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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3961 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 3, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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The usual. By that I mean regular beer aka Miller High Life, Coors Banquet, Pabst, etc. It's not that I don't like imports and craft beers, it's just that I drink almost every day and they're too idiosyncratic and expensive to really work as daily drivers. I also like to keep a ton of it in my car so that when I'm skiing or whatever I always have beer I can offer everyone freely without them feeling bad about taking as much as they want. I honestly think that if these weren't mass-market American beers but some special variety brewed by Czech monks beer snobs would rave about their crisp and refreshing taste.

While we're on the subject—as a Wisconsinite I assume you can give me a satisfactory answer to this—what the hell happened to Leinenkugel's? When I was in college and craft beer was mostly mediocre, a friend of mine would regularly bring in cases of the Creamy Dark and Red Lager back from Chicago and they were both excellent. Then you could get it in Pennsylvania and it was great. Then they started selling fruity stuff, which okay, fine. Then it got hard to find. Then you could only get the Red Lager if you bought a variety pack. Then they discontinued it altogether. The situation got so dire that my brother and I went to the local master distributor to see if he could order it specially for us. Now it seems the only stuff of theirs I can find around here is all fruity stuff. I was at a pizza place Sunday and saw they had a Lemon Haze which I wanted to try because I like hazys, but was told it had been replaced with a peach sour. Okay, I like sours, let's give this one a go. It wasn't a sour. It tasted like Leinie regular (which I can't get around here for some reason) with peach flavor. I'm really disappointed that a company that once made a quality product has let itself slide so far.

PBR is like the final boss of cultural baggage attached to something that's just good on its own merits.

Bud or Blue Moon all the way. Coors is terrible and Miller isn't much better.

Used to work with a Wisconsinite who was also disappointed with Leinie but raved about Spotted Cow.

Am Sconnie, can confirm Spotted Cow is delightful and inexpensive, and remains my go-to bar beer. I've also been drinking brandy and bitters toddies when there's a chill, and High Life remains the ultimate lawnmower (or, as is the case, snow shoveling) beer. Also been drinking some homemade hard cider, which is ludicrously easy to home brew compared to beer.

Honestly, as one who drinks a ton of mass-market beer, Bud is about on the same level as Coors Banquet, Molson Canadian and Miller High Life. MGD is indistinguishable from High Life but slightly more expensive so there's no reason to buy it. The next tier includes Pabst, Iron City, Stoney's, Labatt Blue, Molson Golden, Lion's Head, Straub. then there's the specialty tier, beers that aren't particularly cheap but have some kind of off-flavor that make them bad: Michelob, Rolling Rock, Stroh's, Genessee. Then there are beers that are straight-up bad: Carling Black Label (except when it's a buck at 123 Pleasant St. in Morgantown), Red Dog (RIP), Coors Extra Gold, Keystone, Schlitz (though that may have changed), Yuengling Premium (not the lager, which is too different to qualify for this list). Then there are beers that I'm afraid to try: Milwaukee's Best, Natural, American. Then there are the special cases: Duquesne and Hamm's have unique flavors that aren't necessarily unpleasant but that you can get sick of rather quickly. Old Milwaukee exists in some limbo where it isn't as bad as it seems like it should be.

By most "objective" measures typical West Coast IPAs should rank near the bottom; they're usually excessively bitter, with a cloying cough-syrupy sweetness underlying them. Yet this has become the beer snob beer par excellence, mainly because local craft breweries that don't quite know what they're doing yet can take advantage of the large margin of error something that hoppy provides and get started pretty quickly. MOst of the issues with mass-market beers come from the fact that all of them use a healthy amount of adjuncts to keep costs down. I've had craft versions of these beers from local breweries (shout out to Exile in Des Moines for offering the best example) and there is a significant improvement. The problem is that you still have to pay craft prices for these beers because they're brewed in small batches, which makes it difficult for them to occupy the same cultural position as High Life or something similar. If only a large brewery were to make a premium product without adjuncts and sell it for a few dollars more than the mainstream brands... which would create a new product that nobody wants because both the style and the concept of a mass market beer are anathema to beer snobs. I remember when something like Sam Adams was considered a premium product that most restaurants wouldn't have. Now, nobody seems to think there's anything particularly wrong with it, but no one is going out of their way to say it's a great beer. Same with Magic Hat. Same with Killian's. Even Yuengling Lager (which isn't the original Yuengling but a '90s innovation meant to latch on to the Sam Adams trend of brewing better beer) doesn't have the cachet it once had since they expanded their distribution beyond a few select markets; it used to be impossible to get in West Virginia and Ohio, even though they border Pennsylvania. Anyway, my overall point is that perception has a lot more to do with things than beer snobs want to admit. A craft beer usually has to be pretty bad before anyone wants to admit that it sucks. And no one will admit that some German Brewery that's been around since 1485 or whatever is actually sub par. The West Coast IPA model should theoretically be great for a mass market beer, because the flavor masking nature of heavy hop use would make it easy for them to get away with using a ton of adjuncts. But there's no market for a mass-market, low-cost IPA, because the people who drink IPAs will never drink a low-cost, mass-market beer.

Also, if there are German(or Czech, or Polish, or whatever) beers out there that are objectively better and cheaper than the American mass-market stuff then let me know what it is. Keep in mind that I'm used to paying about $20-$25 for a 30-rack of cans, and Pabst is usually on sale for $15.99, so it would have to compete with that to be truly worth it, though I don't mind paying more.

Depressingly, the Leinenkugel's disaster is what "success" looks like. They were long ago purchased by Miller, who got to work on trying to make the brand more profitable. They repeatedly tried to go national, nothing really stuck, until they started in with the shandies and had immediately commercial success. It's really unfortunate, like you said, their old school beers are actually pretty solid representatives of their styles and aren't really all that common on the market these days. The sugar bombs sell though, so pretty much everything they make is soda with a slight beer spin to it.

I still buy Leinies original when I can get it, but yeah since the sale they've mostly been focused on seasonal varieties. The lemon Summer Shandy was a big hit in that series, and led to them making loads of other fruity beers. Can't blame them too much, light lager is a crowded market.

However it goes back some ways. I remember drinking a pitcher of Berry Weiss circa 2002 or so because it was on special, regretting it more and more with each sip. Finished the whole pitcher though.

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