Dear New Belgium,

For some time now, skylark and I have had an argument. He has claimed that you were unimaginative. He claimed that all your beers tasted the same. He claimed you weren’t the awesome microbrew heroes you claimed to be.

And all this time I defended you. I said “No, 1554 is original!”. “New Belgium is awesome”. “They GET it.” I believed it in my heart… and then I saw this.

There you were, nestled up next to the Pabst Blue Ribbon. And me, standing there mouth agape. How could I face skylark now? It’s like I was the guy angrily defending the fidelity of his best girl…while she bangs some guy under the bleachers at the monster truck rally.

Good bye New Belgium. You can keep the singing fish plaque and the Garth Brooks CD. You’ll need it where you’re going.

- Frosty

Last year, when I tried this beer, I was really amazed and how Blue Moon managed to blend in the flavor of pumpkin into a malty fall ale and have it actually taste really yummy.

You can imagine my chagrin this year however, when I bought this brew expecting that early dose of autumn goodness. Instead I was met with … well … nothing. Its a malty fall like beer I guess. But it lacks any pumpkin flavor. I mean none. Zip. Nada. So how do they justify calling it pumpkin ale? Maybe they brewed it IN a pumpkin patch.

It doesn’t taste bad…just incomplete. And a beer that makes me feel cheated deserves a little squashing. Get it?  Squash…pumpkin? I kill me.

    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…