PDubyah: Beer - #108 - Leffe

Friday, December 21, 2012

Beer - #108 - Leffe - Blonde

Leffe Blonde, brewed by InBev Belgium in the Style of a Belgian Ale in Leuven, Belgium.

"Leffe Blond is a pale abbey beer, with a full, sunny, golden colour. It has a smooth and full bodied taste and a rich creamy head. Like all the Leffe beers, it is a ’connoisseur’ beer that is easy to drink."

330ml bottle of 6.6% ABV beer, that'd be 1.7 units to meer men.

It's a sweet aroma beer, lots of malts, caramel, toffee, sugars, in a rich brown golden colour beer.

Fantastic head that stays steady, it has a lovely toffee taste, and of the alcohol there is none, and you know it's there.

There are a myriad of people who will find this beer too sweet, syrupy, overly intense, and to be honest they're probably right. Leffe make a "Brown" version of this beer which I like more, but as a starter to the Blonde.

This is a very professional beer, it's accomplished and it plays to its audience, delivering a great Belgium Ale in a mass produced way. I'm a fan though because I like the style, and will forgive the commercial nature of the brand. Given a Duvel, Chimay or this I'd arm wrestle you for the Chimay, you could have the Duval which I find to be slightly sour. They're all commercial quantity beers, but they do their thing better than some of the more eclectic beers (say Pawel Kwak for instance), and it does it simply and effectively.

I'd rather a couple of bottles of this that I could enjoy for the "it" than say similar amounts of Heineken or Stella Artois, which might make me a bit snobby and twatty, but I'd end up thinking I'd had a dessert dish of something as well as a beer, the sweetness of the malts catch up very quickly.

The pdubyah-o-meter quite like this 8.5 things from its thing of things. If you're thinking of Belgium or White/Wheat/Whit beers there is a stiff competition, and a lot of very good beers at the pointy end.

This is as mainstream as you get, along with Hoegardeen, Duvel, and Chimay, each of which will give you a decent hit of what you need, or be a great segue into the Belgium beer vortex. And as far as I like to wander there are two things to get back to, British Ale and Belgium Beers.

This then is a beer where I give you money back guarantee that if you'd like or would like to like a continental beer that has a lot of flavour, is sweet on the tongue and gives you a beer that you should have no effort to enjoy