Around Europe on the dry

As I mentioned yesterday, Carlsberg hosted the EBCU for one day of their most recent meeting. The Carlsberg Conference Centre is richly appointed, and just beside the coffee machine there was a fridge offering a plethora of non-alcoholic beers from the company's European portfolio. Well, it would be rude not to.

Birell Belgian Wit, from Poland, is delightfully peachy, sweet and a little sticky, with overtones of lemon. There's that worty quality I associate with non-alcoholic beers generally, though the fruit content is high enough that it gets away with it. Not sure I can imagine drinking lots of it, however.

There's also a Birell Lager, which honestly tasted more like a wit than the wit. Or maybe a radler. Either way, lemon features big. It doesn't have much else to say, just a mild metallic tang in the finish. The texture is thick and un-lager-like, though that does give it a gorgeous stiff head of foam on top. While not unpleasant it's just too sweet. Pretty typical of this style.

Carlsberg's own Nordic Hvede is a wheat beer. This is lighter textured but no more beer-like. The aroma is all rich baked apple while the flavour is mixed fruit bubblegum. After the initial candy punch it finishes dry and quite watery. Most of the others I'd nod through but this is actively unpleasant.

My fellow tasters made faces when it came to the Greek offer, Fix 'Aneu. It's a pale yellow colour. It smells horribly funky; agricultural, like slurry or silage. The flavour isn't as bad, but still terrible. Over-boiled vegetables is the main thing, and a sharp metal tang, leading to carbolic soap. It is, in short, absolutely disgusting.

San Miguel 0,0 at least looks better: quite a rich golden colour. Sweet and worty candyfloss is the aroma, and it's sweet to taste, finishing with a bitter tinny tang. The worst of both worlds, really.

Switzerland brings us Feldscholossen Alkoholfrei Blanche/Weizenfrisch. It's fairly inoffensive. The worst of it is a soapy tang, but that sits atop a bright and juicy pineapple and stonefruit element. The texture is nicely fluffy. I still wouldn't count it as good though: it never manages to shake the feeling of laundry detergent.

Naturally there's a Feldschlossen Alkoholfrei Lager. It starts with a sharp and sickly aroma, leading to a medium-sweet flavour carrying a sense of toffee popcorn, but finishing quickly. There's a light dusting of banana and familiar tangs of tin and soap. Pretty poor fare, but at least it's not loud and brash.

I'd forgotten that Carlsberg owns Baltika. Baltika 0 is another wheat-based one, very pale and only slightly hazy. There's a delicious lemon candy aroma and that adds a different sort of sweetness to it. The base is a standard worty alcohol-free weiss but it's quite successfully masked by the flavouring, perhaps more grapefruit than lemon here. Yes it's a little artificial tasting but it's quite nice, like a posh lemonade. Adding syrup is one way of hiding non-alcoholic beer's flaws. My Russian isn't up to much, but I can't see any mention of added flavouring on the can, mind.

The Lithuanian option was a stout, called Go Juodas. It looked convincing in the glass: deep brown with a thick creamy head. There's a strong chocolate aroma and, unsurprisingly, it's hugely chocolatey to taste. It's sweet like a chocolate breakfast cereal though surprisingly light textured and properly stout-smooth. I really enjoyed this. The flavour profile hides the innate sugariness common to non-alcoholic beers. I'm not at all sure I would even have pegged this as alcohol-free.

And I almost missed Tourtel Twist because I didn't think it was a beer. It certainly doesn't taste like a beer, being powerfully sweet, thin of body, with a tacked-on lime and mint taste, like a basic alcopop. I'd complain it's a drink for people who don't like the taste of drink except for the fact it's not drink. It's a sugary fizzy thirst-quencher and doesn't really belong with the others who are at least trying to seem like beer. It's probably not legal to sell pre-packaged 0% ABV margaritas to kiddies, but if it were they'd taste like this.

And that, in a mere six posts, was my Copenhagen. A proper smorgasbord of a beer city it is.

Road-testing the unleaded

An unusual turn of events saw me out one evening last week while in possession of motorised transportation. Of course, my drinking options for the evening were manifold, but I decided I may as well use it as an excuse to try out some of the alcohol-free beers available. Y'know, the ones I wouldn't normally dream of touching with a barge pole (unless I were actually piloting a barge, of course; then they might be appropriate).

The original intention was just to get the Erdinger and Paulaner ones, but it turns out that there's a much bigger range out there, much of which was carried by a local off-licence (I got the Paulaner in Superquinn where, oddly, the automated checkout still made sure to card me).

I lined them up for a mugshot before sticking them in the boot and off to my destination (Séan's gaff; fabulous 8% ABV stout on tap; untempted; look at me the responsible adult). First out of the traps was Cobra Zero, and I liked this, but not for any of the reasons I like Cobra. Cobra Zero makes more-or-less no attempt to be a beer. Though my bottle was rather lightstruck, what came out most on tasting was a very sweet and malty wort flavour -- porridge with loads of sugar. It reminded me a lot of the dark non-alcoholic malt drinks you get in Africa and the Caribbean, and which I really rather like. I don't know that I could drink much of this, but I did enjoy the bottle.

Beck's Non-Alcoholic didn't work so well. It's sort-of faithful to the Beck's recipe, in that it's quite sharp and hoppy. The worty sweetness is there again, mostly on the nose, but this translates to an unpleasant soapy flavour which, coupled with the thinness, does not make for a pleasant drinking experience.

I figured the wheat beers would be better propositions altogether and, while this broadly turned out to be true, the two beers were as different in quality as their real-beer counterparts. The Paulaner Alkoholfrei was my favourite of the lot. Yes, there's that unfermented sugar, but it's buried under a hefty dollop of fruity banana esters. It's very drinkable and is distinctively a weissbier. I'd go for it again. Not so the Erdinger Alkoholfrei which tried to do all the same things but comes out weak (well, you know what I mean) and lacking in character.

Was it worth it? No, not really. If I wasn't a ticker I'd probably have settled for drinking non-beer, and will likely do so in the future. Unless I can find some Baltika 0 or alcohol-free Bavaria, of course...