Sunday, February 12, 2012

Prueba el arcoiris


Levi Roots Fiery Ginger Beer
“Put some music in your glass”

There’s a slight hint of ginger, nothing too strong once the bottle’s opened.
Pours smoothly, barely any fizz to be detected. The odour once in the glass is less strong, if anything, with a slight citrus hint.
The ginger is a background flavour on the first taste, with the lime mellowing it out, though the spice of the ginger lasts for a few seconds afterwards in the throat. The honey doesn’t really stand out but probably provides the smoothness.
It’s very pleasant, but I’m not so sure about the music. It’s a little too hardcore to become a regular tipple, though - sugar, caramel sugar syrup and sweeteners? A little too much, even if it doesn’t taste that way.



Each half litre bottle has 36g of sugar in it, or 40% of and adult’s daily dose. Shazam!

Go to - http://www.reggae-reggae.co.uk - for more info about Levi Roots, the famous jerk chicken sauce man. He’s got loads of stuff now.


Sainsbury’s Iron Brew Zero

The tangy, fruity smell of Irn Bru is evident when cracking the can, and a bit stronger once in the glass. It’s smells practically the same, but the taste doesn’t match.
There’s something a little more ‘normal’ about it, a bit more fruity, the sweeteners making it seem something more like a liquidated boiled sweet than an approximation of Irn Bru - definitely sweeter than the diet version of the original.

It seems odd that a supermarket chain would seek to replicate a sugar free rip off version of Irn Bru, when the diet version of the original is so hard to come by, you’d think there wouldn’t be much demand but I suppose the supermarkets know that price is going to be a big factor - this stuff works out at 3p per 100ml from a bottle.


The reasons for the sweetness may be the sugar-free additive, sucralose.
According to Wikipedia:
"Sucralose is an artificial sweetener. The majority of ingested sucralose is not broken down by the body and therefore it is non-caloric. In the European Union, it is also known under the E number (additive code) E955. Sucralose is approximately 600 times as sweet as sucrose (table sugar), twice as sweet as saccharin, and 3.3 times as sweet as aspartame."

600 times! so there you go.






Meantime Grand Cru Raspberry Beer


I’ve never liked beer. Back in my teens I tried it, of course, but I couldn’t go so far as to ‘develop the taste’ for it that so many grind their way to, basically grinning and bearing it in desperation to be a proper grown up man, like legions of broken-voiced, gangling Pinnocchios. Probably a result of the hops, beer has a mouldy, earthy quality that to me tastes of rot and decay.


Crabbie’s ginger beer inspired me to think about trying flavoured beers, it’s nice so maybe fruity beers and the like would be okay?



What does it smell like? Well, it smells like beer. You know, beer, the foul besmircher of once great men, the sweat of many an elderly public house, the spilled effluence of a night on the town. Awesome. And while the slight, rosy tint hints at fruitiness, it mostly looks like beer too, with frothy head and all.
But what does it taste like? Beer. Weak beer, admittedly, but beer all the same with no actual hint of the berryness supposedly interred within. Regardless of the fancy bottle and label, this tastes little different (to me) than the mass of beers that heave and groan on shop shelves and behind pub bars the length and breadth of the country. Pish.