Horrible Beers So Far: A Summary 

    We’ve come to a decent point for reflection in our quest to rate the worst beers on the planet, a place to set up camp and stop for the night, as it were.  A place to look back, survey the wide forests of malt liquor and beer+seafood combinations we’ve hiked through, and ponder.  A place to stop for the night and rest our shoulders, which strain under the weight of this hiking metaphor.  But let’s be serious and systematic about this — we all know that most of the beers I review are bad, but which ones are REALLY bad?  If you’re in a spot in your life where you absolutely had to drink one of these, which would it be?

    Not only am I going to get serious and systematic, I’m going full-blown Nerd on this.  I’m going to get out my taped-in-the-center glasses, put aside my rock tumbler, and present a plot of data taken so far that should illustrate which beers are the cream of this awful crop.  It boils down to this — a beer that is bad should be cheap, right?  So which beers give you the best bang in quality for the least buck (and I do mean a buck, or maybe upwards of $1.40 for the more expensive malt liquors)?  Let’s take a look at the price of beers rated so far (in cents per ounce) versus the quality I gave it (the rating, out of six).  I took the liberty of futzing with the rating dimension a bit, but you’ll forgive me, right?  Here are the results:

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    Well, there you have it folks.  Beers in the upper left corner are the ones you should aim for, being passable in quality and easy on the wallet.  Beers down in the lower right corner have the nerve to be more expensive than other beers of better quality.  Let’s put aside the Bud / Clamato abomination as an outlier obviously concocted by forces of evil.  Within the standard, non-clam-based beers, you’ll want to avoid Mickey’s and Schlitz, and instead opt to crack open a screw-top of King Cobra, Steel Reserve, or better yet Natural Ice.  The Natural Ice price is skewed a bit low since you can buy it in 24-packs, so I’d bet the little Natty Ice dot would move closer to the pack if you could buy it in 40 oz bottles.  Which would be nice, since I can’t be hauling around a 24-pack of cans to the bus station…