Stella Artois 4% / Légère

Brewed by Samlesbury (InBev UK - InBev)
Style: Pale Lager
Preston, England

Bottle: Poured a bright golden color lager with small bubbly pure white head with minimal retention. Loads of sweet adjunct are noticeable and dominating the aroma. Taste is also dominated by loads of sweet adjunct. While the regular SA is no favorite of mine it is at least more authentic the this adjunct juice.

2 cans while walking home from work. Alround rating: Thin ceareal extract malt, peoppery skunkyness, the hops are infact there, but its not my scene. Better than the newlym altered tax saving inbuv 5% stella anyway.

You can’t go into this beer expecting something spectacular. It’s pure marketing but it is brilliantly executed. The aroma is perfect for reaching out to a wider audience that wants something a notch above their everyday beer. It is Stella+Any Canadian macro-skunk. The appearance is nearly rubbish, where is the glorious head? The flavor is a corned up watered down stella artois almost perfectly. Mouth feel is terrible but could be worse by being fizzier. Overall the beer should get a 2.5 from me, but I can’t drop my overall impression and all the other grades are exactly how I see the beer.

On tap in England. Thin, watery, not well balanced. Some grain, a little citrus dryness, but not remotely good or interesting. Avoid.

330 ml green bottle. Pale golden colour with a fully diminishing fizzy white head. Not much aroma to speak of, just some faint grassiness to go with a light crackery, corn, and toasty notes. Flavour reminds of unfermented pale wort or your standard non-alcoholic beer, along with the same crackery and grainy malts and a faint herbal and grassy bitter finish. Light bodied, fizzy but firm mouthfeel. Reminds me more of Beck’s non-alcoholic than regular Stella. That might actually be a good thing, but it’s not saying much.

This doesn’t taste anything like standard Stella, it has a harsh corn/maize flavour, and nose,is thin and lacks body. A quite unpleasant beer. Canned version.

330mL bottle from the LCBO (single, because I wouldn’t ever actually buy a whole six pack of something like this). I bought this partly because I’m a ratings whore, but also because I enjoy downing incredibly mediocre beer really, really, really fast. Pours a remarkably un-lively pale gold, almost no effervescence with a large white head. Aroma is actually pretty damn good considering it’s a macro, in a green bottle. Nicely hoppy with very minimal skunk, though no real sign of legitimate malts shows up. Flavour is, well, what you’d expect from something so ’Légère’, not a whole lot going on. Surprisingly fizzy considering the lack of visual carbonation. Insanely mild malts with a decent hoppy sharp bite in the finish, followed by waves, and WAVES of fizzy complexities. Note: The term ’complexity’ used here is used in an entirely sarcastic manner. Anyways, this is actually not all that bad. If I had a gun held to my head and forced only to drink crappy ’lite’ beer, this would be my choice.

440ml can. Drank cool, not chilled. Rough off flavours. I find the standard Stella an acceptable pale lager - but this 4% version with corn is not good. Few hops, thin and without much positive flavour. What flavour there is tends toward rubber, stewed corn, stale beer and tin.