Inexpensive Beer Report: Old Style

Ever hear of the great punk band The Queers? They're one of my favorites. On their album Don't Back Down, there's a great song called "I Only Drink Bud." In the song Joe Queer sings:

"People in Chicago
always brag about Old Style
before I drink that swill again
it's gonna be a while"

I've been humming the tune all night while putting down these cans adorned with a red and blue shield. However, it's hardly swill.

I find it to be a rather enjoyable beverage. I would definitely prefer a bottle rather than a can but something tells me this drink is best served from an aluminum container.

It's sweet at first taste and smooth on finish, with the sweetness sticking around just a bit. I'd like a bit more carbonation but with a beer of this value and it being served in good ol' Al, I can't complain too much, I knew what I was getting when I bought this beer.

If I had to compare it to another beer I've drank, it would be Bud Light. This is strange, because I'm not a fan of the beer promoted with the best radio ads ever. My dislike for Bud Light has a lot to do with the hangovers it usually causes. For whatever reason, a night of slaying Bud Lights is followed with the worst beer shits known to man.

Enough of this babbling and boring nonsense, onto the ratings:

Taste: 7/10

Again, nice and smooth, pretty balanced. No real surprises here, it's about what I expected and didn't disappoint.

I will say it isn't quite as good as the first time I had the pleasure of drinking it. That was in a hotel parking lot tailgating with friends.

Aroma: 3/10

Smells like aluminum. Which reminds me of picking up thousands of cans in college the morning after parties.

Ever smell your hand after drinking all night, and smoking an untold number of cigarettes and bong loads? It's not good. Not good at all. Cleaning up mostly empty cans of beer that have been sitting out all night only makes things worse.

The bile is starting to build just thinking about it.

Price: 5/10

$8 and change for a 12'er. And these are cans. As I said, as far as I know, Old Style isn't readily available in Phoenix. The price is proof. Fuck you, Walgreens.

Hangover: N/A

It's Thursday night and I don't plan on drinking any more than four of these suckers. If I did finish the 12-pack my guess is I'd be on the shitter half the following day, battling a raw asshole and a splitting headache.

I can see myself now, walking gingerly back to my desk, sitting down gently as my stomach continued to bubble and gurgle.

Inexpensive Beer Report: Milwaukee Classic Ice

On Saturday afternoon, the Good Brother and I decided to take the 45 minute drive up to Kenosha, Wisconsin to go beer hunting. Specifically, my brother was looking for Bells (which ain't available in Chicago) and we were both looking for the Holy Grail of Inexpensive Beer - Genesee Cream Ale. We hit up this HUGE grocery store called Woodmans, it was literally the size of a Super Wal-Mart, maybe bigger. Their beer selection did not disappoint - we got the Bells & Genesee along with a bevy of inexpensive beers that will grace the pages of Your Liver Hates You over the next month or so.

I was immediately drawn to the "Classic Ice" for the following reasons:

1. I've never heard of it
2. It was dirt cheap ($9.99 for 30)
   
3. It came in four packs

That's right people, four 12oz beers for sale. This absolutely blew my mind, what company would have the gall to sell 4 regular beers for a sub $2 price? Apparently the Milwaukee Premium Brewing Company, that's who!

Apparently the Milwaukee Premium Brewing Company (at least according to the fine folks at ratebeer.com) is a subsidiary of City Brewing. Ratebeer's listing of City Brewery's beers is a Who's Who of crap beer that I've enjoyed throughout my lifetime - Beer 30, Camo, DB Hobbs, Jaguar High Gravity Lager (which I also enjoyed thanks to the trip up north), La Crosse Lager, Schaefer Light and Sportz. These beers are all winners to a connoisseur of Inexpensive Beer like myself..... well actually Camo is absolutely terrible but in all the right ways. So my excitement level was quickly rising when I cracked open my first Classic Ice.

Now I love a shitty beer, but Milwaukee Classic Ice takes shitty to a whole new level. This is definitely one of the worst non MaltLiquor/HighGravityWhatever beers I've ever had. It doesn't have much taste going down, but it has a weird "texture" when drinking that I can't describe. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with an absurdly low carbonation level. When your sip is complete, the aftertaste kicks in. Not overwhelming mind you, but just enough to say "I'm here and you won't enjoy my company" - a most odd double whammy.

So Milwaukee Classic Ice has done what I previously though impossible - present me with a cheap, obscure, poorly brewed domestic beer that I don't really enjoy. Actually, now that I'm near slaying the 4 pack and its 6.0% ABV buzz is kicking in - I can think of worse ways to spend my time. Still, be wary of the Milwaukee Classic Ice, fine traveler....

Inexpensive Beer Report: Cerveza Caguama

The Kroger near my house carries a lot of interesting beers, the first on the list of things to try was Cerveza Caguama, mostly because it has a turtle on the front. The back of the bottle explains that Caguama means giant sea turtle, so now I have a beer made out of turtles. Either that or it comes from some terrible river full of needles that turtles fucked in in Mexico.

