This particular brew looked like, from the artwork, one of those brews that combine caffeine and beer, but I think it’s just simulacrum put out by Busch to grab a few bucks from the low end of the market.  It’s perched right in that no-mans-land in between good malt liquor and bad regular beer, an awkward spot in beer space that seems like it should be the best of both worlds yet appeals to no one.  It’s the equivalent of the robotics world’s “uncanny valley” — they’d do much better if they just committed fully to making crappy cheap malt liquor, or retreat back behind the mediocre-beer defense walls and continue making Bud Light.  I’ve seen references to Hurricane Ice, which must be marketed to an even smaller demographic, namely people who want to go straight to jail, tonight.  It’s not bad, actually seems to have a bit of fruity orange flavor to it, but it’s just oddly awkward.  When you drink from a can this big, you instinctively cringe with each gulp as you learned from drinking malt liquor.  At least I did, using the patented take-giant-swigs-of-ice-cold-crap-beer-so-you-minimize-the-tasting technique honed over the years.  When I didn’t get the usual sour soapy proto-malty aftertaste, I was strangely relieved that it wasn’t malt liquor, followed a second or so later by disappontment that it isn’t even a bad regular beer.  For some reason I kept doing this same pattern for at least 10 minutes, probably because the malt-liquor cringe is a hard habit to break when you drink from a can the size of a scuba tank.  After a while, though, the 8% alcohol content catches up with you, and lo and behold, you’re unexpectedly drunk on a Tuesday night.  And coincidentally, “Unexpectedly drunk on a Tuesday Night” was my wedding song back in Fairfield.  Sung by the wedding band, “Sour Cream N’ High Gravity Pringles”…

As for Mocne, I can’t decide if I’ve been duped or not.  They’ve gone ahead and put “Malt Liquor” on the label — does this indicate a foriegn-brewery lack of knowledge about the stigma associated with Malt Licka’s here in the U.S.?  Or have I purchased Poland’s equivalent of King Cobra, thinking it was a fancy import, despite them giving me fair warning on the label?  The fact is, it’s not nearly as bad as domestic Malt Liquors, but it’s not nearly as good as the specialty quintuple-boch-uber-malty brews that must technically be called Malt Liquors because of their alcoholic content, but nevertheless are quite tasty.  The flavor has a faint whiff of whatever domestic malt liquor reeks of.  The head had that same super-fine-grained soapy bubbliness that you see in cheap 40’s, industrial solvents, ocean foam in Newark, but never in a decent beer.  I have to conclude, therefore, that this beer is to King Cobra what Harp’s Lager is to Budweiser — an imported, better-quality yet essentially in the same family of beverage.  Since being the Best of the Malt Liquors is a distinction akin to being the professional bowler with the fastest 40-yard-dash time, I’m not sure what the point really is for this beer.  If you were somehow constrained to the world of malt liquors forevermore, this is your best beer choice, but if you’re in this situation then you really have more pressing problems to deal with…

After taste-testing six malt liquors in the past year, I thought I was able to handle the typical malt liquor.  St. Ides didn’t at first appear to be anything special.  But this is a malt brew full of surprises.  And, needless to say, surprise is NOT what you want when it comes to beer this bad.  At every turn, in all respects, I shamefully underestimated this dreck, and it made me pay for my miscalculation.  Here’s the rundown:

*** Characteristic:   Flavor

My expectation:    “Probably terrible, but I’ve done terrible before… bring it on!”

Reality:    “Oh my dear lord!  We’ve hit an iceberg!   We’re going down!  Oh, the humanity!”

***  Characteristic:   Intoxification-ness

My expectation:    “I might be giggling a bit too much by the end, but I’ll be back to normal by bedtime”

Reality:   “Ehhhh?  … I’m only down about halfway, and I can’t see straight…  my toes are numb…  I can see through metal, I swear…”

*** Characteristic:    Hangover

My expectation:    “Eh, a little water before bed, and I’m fine.”

Reality:    “Could someone turn down the throbbing in my arteries?  I think I can hear my eyeballs moving in their sockets…”

Maybe for some reason I was caught off guard (did I give blood earlier?  do I have a tapeworm?), but this 40 knocked me on my behind.  It was just like high school all over again.  Late that night I happened to catch a few minutes of the kid’s show “Oobi”, where all the characters consist of human hands with googly-eyes glued to the knuckles.  That show is surreal sober, so you can imagine my discombobulation.  So while I don’t have much remembrance of the flavor, quality, or other characteristics I usually use to judge the beer, I will give this one a rating of 2 beers as a reward for reminding me not to be complacent.  I gotta start training better…  where was that Rocky 8-track tape?

Old Milwaukee… just sounds delicious, doesn’t it? This beer dates back before they named brews after snakes. I’m not sure if this is technically malt liquor or merely cheap beer, but I drank it from a 40-ounce bottle shaped like a Saturn rocket booster, so I’ll refer to it as the malt variety. Once Frosty hires a fact-checker for us, I’ll be more diligent in my terminology.

