Everywhere and nowhere

Huh. Looks like it's January again. Time to pick over the remnants of the holiday period and check the back of the sofa for beer money. Me, I've been to Aldi. They added a new eurolager knock-off to their line-up and, after being impressed by Rossini last year, I figured it was worth a punt. That gave me an excuse to compare it with their more established brand-leader substitutes.

But to the new one first, and Carullo Especial is a few centuries late to claim any real Spanish heritage: the label states it was brewed in the Netherlands, I'm guessing by Swinkels. From the scarlet livery I'd say Estrella Damm is the target of its appropriation. It's quite a weighty lager, feeling stronger than its 4.8% ABV. There's a dense breadiness in the flavour and not a whole lot else. I get a vaguely green grassy tang from the aroma but no hop flavour I can detect. I can't find anything to be critical of here other than its crashing dullness. If clean and bland is what you value in lager, this one fits the bill, and doubtless that's the intention.

Stacked high and sold cheap in Aldi since time immemorial is Galahad Export. The very English stylings suggest Carling is the niche they're aiming for with this, a beer with nowhere near the status here as it has in the UK. Still, if my observations in the check-out queue are anything to go by, Galahad is undeniably popular. No provenance is given, nor list of ingredients, and it's a meek 4% ABV: another nod towards Britain where that's deemed an acceptable strength for mainstream lager. The appearance is undeniably handsome: a strawberry blonde with a head of purest white. A grainy aroma becomes a corny foretaste so I suspect the use of maize in this. After the initial burst of sweetness it turns dry and a little musty. The vaguest tinny tang of hops appear on the reflux. All, therefore, is in keeping with your bottom-of-the-barrel international adjunct lager. I drank it as a literal lawnmower beer and the first few gulps were deliciously refreshing but it turned harsh, dry and unpleasant very quickly.

We class it up next with some reassuringly expensive Sainte Etienne. It does state it's brewed in France this time, and at just 4.8% ABV your wife can rest easy. It also looks the part: a bright gold with lots of fizz. The texture is decently heavy but oooh the flavour is not right at all. There's a similar stale mustiness as I found in the Galahad but it's combined with a bizarre herbal flavour: mint and aniseed, with a concentrated poppy or caraway afterburn. Thankfully that fades quickly but there's a long residual syrup effect which is actively unpleasant. Charitably you could call this a heavy hearty beer for manly men; realistically it's just difficult to drink and a bit nasty. They've called it Sainte Etienne but the real martyr here is your correspondent.

Switching tack for completeness sake, a new addition to Aldi's Irish range, or at least one that had hitherto passed me by. The Brown Bears already include an IPA, IPL and DIPA, but now there's a Brown Bear Session IPA too. As with the rest it's brewed by Alltech in Dundalk, and a couple of bottles were sent to me by Aldi as part of their 12 Bears of Christmas box set. The colour is a bright gold with a little haze. 4% ABV shouldn't necessarily mean it's watery, but it is a bit. The carbonation is low, which contributes to the thinness but also, I guess, the sessionability. The aroma is a fun mix of apricot, lemon and nutmeg but the flavour is plainer: straight citrus with just a hard wax bitterness in the finish. It's fine, and I could imagine settling into a few of them, but I think I prefer this style to be more fruity and rounded than palate-strippingly bitter.

It's great that the German discounters give us such an extensive beer choice, and that the market supports that. However, nothing here has the beatings of their Aldi shelfmates, Spaten and Rheinbacher. If you want to see out January with good quality, attractively-priced beer, they're still the ones to pick up.

Phoney Peroni

A few weeks ago I was at Aldi's summer drinks press event. Wine mostly, of course, but they had one new (to me) beer in the line-up, an Italian lager which was obviously aiming to be an own-brand answer to Peroni Nastro Azzurro. Rossini matches Peroni's 5.1% ABV and I'm told is brewed by Swinkels, though I didn't know they had an Italian footprint.

On tasting it I was quite impressed. I have an active dislike for Peroni, considering it a cheaply-made lager that has gathered for itself an entirely inappropriate premium status. Rossini, on the other hand, tasted solid and decent, if unexciting. I decided it would be fun to try them blind side-by-side to test my prejudices. Is Rossini actually better?

Two days later I bought a bottle of Rossini in Aldi and a Peroni in Tesco. Unexpectedly, the latter was actually the cheaper of the pair, the 66cl bottle part of a 4-for-€10 while a half-litre of Rossini was €1.99. I had intended to run the tasting as a triangle test but there wasn't much point in the end: one beer was pale yellow with a stack of tight white foam while the other was a darker gold and lost its head quickly. I immediately had a suspicion of which was which.

Pale 'n' frothy was the more aromatic one, showing Saaz-y grass and petrol while the other smelled of nothing much. The paler one was bitterer to taste, but that's not in its favour. There's a sharp and quite harsh plasticky bite on the end, leading on to an unpleasant acrid aftertaste. I'll put my cards on the table now and say this is a nastiness I associate strongly with Peroni.

Supposed Rossini, then, was blander but definitely smoother and more full-bodied. There's a bread or biscuit malt character that made me think of Bavarian helles more than Italian or Dutch pils. The finish was clean and the whole thing very satisfying to drink. Dull helles beats crappy pils any day of the week.

The reveal proved me correct. What have we learned? Well, Peroni is still objectively awful and should never be consumed by anyone anywhere. Peroni purists, however, are unlikely to be swayed by Rossini's superficial similarities: the flavour profile is dramatically different. Asahi shareholders have nothing to fear from it while the drinking public can rejoice that Nastro Azzurro is safely uncloneable.