Whoops!  I’m a little late with my posts — didn’t realize how long it had been since my last Malt Liquor update (must be down to just a handful of brain cells left).  I’ve also exhausted all the Malt Liquors at my local brew pit, so I’ve had a harder time getting new dreck to review.  But I did get ahold of some St. Ides, from the 7-11 during a trip with the kids to buy a slurpee.  (And boy was that awkward, putting both of those on the counter…)

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?

“Who is more foolish? The fool, or the fool who follows him?”
-Benjamin Kenobi

Juan de la Cueva may have been a loon. For some reason in 1575 he wrote about some dish that combined Jalapenos and ale. Crazy? Maybe. But the real fools in this instance are the guys at Rogue Brewery who decided that this obscure story would make for a great beer.

Have you ever tasted a shoe? No? Well, I’m not sure I ever have either, but immediately after taking a sip of this beer I was convinced it tasted like one. Then the shoe flavor left, and the real horror crept in. Repeat after me: Peppers do not belong in beer.

The aftertaste was so wrong, completely awful on so many levels, that I was convinced I couldn’t really have tasted that. I tried again. I had Grandpa Goodbeer try it. All to no avail. This beer is gross. As soon as the otherwise odd flavor goes away, Rogue Chipotle Ale attacks you with the nuclear bomb of all Aftertaste Attacks. Dry, tangy, salty, throat scratchy, gross old jalapeno flavor. Its actually much worse than it sounds, if you can believe that.

On the other hand…

I did have to give it a 2. It worked pretty awesome as a marinade for Tilapia.

I applaud Rogue for trying new things, I really do. But much like that random hallucinogen I tried in college, not all experiments are a good idea.

This has been a bad week for my stomach.  First, we went to the county fair, where I had — you better sit down for this — 1) a deep-fried twinkie, 2) deep-fried oreos, 3) deep-fried Spam, and best of all, 4) a deep-fried WHITE CASTLE BURGER.  I believe these are coincidentally the forms that the four horsemen of the apocalypse will take when they reappear on earth.  Fortunately for us all, I neutralized them with my stomach.  Then, I found this beverage.  It was a moment that will forever live in infamy, a moment that will have entire chapters devoted to it in my children’s high school history textbooks, a moment that as we speak is forming the foundations of new religions.  The moment that I found…   Budweiser and Clamato.   Yeah, that’s right — Budweiser, a perfectly normal, profitable company, has put out a product that consists of a can, a can that contains beer, tomato sauce, and clam juice.  The resulting concotion is salmon-colored, cloudy, and carbonated.   And it looked just as disgusting as it sloshed down the kitchen sink drain as it did sitting on the shelf in the store.

 Clamato, as I read in wikipedia, is a mix of reconstituted tomato juice concentrate, reconstituted dried clam broth, and high fructose corn syrup.   Oh, and MSG.  Who the hell decided they needed to add beer to the mix?  It’s apparently very popular, particularly in Canada, but it is easily THE WORST BEER I’VE EVER TASTED.  And keep in mind, I’m the guy who actually finished forty-ounce bottles of Schlitz, King Cobra, and something called “Country Club”.  I managed two sips of this abomination before I had to eat a mop to get rid of the flavor.  It takes quite a lot to disgust me, and the fine folks at Budweiser have done it.  I raise a glass of Tums to you in salute.

 Sadly, I had poured it all down the drain before I realized I had not maximized the potential of this drink — clearly, what it’s meant for is dipping sauce for deep-fried White Castles.  Maybe next year, unless I wise up before then.  If I could give this drink a negative six, I could, but let’s just say that my digestive system will never be the same…

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!

I haven’t had this beer in a long time. And yet, it hasn’t been long enough. I can’t even describe the bad that was the taste of this beer. This beer, if you want to call it that, holds the distinction of being the only beer I would not and could not finish. I know that Trader Joe’s isn’t known for its proper beer storage ways, but that can’t be the reason behind the flavor of the Bavarian Hefeweizen. It goes way beyond that. Only a temporary lack of sanity could lead to this sorry beer’s release.

It was an indecisive day at the wall of beer. As I sat contemplating what to buy, my local beer pusher, Sally, remarked how many of the beers on the wall seemed to have a devil, evil, end of the world theme. Perhaps the brewers of America know something we don’t? I figured, well, if I have to go, I should heed the message at hand. Theme week! What better way to understand brewmaster revelations than to drink the beers themselves. For the next couple weeks or until the world ends, whichever comes first, I will be subjecting myself to and revealing to you … the Beers of Evil.