This one was not terrible, but it really stands out for fizziness. The “beer” was astoundingly carbonated. Just so much bubbles, fizz, and accompanying bloated feeling, that I wondered how much actual beer there was in the bottle along with the CO2. If it’s warmer this month than usual, blame my beer review for doubling the global warming effect. Malt liquors in general are more carbonated, and oddly carbonated, than regular old beer — you can tell that whereas a homebrewed beer, for example, contains bubbles from natural fermentation processes, malt liquors contain bubbles thanks to the support of some scary industrial surfactant. Needless to say, I was absolutely charming in the eyes of Mrs. Liquor that night, with my horrible beer breath and need to burp every 3 seconds.

What’s this I see on the label? Lo and behold, Old Milwaukee is brewed and distributed by Schlitz, which makes my least-favorite malt liquor to date. Given the flavors of both, it seems that Old Mil is the upscale, high-quality product, the Lexus to Schlitz’ Toyota. I’d drink this over Schlitz, but not much else — I really can’t recommend it for taste. If you’re entering a burping contest in the next 30 seconds, or you need to inflate a lot of backyard jumpy toys by hand this evening, I heartily recommend it. Otherwise, save your money, and save our world from more global warming!

The picture I include with this post is intended as testimony that I actually drank the thing. And I did make it all the way through, though just barely. It’s not outright undrinkable, but it certainly wasn’t pleasant.  It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever had (see my post on Schlitz), but if you’re looking for a 2-dollar night of fun, you could do better than this.  It is actually pretty bland for a malt liquor — the flavor is bad, but in just a general way, without any of the surprising and novel petrochemical pungencies you get with Schlitz or Steel Reserve.  Heck, Mickey’s may not be much better, but it’s at least got character.  I may not enjoy drinking Mickey’s, but I can at least imagine myself while drinking to be a South Boston street rat who’s tryin’ to make good on his lousy life by makin’ a new start in the boxin’ ring.  Drinking Country Club, what possible scenario can I envision myself in?  A WASP-y guy named Bennett with a trust fund who incongruously drives a beat-up Pinto?  Nah, the cognitive dissonance between the pretensions of the wrapper and the contents inside are just too much for me.

But it is still better than Schlitz.

As I’ve mentioned before, the key lesson you quickly learn in drinking these bloated, nasty concoctions is to drink them COLD. Serving them ice cold beats down the horrible flavor — you do NOT want these puppies to warm up to room temperature to volatilize all those nasty petrochemicals. You soon find yourself in a race against the clock, hurrying to chug it down before thermodynamics catches up with you, sometimes resorting to gripping the bottle around the tiny neck to avoid accelerating the warming from your hands. The last few ounces will be precisely the same frothiness as fresh pee, so you better hope it’s not the same temperature, or you’ll be heading for technicolor yawn. All that being said, King Cobra was my favorite of the bunch, and over time (i.e. the couple months I spent in phase 2) I developed a fondness for it, memories of which all came rushing back at my first sip, now 10+ years later. I think it’s that this beer has the least odious qualities among all other malt liquors, so it shines in comparison — not as gag-inducing on the first sip as Old English, not quite as much hints of a Greyhound bus station in the bouquet. And, of course, wrapper artwork that could kick your ass and then possibly eat your foot…

Part three in my tony-nominated series of reviews, Beers Whose Artwork Can Kick Your Ass, Steel Reserve is yet another malt liquor beer that I (a pencil-necked balding geek who could get sunburnt from a dashboard light) have absolutely no business drinking.  And yet, it wasn’t bad.  If drinking Schlitz is like punching yourself in the face with a cinder block, Steel Reserve is like slugging yourself in the stomach with a can of pumpkin pie mix.  (And of course Miller Lite is like a weak slap to the face with an envelope of petunia seeds.)   It didn’t have the sharp skunkiness or odd medicine-y taste that the really bad malt liquors have in that first whiff — served sufficiently cold, Steel Reserve will admirably serve your purposes if your purposes are funded at less than the 3 dollar level. 

I realized in writing this review that I should research why the hell there’s a “211″ on the label, and discovered it’s the medieval symbol for “steel”.  There, someone can now use this blog as a book report.  While you’re at it, include this little nugget (and remember to cite wikipedia):  “Due to the high alcohol content and low price, Steel Reserve is widely consumed by alcoholic homeless people.”  Which brings into stark relief for me who the target audience is for my set of reviews on Frosty Goodness.  Unfortunately Steel Reserve is banned in parts of Seattle for this reason (drunken homeless crime, not my posts on this website).  So I heartily recommend this El Cheapo beer, and urge you to try it before it is inevitably banned by your metropolitan area.  911 might be a joke, but 211 makes for one wild night with five-foot-three former rappers…

So why do this to myself? Why should I complain, when after all, I’m named “Walt Liquor”? More to the point, why should you bother reading it? Because I believe there are tolerable cheap beers, and then there are ungodly awful cheap beers. And it is worth it, nay it is imperative, that we figure out which is which. Because if you’ve only got $2.19 to spend, you might as well spend it intelligently.  And my friends, Schilz is NOT the way to spend that money.

That, and I’m too cheap to buy an expensive microbrew every time I want to review a beer…