A Beginner’s Guide to Lukewarm House Show Beers
Here’s the scenario: you’ve got the inside scoop on a local band you know is gonna be good. It’s a steamy Wednesday night in early August and they’re playing at a house in… let’s say Edgewood. You either a) want to impress an out-of-town friend with your knowledge of the DIY music scene, b) meet some cool new folks, or c) weep in front of a bunch of strangers. Or all three!
You spent approximately seven and a half of your well-earned dollars on a six pack. You open the fridge door and find it’s filled to the brim with marmalades and a solid two and a half pounds of Italian parsley for some reason— no beer real estate in here.
So what do you do? Stash it under the piano bench and hope you can politely elbow past some Head-Nodders in the dark when you need a refill? Rookie move. You gotta rock the beer briefcase. Crack one open, pass another to your show-mate or to a stranger that looks like they’re in need, and hang on to the plastic of the six pack like a handle for immediate access. The more it looks like you’re barely hanging on with as few fingers as possible, the better.
Now that you’ve got the proper etiquette, let’s worry about what’s in those cans. Here’s the thing: those brewskis, they’re going to get warm. The crispness of those first few sips will never last, and by the time you get to your second or third can that’s been sitting out in someone’s sweaty living room/garage/basement, it’ll be closer to a musty gym shower than the ice-cold ideal in a Super Bowl commercial. You gotta pick your corner store beers with that in mind — something that won’t take you out of the catharsis of a good show. There’s nothing worse than a spine-tingling, goosebump raising moment of discovering your new favorite band being interrupted by taking a swig of whatever’s in your hand and not being able to figure out if it’s just 100 percent backwash.
We set out to not-so-definitively find out what the best house show beer is. It had to be cheap, not be immediately problematic (looking at you, Yuengling), be good cold, and not make you hate yourself when it inevitably gets warm.
So we got a couple of friends who didn’t have plans on a Tuesday night and went out to the nearest corner store to get their finest swill. We engaged in a mostly-blind taste test to try and eliminate our existing biases.
Here are our candidates:
- National Bohemian AKA Natty Boh, AKA the Bad Boy of Baltimore, the Mid-Atlantic Hometown Hero, the Pringles Man’s Older Brother that Wears Leather Jackets and Owns a Python
- Budweiser AKA “Bud Heavy,” AKA The “King” of Beers, AKA “AMERICA”
- Schlitz (which is really a Malt Liquor) AKA The Raging Bull, AKA Blue Bulls, AKA David what the fuck why did you get this, AKA I’m not sure if I hate myself this much
- Miller High Life AKA The Champagne of Beers
- Pabst Blue Ribbon AKA PBR, AKA Pabstbier, AKA We Won an Award in 1882 and Haven’t Shut Up About it Since
Our extremely unscientific system will rate each drink on Flavor/Mouthfeel/etc while cold, and then re-evaluate once those bad boys sit out for a few hours (no, we did not microwave the beer cans, no matter what our Instagram account may have told you). Most of this will be in the form of out-of-context quotes, with a ranking at the end of each round of tasting.
I cannot promise that these tasting notes will be accurate. We are not beer experts, and it turns out that one of our taste-testers was born without a sense of smell. Love ya, Dylan.
Let’s begin!
TEST 1 — COLD BEERS
#1 Natty Boh
“This has a light amber hue. I guess they’re all going to be like that.”
“Not very… leggy.” “Wait, that’s for tasting wine.”
“This smells like a dorm room floor.”
“Getting notes of asparagus and……bad. Maybe some apple?”
“Drinking this makes me feel like I’m in a Queens of the Stone Age music video.”
#2 Bud Heavy
“CORN. Like, all the corn.”
“A distinct odor of dryer sheets. It has the mouthfeel of a hotel towel”
“This has a heavy butter flavor, but like, if butter could be vindictive.”
“A lot of chemicals — this tastes more like the can than the beer, I think.”
“This is resoundingly unpleasant.”
Editor’s note: this one had the best burp production, if that’s something that matters to you.
#3 Schlitz
“Good head on this one.” “Yeah. Great head.”
“This one is pretty good. It’s a little bit urine-y, but not in a way that ruins it?”
“This feels union-made. I can really taste the collective bargaining.”
“Oh man, you really feel this in your liver.”
“This one made me drunk.” “It’s dense.”
“I couldn’t bike after drinking this because I’d totally yarf.”
#4 Miller High Life
“WOAH. This is freaking out my mouth.” “Really engages the sides of your tongue.”
“It’s like honey mixed with baking soda.”
“It kind of smells like weed.”
“This is definitely the best so far.”
“If you could drink one of those sparkly vinyl diner seats, this is probably what it would taste like.”
#5 PBR
“This smells like vinegar, but in a way I don’t hate.”
“This is PBR, isn’t it.”
“Predominant taste is…..feathers? And definitely saliva.”
“Drinking this gives me the feeling that someone just stuck their tongue in my mouth.”
“This one is definitely PBR.”
RANKINGS — COLD
First — Miller High Life
Second — Schlitz
Third — PBR
Fourth — Natty Boh
5 -1000 — Anything Else
Last — Bud Heavy
TEST 2 — WARM AND STANKY
#1 Natty Boh
“This now smells like a storm drain.”
“Less offensive than when it was cold, but it tastes like pond water.”
“This is like that smell you get from the inside of a rubber halloween mask you’ve been wearing all night.”
Editor’s Note: Tasters got kind of tipsy after so many generous pours and from having a few beers while waiting for the first beers to get warm. The tasting notes slowly devolve after this point.
#2 Bud Heavy
“This is way, way better than it was cold! How does that happen?!”
“Like a fresh barn.”
“And, I want to say….tuna?”
“If they made a Nascar-scented Yankee Candle, this is what it would smell like.” Editor’s note: I swear we didn’t know this was Budweiser at the time.
“This tastes like hiding in the clothing racks at a department store.”
#3 Schlitz
“Oh, major Pine-Sol on this one.”
“No. No. I hate this.”
“It’s like…..citrus. With a molasses core. And some kinda toxic cloud.”
“Astringent bile.”
#4 Miller High Life
“This is the smell you get after leaving your laundry in the washing machine overnight.”
“Clammy. Like putting on an already-wet bathing suit.”
“It’s a briny boy. Seafoam.”
“I’m getting some notes of egg bread.”
“Overall, I don’t hate it.”
#5 PBR
“This tastes like eating a frozen pizza and then throwing it up in the sink.”
“THA DEVIL’S TWINZZ” Editor’s note: ???
“Dusty. Dusty and…musty. Ech.”
RANKINGS — WARM
First — Miller High Life
Second — Bud Heavy (?)
Third — Natty Boh
Fourth — PBR
Last — Schlitz
REFLECTIONS
Well, based on our incredibly small sample of beers and the rantings of couple of drunk idiots taste testing them, Miller High Life is your way to go if you want a beer you know’ll get warm at some point. It started out surprisingly tasty, and never got worse than “tolerable.”
It still is shocking how Budweiser somehow improved drastically from cold to warm. It started out as everyone’s least favorite and then jumped to #2 or even #1 for some testers.
As a bunch of DC/Maryland people, we were all honestly surprised at how poorly Natty Boh fared in a blind taste test. It seems like most of the flavor there comes from the hometown pride.
If your favorite cheap fermented barley water isn’t on here, let us know! We might just do a round two.
