As well as tasting watery and extremely tedious, I discovered that Compliments de-alcoholized Blonde Lager shuts down any musical creativity.

 

Compliments Blonde Lager, InBev/Labatt, London, Ontario (<0.5% alcohol) Sobey’s and related stores $5.49 (six pack of 335ml cans)

When, back in 2019, I wrote of Hoegaarden O.O% looking, smelling, and tasting (?) akin to a fluid expelled from some poor soul suffering from a urinary tract infection, little did I expect to face the collective impotent fury of the non-alcoholic beer trolls and snowflakes. Just check out the comments.

With this in mind, it gives me great pleasure to share with you another non-alcoholic beer that gave me absolutely no pleasure at all, simply so you don’t have to go through the disappointment yourselves.

Let’s start with the ingredients present in this little can of sad nothingness, Bavarian Purity laws be damned: Water, malted barley, sugars (glucose-fructose, malted barley extract), yeast, phosphoric acid, caramel colour, hops, hop extract.

Oh, and let’s not forget the fact that this is made for Sobey’s et al. by Lakeport Brewing Company, the once Hamilton-based budget brewery now owned by multinational InBev’s Canadian subsidiary Labatt, and brewed in London, Ontario at their facility there.

Perhaps it’s worth noting here that the utterly vile Hoegaarden O.O% was also made by InBev, as well as the now undrinkable Spaten, and of course my much-missed Löwenbräu, that I have been calling for a boycott of since back in 2014. We are beginning to spot a pattern here, right? I’m beginning to think that they really should fire their entire tasting panel as I’m pretty sure my mother-in-law’s dog could do a better job. It wouldn’t be difficult.

Upon opening and pouring this blonde lager one finds oneself (figuratively) staring into the abyss, an abyss of abject mediocrity and perpetual nothingness; never before have I witnessed such pathetic vacuity in a glass. I fail to see any correlation between this pitiful brew and the real thing. I guess it kind of looks like beer, but that’s where the similarities end abruptly.

Philosophically it is banal, lacuna-headed nihilism in moribund liquid form, and the non-alcoholic beer trolls/snowflakes will no-doubt love the stuff and proceed to shower me in a torrent of abuse. Ah well, them’s the breaks, as they say.

Please don’t waste even one second of your precious life upon this utterly forgettable caramel-coloured banality.

Zero apples out of a possible five apples.