This first beer I chose, some french* job named Belzebuth, immediately grabbed my attention with its gratuitous marketing. Taking up most of the neck was the massive announcement that this beer was 13% alcohol. Savoring dreams of being piss drunk after just one bottle, I poured the bottle into a glass and realized the second thing evil about this beer.

It didn’t fill the glass! (See the picture to the right). I knew the french were annoying, but to make me angry before I’ve even had a single sip was a special accomplishment. I soon discovered however, that the bottler was actual doing me a favor.

A little bitter, but still excited, I took a sip. Reaction: “WTF is this?”. It was like I was chewing it. Full of all sorts of heavy flavors, like gulping a rotten fruit salad. I was a trooper though and resolved to get through a bit more. Thankfully the next sip didn’t taste so rotten. As a matter of fact, it didn’t taste like beer at all. It was more like tonic water with a bunch of whiskey poured in. The kind of whiskey that comes in a plastic bottle. Evil indeed. This stuff was so nasty that even though I poured it out after only three small swigs, the boozy hobo aftertaste stuck with me for the rest of the evening.

If one can call this beer, then I wouldn’t hesitate to call it about the worst beer ever. Quoth Mike Myers: “It’s not just evil, its ‘e-veel’. Like the fru-its of the de-veel”

I like Nut Browns. Anyone who has ever tried Rogue’s Hazelnut Nectar can attest to its total awesomeness. Even perennial disappointment Deschutes Brewery makes a pretty tasty Brown.

So you can imagine my total shock and dismay when I took a swig of Hale’s Irish Style Nut Brown, and immediately cringed with an intense cheek smash. Hale’s Brewery best never go to the Emerald Isle, because apparently they consider “Irish Style” to mean “tastes like crap”.

You see, where I was hoping for a nice nutty flavor, possibly with a hint of “brown tang”, I was met instead with an insane amount of hoppy teeth kick. Admittedly, I don’t like IPAs all that much (even when they taste like crotch), but I don’t even think IPA guys would like this. Its like a beer that can’t decide what to be. I can only imagine the brewers sitting around … “We can’t get this to taste right, lets just throw a bunch of hops in it”.

To their credit, Hale’s only offers this as a seasonal brew. I mean, why offend the Irish all year round?

The next entry in my tongue-pummeling series on malt licka’s, Country Club Malt Liquor is interestingly one of the very few not to go with uber-macho iconography like Steel Reserve or King Cobra. Maybe only Old English, in the world of low-class beverages, even attempts to masquerade as similar heights of culture, but both brews are equally tragic in the futility of trying to fit in as a cheap malt liquor in the grocery store next to all the genuinely classy foodstuff like water crackers or the wines they keep behind glass. Old English at least has thinly veiled menace to keep it from being outright ridiculed by the high-class food — no amount of gothic font will hide that it could call on cousins Colt 45 and Steel Reserve to kick some butt in the fine cheese aisle if need be.  Snoop Dogg probably drinks Old English, after all.  Country Club, on the other hand, leads a pitiable existence, shunned (of course) by the food and beverages you actually would expect to find consumed in a country club, and equally scorned by the other malt liquors for being such a dweeb. Country Club is perhaps the only malt licka whose artwork most definitely cannot kick your ass, whose artwork in fact you could steal lunch money from, give a wedie, then a swirlie. I wonder if it hangs out with other supermarket outcasts, like the sardines, or the little thin cigars with plastic mouthpieces.

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.

“Woah” I said as I took my first swig. And I didn’t mean a good woah.

I was feeling adventurous, so I decided to grab this rather cool looking bottle and try something from our friends down south. Apparently “Carnivale” isn’t the only wild and crazy thing in Brazil, cause this beer is wacky. The odd initial flavor, and ass-y aftertaste is difficult to describe. Fruit? Wheat? It is “Unfiltered Wheat Doublebock”. Apparently what they didn’t filter out was the “funk”.

I give it a 2, cause I made it through at least 1/3 of the glass before the inevitable sink pour.

I present his here to you as a cautionary tale.

Grandpa Goodness was in town, and we shared some of the yummy Hitachino Nest, both coming away with what we thought was a new appreciation for Japanese beer. Sadly, one day while I was away at the salt mines, Grandpa, flush from the success of the previous evening, decided to go to the local beer pusher and pick up something new from Japan to try.

And so begets what is about the worst beer I’ve tried in the 60+ reviews on this site. It’s been a long time since I’ve had those college mainstays Keystone and Natural Light, but if my memory for nausea serves me right, they have a Japanese equivalent. Light like urine, rancid tang like urine (wait, how would I know that?) this stuff was … less than stellar.

There are quite a few things I like to recall from college, but what the frat party beer tasted like isn’t one of them.