Gameday Beers of the Week: Louisiana-Monroe
I want you to stop thinking about beer for a minute. I want you to think about how hard practice must have been this week for the Crimson Tide. How they worked extra hard. How they ran drill after drill after drill. How they needed to excise the demons from whatever it was that happened against Ole Miss. How the team paid penance.
If the Tide must suffer, must apologize in sweat, then you too must suffer. This is the week of Punishment Beers. Force yourself to slug down the muddy, flabby dregs of awful beer. Sometimes, in order to achieve purity, you must first bathe in toxins. The toxicity of our shitty (of our SHIIIIIITYYY) beer. This week please punish yourself, but first read my own journal of punishment.
Punishment Beer of the week: Shipyard Pumpkinhead Ale
This beer pours an unexpectedly light shade of yellow. It’s lager-yellow; as clear and pale as an industrial adjunct lager. Pours this up against an Old Milwaukee and the only difference you’ll notice is that the head retention on Pumpkinhead’s 1/2 finger cap of white foam is superior to the shit beer. Forget your aspirations of warm autumnal copper sweet potato orange colors. It’s yellow. Good lord. This smells exactly as artificial as you’d imagine a pumpkin beer brewed by Miller to smell like. Only Shipyard is a craft brewery. Aromas of heavy cinnamon powder, synthetic nutmeg, potpourri, plastic garden hose. It smells like grandma’s house. No, not your cool grandma. The other one. For as strong as the beer’s aroma comes across, it is relatively muted on the palate. It even tastes like a lager: the malt flavors are subtle and clean and lightly sweet and impart a Yuengling-like finish. The spices however? Like someone dumped a literal ton of stale nutmeg powder into the boil. It’s not even pumpkin pie flavored, just “old kitchen cabinet that hasn’t been used for years” flavored. This is the worst Pumpkin Ale I’ve ever had. This beer is water-thin, too slick, utterly insubstantial. At best, it has some drinkability. That’s about all I can say for it. Overall? Even Michelob’s Jack’s Pumpkin Spice is a better example of the Pumpkin Ale style. Somehow. Seriously.
Punishment Beer of the week: Abita Strawator
The Tide IS playing Louisiana-Monroe, after all, so why not drink the worst Louisiana beer there is? Finally, Abita gives beer drinkers the answer to a long-standing question: “What would happen if you strained strawberry juice through used cheesecloth and blended it into some swamp water?” It tastes like a tea steeped from silo-stale cereal grains & left out in direct sunlight next to a malnourished orchard.
Punishment Beer of the week: Magic Hat #9
Plenty of people swear by this apricot-accented beer, but plenty of people like punishing themselves in lots of popular ways. Some people persist in watching WWE television. Some people like to watch Mizzou football to see Gary Pinkel attempt to ice his own kicker. I might be the “some people” in these examples.
I’ve had pale ales brewed with stonefruit. The aromatics can be fresh & juicy & lovely. Magic Hat #9, however, smells like sugar-sweet fake apricot. Like apricot Haribo candy or something. But unlike delicious Haribo, #9 ALSO smells like burning PVC pipe. There is a serious I-have-some-plastic-and-it-is-currently-on-fire component to this beer’s aroma. And no, you can’t get past it. It dominates everything and makes you think of climate change and carcinogens being released into the air and generally makes you hate life. That terrible, plasticy taste carries over to the palate, but it’s softer. The off-putting flavor tastes composed of maybe 40% burning PVC pipe, 60% too-charred apricot skin, like someone saw Bobby Flay grilling fruit on the Food Network and decided to give it a go with already used-up charcoal. The apricot juice flavor is woefully artificial. I think I tasted a hop or two, but it too was singed by the fire that befell the apricot syrup factory in an insurance fraud arson.
Punishment Beer you can buy in Alabama: Rogue Voodoo Doughnuts Maple Bacon Ale
This stands a chance of being the single worst beer I’ve ever tasted. Look, it’s not even what I expected. I expected all of the flavors to be VERY strong. I expected barrels of vanilla & bags of sugar & feedlots of bacon. The beer is more subtle than I feared, but also it happens to taste bad. Like, bacon tastes good. Maple syrup tastes good. Maple syrup & bacon taste good together! I’m not personally big on maple donuts, but people swear by them. I think it was a maple donut that former Notre Dame WR Golden Tate literally broke into a Seattle donut shop to steal during his rookie year in the NFL. So I get that these flavors are supposed to work together & are supposed to taste good.
Instead this beer tastes like a fishing tackle store opened up inside a diabetes clinic.
Punishment Beer to avoid at all costs: Crazy Ed’s Cave Creek Chili Beer
Just cook up a succotash of corn & jalapenos instead. That’s all this beer is: oily jalapeño heat & a lager possibly made only from corn, combined with the refreshing drinkability of presumably tepid standing water on the roadside. This is a beer that you can find in shopping mall trinket stores, notable for its novelty packaging: there’s one whole jalapeno jammed into every bottle. Chili peppers in beer can totally work, especially in styles like Imperial Stout where there’s enough sugar to balance the heat. Those good chili beers are brewed with peppers or are conditioned in steel tanks with peppers. They aren’t bottled with Sysco-grade hot peppers & left to secrete an oily film. Cave Creek Chili Beer, unfortunately for the world, is
