Estrella Damm Inedit

There are quite a few brewers of watery adjunct ridden pissy lager who, presumably to stop their brewers hanging themselves, will sometimes have a stab at making a decent beer. Thus we have Super Bock "gourmet", Peroni "gran reserva" and this fella, who grabbed my attention in El Corte Ingles.

It comes in a 75cl bottle with some poncey tags and stuff hanging off the top, like those jars of jam with hats on that you find at some posh shop in Devon. With wheat, barley and spices in the ingredients this promised to be another southern European brewer having a shot at a Witbier.

Spices in a Witbier should be like the icing on a cake, not the cake itself. Here, the spices were too prominent because there wasn't enough backing to them from the beer - altogether too lacking in any guts. Perhaps Estrella Damm should stick to lager.

Gourmet?...

What do you do when your regular product is called "super" (even though it's not), but you want to have one product which is more "super" than the rest? Well, declare it "gourmet" of course.

"Super Bock" is a cruddy range of beers available all over Portugal, advertised with idiotic nonsensical English slogans, which in its regular form is your average adjunct filled lager. The "gourmet" version however boasts that it is 100% malt (presumably only gourmets don't want maize in their beer), and the "Abadia" denotes that it is supposedly imitating a Belgian abbey beer.

I was surprised by the colour, quite a fruity amber, and the decent head. There's definitely something in there, and compared to the piss that the rest of their beers are, I wouldn't mind making this a regular if I lived in Portugal. Buy it in a pack of 4 and it works out about 80 cents a bottle, so its price / taste ratio is not at all bad. They should drop the "abbey" claims though.
The thing is, you won't actually see it in a regular supermarket or booze shop - to get this, I had to go to El Corte Ingles, an upmarket Spanish shop, a bit like Galeria in Germany. So there you have it - piss tasting regular variety, available everywhere. Reasonable tasting variety, only 20 cents a bottle more, available hardly anywhere. Stands to reason really.