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Tuesday, July 28, 2015

WHAT MAKES A CRAP BEER?


WHAT MAKES A CRAP BEER?
A couple of weeks ago I posted about beer.  Stupid post because I don’t even like beer that much.  I posted how when I do buy beer I buy Miller High Life.  I also made fun of Mexican beer because it is brewed with (I assume) Mexican water, something everyone who visits Mexico is warned not to drink.

Several readers came to the defense of Mexican beer, and truth be told I often drink Corona.  

One reader actually had to inform me that Miller High Life is crap!  Wow, my personal preference in beer is crap...who knew?  I wasn’t told that true connoisseurs would not rank Miller as one of the finer beers, but I was told straight out that Miller, my preferred beer is CRAP!

This got me to thinking, what makes a beer good and what makes a beer crap.  I decided on three criteria:

Taste/ Does it make you sick?/ Cost

Taste, regardless of what any reader or connoisseur may tell you, is personal.  If you think it tastes good then gosh darn it, it tastes good.

If it tastes good, but you have a miserable hangover in the morning, or it makes you barf, it is crap.  Regardless of what any reader or connoisseur may tell you, if the beer gives you a miserable hangover and or makes you barf, it is crap beer.

If you like the taste, and it does not give you a hangover or make you barf, I say it is a good beer.  If it costs $20 a six pack, it is crap.

In my life I have probably sampled about 200 different beers.  Only two have made me barf or given me a worse hangover than consumption would have dictated.  I have never sampled any beer that cost $20 a six pack.

In my mind, beer is either good, or crap.  There is no great beer, just the beer that you happen to prefer taste wise that doesn’t make you sick and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

I remember when Coors was not available in the east, and it was featured predominantly in a book and later a movie “North Dallas Forty.”  Coors became “THE” beer.  When it became available in limited supplies back east, it was in great demand and overpriced.  If you scored a case it was a big deal.  Everyone gushed about how good Coors was.  Coors is now readily available all over and it is a good beer, but nothing special, and it is sold at the same price as most other good beers.

Corona was all the rage for a while.  People liked the lime in the bottle thing, very cool and sophisticated.  Turns out the lime thing was because in Mexico it kept the flies out of the bottle…not so cool and sophisticated.  Still, people will not drink a Corona without the lime garnish.  Any other beer, a lime is not requested.

There is a new beer advertised lately, “Blue Moon” that is served with an orange slice as garnish, because it complements the beer which is brewed with orange zest or something.  What bull shit! But it has made drinking Blue Moon with an orange garnish very popular.

We went to a sports bar for dinner tonight, and they served 78 different beers.  There were four different Samuel Adams brands, because apparently the brewers of Samuel Adams take extra pride and care in brewing their beer.  There were three different varieties of Blue Moon, served I’m sure with the bull shit orange garnish.  They did not offer Miller High Life, the Champagne of bottled beer.

I had water.

All the other beers are crap!

19 comments:

  1. Fourth of July we went to son's for a barbecue; he had Miller High Life as the beer. I had one in your honor :) The taste of beer is subjective like so many other things in life. What might be one man's delight is another man's worse tasting beer.

    betty

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  2. I've been drinking Blue Moon for about five years, with the orange slice! Quite refreshing! I also like grapefruit shandys and Clown Shoe Clementine, so at least I'm consistent.

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  3. I'm not a beer drinker so I've no knowledge about good or bad beer. Beer taste awful to me. Now a nice glass of Champagne is another story.

    Have a fabulous day Cranky. ☺

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  4. Hi Cranky Man,

    I suggest you buy a plane ticket and fly over to Europe, stopping off in many countries, were you will find the best beer in the world.

    With all due respect (and I mean this most sincerely), American Beer is rubbish - with the possible exception of Sam Adams, which I really enjoyed on my last visit to the States, in Boston.

    English beer is superb (if a little warm); Belgian beer is the best in Europe; German beer is wonderful and Czech beer is like nectar.

    And that's just the start,

    Do it, cranky man.

    You will write a non-cranky post about beer - I can promise you that.

    :o)

    Cheers

    PM

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    1. See that is my point, I have tried tons of import beers and they do nothing for me. Taste is sometimes just what you acquire. Hell, in this country there are people who prefer Pizza Hut pizza to Mario's from Brooklyn. Go figure.

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    2. The only time I really enjoyed beer was on a trip to Germany!!

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  5. Here in Michigan, we are heavy into the micro-brew craze. I like me a good pale ale (but the IPAs are a bit much for me). And I've been known to enjoy an occasional Blue Moon (not the orange one; one of the others). We had a pretty good local beer called Genessee once, on a vacation in upstate New York, and in Pennsylvania they have Rolling Rock, which is not bad. Back in my college days, I was inordinately fond of Canadian beers, most particularly Molson Golden.

    But then, some of the old-time beers whose jingles I memorized during baseball broadcasts when I was a kid - Goebel, Blatz, stuff like that - were truly awful. . .

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  6. With you all the way on this one, Joe! Taste is in the eye - er, tastebuds - of the beholder and it's pretty arrogant to think you can tell someone their tastebuds are wrong :)

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  7. My main complaint about European beer is it is usually (over there) served not as cold as I would like it. It's barely cool actually. I like mine COOOOOLD! If I like it, it's good beer. You're buying, I'll drink it, but if it's MY money, I'll buy what I think tastes good. :)

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  8. It has been so long I just can't remember.

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  9. I don't like the taste of hops, so all beers are crap.

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  10. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  11. After drinking Korean beer for 13 months back in the sixties, it was hard to find an unpalatable American beer. Being an alcoholic probably helped too. :)

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  12. If it tastes good to you, it's good!

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  13. You might like to know that the Corona you talk about (actually it's called Corona Extra) was only brewed for the U.S. market for many years. They didn't even have it in Mexico. So that story about the lime being to keep the flies out of the bottle is another one of those fake headlines.

    When we went to Europe in 1985 (wow, only 30 years ago!) we learned to drink Bitters and Ales warm in England. Though they had begun to bring Budweiser over and chilled it for the Americans.

    I once took a tour of a Coors brewery in Colorado and at each stop along the way I asked out tour guide "Is this where you do the beechwood aging?" I think he was pretty sick of me by the time we were through.

    In neighboring Prescott, there is a brew pub and I particularly enjoy their Petrified Porter. It's quite dark but not as strong as Guiness.

    Now I've got to go pour me a vodka and water.

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  14. Coors is known as Rocky Mountain Kool-Aid here.
    Miller Brewing were the folks who demoted Miller High Life.
    I visited the Plank Road Brewery in 1973.
    High Life was their premium.

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  15. I'm not a beer drinker, so don't bother keeping track of the price. All I know is my ex never bought just a six-pack. He needed at least eight cans and often bought two six-packs with the intention of keeping the remaining four for next time. Didn't work of course, he always drank the lot. On days when he was really stressed over whatever was going on in his mind he's been known to drink as many as 4 dozen cans in a weekend or less. But he sticks with one brand, VB bitter.

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  16. Well...technically, you don't really BUY beer. You rent it.

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  17. Laughing! You would hate going into half the bars in Oregon. There are so many beer snobs here, and the beers they love have about 10x too many hops in them. Please pass the ice water.

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