HoppySlosh Rants: Slurfke

I've a confession to make.

I watch Thuis almost every day.

In case you don't know (*), Thuis is for Belgium what Coronation Street and Eastenders is to the Brits, Sturm der Liebe for the Germans and The Bold and the Beautiful to the Murkans(°).

°) Although the latter is also staple food for the brainless hordes of Belgian Octogenarians who have ejected Thuis from their daily roster because it deals with unrealistic everyday stuff like lesbianism and transgender issues and stalking and murder and people all being related to one another.

*) and really, I forgive you. But your innocence is lost because you do know now.

So.

I watch Thuis.
Mostly as an excuse to plonk down on the couch with the Missus and the Wee Miss whilst the vegetables turn themselves to food on the stove.

What's my sordid little secret got to do with beer, you ask? Hark! Yonder beckons relevance!

Or is it Den Eddy?

At some point, several seasons ago, one of the more marginal characters in the programme (°) dug up an old recipe of his grandfather's and started homebrewing in his wife's kitchen.

°) den Eddy is the programme's perpetually unemployed token semi-criminal roustabout. Equipped with a heart of gold, but, I daresay, somewhat challenged where common sense is involved.

Story-telling-wise, nothing much was done with the idea of homebrewing, or even beer for the better part of that season. Just last year, however, the entire plot hook of the homebrewing weirdo was abandoned and all of a sudden, the sets became plagued with barely concealed product placements.

For this.

Toe-curling shenanigans were undertaken to infuse nigh-on every scene with at least a background effigy of Van Honsbrouck's proliferous spawn. If characters were not outright swigging pint-sized cans of Kasteel Rouge, or downing Passchendaele straight from the bottle, then they'd be lugging around cases of Kasteelbier in gift boxes when attending fancy dinners, or a banner bearing the Kasteel logo would be flapping in the breeze someplace where it would most irrelevant. It was all a bit ridiculous, but TV programmes are expensive to make so what can you do?

Besides this.

Van Honsbrouck was on the rise, and when the almost-forgotten thread of den Eddy's homebrew attempts was Frankensteined from underneath the Rouge-infused flagstones of the Zus&Zo, I raised a wary skeptic eyebrow.

Prescience can be a curse, it seems, for today, with just enough fanfare to still afterwards be able to claim it was all a bit of laugh, supermarkets are selling den Eddy's (formerly homebrewed) beer, marketed both in- and outside of the programme as Slurfke, as if the beer had broken the fourth wall and escaped its scriptorial confines.

Behold.
The monster is loose.

Notice anything odd about that picture, by the way? Scroll way up again, to the still from the programme where den Eddy is eagerly pouring his first bottle of homebrewed Slurfke and take a look at the colour of that first batch. Now look back at that pic just above this paragraph and tell me you don't see it. I dare you.

It gets worse from here onward.

I have tasted Slurfke yesterday evening and the colour is the least of its issues.

I was nearly shaking with anticipation when I opened the bottle, albeit in the way I'd get the shakes if I were being carted into the operation theatre to undergo a reverse vasectomy. Let's just say that my track record with Van Honsbrouck has programmed my naturally inquisitive mind to a state of wary apprehension. A bit like lion tamer would approach his fifteenth capture from the wild. 

Maybe.
Just maaaaaybe.
This one will be okay.

Nothing, not my rewired mindset, not the warning lights flashing in my head, not even the screenwriters' and brewers' atrociously ham-fisted collective market-injection , could prepare me for what  I found inside that bottle.

Slurfke pours a dark brown. Not nearly the alluring black you see in the promo pics (and in the programme as well), but rather a deep mahogany shade of burnt wood. 

That thick creamy head you see on the promo pic?

It's a McHead.

The smell was underwhelming. A whiff of brownish malty things, a hint of the metallics so often present in pasteurised dark brews, but nothing altogether off-putting.

But the taste.

OMG the taste!

There's the expected signature sickly-sweet jackhammer present in every single one of Van Honsbrouck's Kasteel versions, mixed with a dreadful cough-syrup-like flavour. Artificial (and again sweetsweetsweet) red fruits, but devoid of all fruitiness, and infused with medicinal whythefuckness. Just when you think it can't get more offensive than a Kasteel-codeine hybrid could get, you get hit with an aftertaste of artificial sweeteners.

Imagine the street is your tongue, and the rest of the picture is aspartame.

Upsetting even the basic offensiveness of the brew's main flavours, the liberally dosed sweeteners numb the tongue to everything else, and I swear I felt my taste buds die under the onslaught.

The worst thing about it?

I think it's simply a lazy blend of Kasteel Bruin and Kasteel Rouge, back-sweetened even further to smoothe out any obvious blemishes, and darked with extra caramel.

Curiosity kills cats, and it's beers like this that make me dread my own intrinsic curious nature. 

Here's a beer born (nay, bred) for all the wrong reasons. 

If the aim were to simply introduce a new beer to Van Honsbrouck's already impressive lineup, then I simply don't see the point. It adds nothing of value whatsoever to an already over-populated segment of the Belgian beer market (being that of overly sweet beers which haven't woken up from the nineties yet). In fact, it even detracts from it, being such a blatantly bad example of a sweet brown beer. Or of any beer at all.

If however the aim were to throw us a bit of television merchandise, the very least they could've done was make the beer appear to be realistic. Where, I wonder, did den Eddy's grandfather find all that aspartame back when he was a youngster? When, I wonder, did den Eddy decide that instead of a generic blonde beer, his Slurfke was actually a brown type of liquid throat lozenge? As it is now, Slurfke makes as much sense to Thuis as the Oliphaunt-surfing Legolas did to the Lord of the Rings.

...whilst being marginally less cool besides.

I could rant for ages about the all-encompassing, Lovecraftian wrongness of this beer, but then I'd have to acknowledge it as a beer, which clearly it is not. 

Everything, from the label on inwards, smacks of engineered marketeering, devoid of any proper brewing. 

Suffice to say, then, that I did not like it.

Curiosity kills cats, but in Slurfke's case, we'd better teach the cat to fight back.

Until we do,

Greetz

Jo