Over on The Great Motorcycle Pizza Crusade, Lucky derides beer snobbery and revels in “good old-fashioned manly beers”:
His article, in four paragraphs:
When I think of the American standard of masculinity, I think of a sweaty guy in a Dickies workshirt, clutching a can of beer in one hand and a wrench in the other, cussing at the infernal machine he’s trying to repair.
Something seems to have gone wrong in the collective head of America, however. According to an article on Slate.com earlier this year, wine sales are going way up, while beer sales have barely increased at all.
Personally, I blame microbrews and the accompanying beer-snobbery. Beer now comes with a dizzying array of choices to make. IPA? Double Bock? Seasonal brews? Suddenly, kicking back with a cold can of Budweiser isn’t cool. Depending on your group of friends, such a beer choice could even result in scorn and derision.
If you’re smart, of course, you’ll just smile all the wider as you enjoy your perfectly drinkable – tasty, even – macro-brew which cost less than half of what their “John Hancock’s Extra Creamy Chocolate Stout Frappe… er, just Stout” did.
Then he reviews Schlitz. (Sorry, Lucky, but any snob-snubbing cred you may have accumulated earlier in the article vanished when you used the term “mouth feel”.)
I don’t agree that microbrew and snobbery have made it hard to choose a socially correct beer, and thus driven casual beer-drinkers into the simple and tolerant world of… wine? Nah. Wine snobbery is far more complex and involved than beer snobbery, and the stigma of drinking cheap wine is far, far more condign than that of drinking cheap beer.
Nonetheless, I applaud Lucky’s article. Cheap and nasty beer needs all the friends it can get, if for no other reason than simple mathematics: more people drinking cheap and nasty beer means more cheap and exquisite Czech beer for me.
If I’m a beer snob, I’m not a very good one. Sure, I enjoy my Czech pilsners, and my Colorado porters (and stouts, and IPAs, and…) – but when push comes to shove I’ll happily drink whatever’s on tap.
Lucky has the right idea, applauding beers like PBR and Schlitz. My problem with awful beer isn’t so much the truly awful cheap stuff — it’s the largely awful macrobrew (Canadian, Blue, and the like) that’s no less expensive than beer that tastes good.
For a while when I lived in Edmonton, I was able to buy Molson Dry for barely over a dollar a can. Molson Dry is hardly what I’d call an exciting beer — but for a buck a can it’s a damn fine value. These days, I’d pay ten bucks for a six-pack of Canadian. That’s two litres of pisswater, for those of you keeping score at home. Thanks to the strong Euro and Czech beer subsidies, I can buy four large cans of Pilsner Urquell for ten bucks (two litres of tasty beer). The only thing Canadian has that Pilsner Urquell doesn’t is fratsquatch appeal. I’ll pass, thanks.
Okay, back to the Schlitz. Lucky writes:
Cracking open the can, the first thing you’ll identify is that special “cheap beer” aroma, a strange combination of alcohol, tin can and bread. As a manly American, you wouldn’t pour your beer into a glass (unless it’s a glass that can hold more than one beer), but if you did you would likely admire the light, clear golden hue of the brew. The head is thin, and dissipates quickly.
The beer itself has a surprisingly thick mouth feel. Almost (dare I say it?) creamy. There is a slightly bitter aftertaste, but you can wash that away with more beer. As for the flavor… well, I would describe it as non-offensive. I mean, it doesn’t taste bad so much as it doesn’t really taste much at all. Schlitz is definitely a hot-garage kind of beer. It goes down easy and, for $3.64 per six-pack, you can afford to keep some on hand to refresh yourself after a hard day working on the house, in the yard, or on your bike.
That sounds about right for awful beer. In fact, this is where shitty beer truly shines: it’s the perfect solution to the “I need something refreshing and alcoholic” problem when you can’t (or won’t) mix yourself a gin and tonic. Sure, there are plenty of good beers that would suit (most IPAs, for example), along with the aforementioned gin and tonic, but I see, say, Schlitz as what Clausewitz would call an economy-of-force option. You wouldn’t chug a good IPA — so if the beer’s only barely going to touch your taste-buds, why not drink something cheap?
At any rate — dammit, man, you’re drinking beer. There’s no need to apologize, and no need to justify yourself.
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