Beer review websites listed this as a solid C- beer. Those people are goddamned lunatics. Opening the beer, my wife recoiled in horror at the smell and she was 10 feet away from me when I opened it. This did not bode well for me, or my gastrointestinal well being.

Taste: 2/10
Take a Corona, open it, and then leave it out for a week. Put it back in the fridge, open, next to some cottage cheese. Dump some asparagus in the bottle. Whatever you want. That's what can approximate the taste of this stuff. It really is trying hard to be a Corona Light, but as everyone knows Corona Light sucks, and if it's aspiring to be that, well, there's trouble right there.

Aroma: 0.5/10

This is a crappy Blackberry camera phone picture of MacGyver, our crack beer drinking dog. We don't let the other dog drink, because he is already too stupid, and therefore can't spare the brain cells.

Mac has had most of the beers I've reviewed so far, just to see what he'd enjoy, hoping for a moment like there was with The Turtle. After sniffing a little bit of this in his bowl, he moved to the other side of the house and didn't move, and I took the picture above. I'd say that's a resounding fuck you to this beer, if even the god damn dog won't drink it.

As for me, I think it approximates closely to what I would imagine turtle piss would smell like.

Price: 7/10
$5 a sixer is nothing to sneeze at down here, cheaper than Bud/Miller/Coors. It's no Hamm's or Blatz, though. I wouldn't pay $2 for a sixer of this.

Hangover: 2/10
Four before bed and only woke up with an urge to relieve myself. I guess that's the bright spot in all this? To be fair, I was not in the same county as a buzz after 4 of these, so that's probably the reason. I don't like this blog enough to drink enough to make the pain. I was anticipating stomach hell but everything was copacetic.

I have never seen this beer anywhere else, but if you do, and buy it, you're retarded and I hate you.

Inexpensive Beer Report: Hamms

Let me get this out of the way - I like crappy beer. I love obscure, cheap domestic beer that comes in cans. I certainly have no issues with "good" beer, but most of the time I'd prefer to drink the crappiest stuff available. When you see the line of cans/bottles across a bar to show you what they sell, I'm always looking at the far left end. I don't pour my beer into a glass, I don't smell my beer before drinking it and if it comes in a 30 pack I generally like it. I plan to use the Inexpensive Beer Report to focus on those long forgotten beers that your ancestors used to drink after 12 hour days in the coal mines.

But I digress, onto Hamms. This beer has a storied history, which dates back to 1865. It was relatively localized to the midwest, but odds are that your pappy & grandpappy drank it at some point in their lives. In the 50s & 60, Hamms sponsored both the Chicago White Sox & Chicago Cubs. If you're a Chicago native, that's as good as playing both kinds - Country and Western. It was a pretty popular blue-collar beer in the 60s & 70s, but by early 90s it was all but forgotten. Nowadays, nobody under 50 drinks Hamms , though the threat of a hipster renaissance always looms large.

From the 50s through the 80s they had one of the catchiest jingles and mascots in beer history:



If a lobotomized black & white bear doesn't make you want to sling some Hamms, then you don't have a soul. But since this is a beer review blog, I'm going to stick to the nomenclature and review it like any other professional.

Price: 7/10 - The local Dominicks by my house picked it up recently, which is SHOCKING. I live in a middle-class suburb of Chicago and you typically gotta hit the city proper to find a quality brew like Hamms. It was originally $2.99 for a sixer, but I went today and it was $3.19 - which pisses me off to no end. I know I can easily spend more money for a can of Old Style at a bar, but I'm certain that the price hike is due to me buying them out every time I go.

Aroma: N/A - I did pour it in a glass and smelled it. Smells like beer... while prepping for this, my first official online beer review, I researched the popular beer review sites. Some fucking guy was reviewing a Sam Adams beer and said he could smell pineapple and cornbread in his beer. If I ever get to that level, the first person to recognize me on the street should swiftly end my life. The chances of me ever writing something like that, even if it's .000001%, means that there will be no more smelling of the beer. I just can't risk being that big of a douche...

Taste: 7/10 - In the glass, Hamms is relatively weak tasting - but very little bite or aftertaste. Just just a quality beer at a quality price. I would put it below Schlitz, and a step above PBR on the Pantheon of Shit Beer.

Pouring beer in a glass: 0/10 - Beer aficionados do this because it tends to let the beer breathe, letting you get all those smells and hops and barleys and that other crap. To me it kind of exposes the weak overall taste of the Hamms. It really does taste different than out of the can, and I don't like these hoity toity sons of bitches taking some of the luster out of Hamms. I prefer to wallow in my ignorance, and future Inexpensive Beer Reports are can only.

Critical links for further study

• The Hamms Club - Some dedicated, Hamms lovin mofos
• Find Hamms in your area
  
• Hamms MySpace page - Will likely lead to above hipster renaissance, but then again hipsters are on Facebook
  
• Ratebeer's Hamms reviews - Idiots, all of them