BoozeReviews.net

OK, look: unlike the San Diego contingent, I am not a beer snob. If the weather’s warm, the beer’s piss-colored or darker and cold, and I’m thirsty, I’ll drink it and probably like it. It’s cold, it’s somewhat refreshing and it tastes great when you’ve been out angling for Halibut all day with nothing else to do but talk about strippers with the other guy on the boat. Look, I’m a guy who once split a flask of Jack Daniels’, 3 homebrews, a 12-er or Bud, a joint and another 30-pack of Bud with 2 other people while at-sea on my canoe, then stopped at the gas dock (in a canoe with no motor, go figure) so I could get another 12-er for the long half-mile trek through the harbor.

Tonight it was 90º in my house and I came home, cracked a cold Pacifico, dropped a lime in it, and it tasted as good as Dom Perignon licked off a freshly-bathed woman’s breasts.

It’s all about what you like.

So please bear with me in the following rant against, primarily, Miller.

Their latest ad campaign states proudly “did you ever think about the way it’s triple hops brewed?”, and “does the fact that we add hops at 3 different times during the brewing, instead of all at once ever cross your mind?”.

OK, let’s just transpose that one over another industry, for a second:

“When you eat a Supermegafatty Burger from Bust Yer Gut’s, did you ever stop to think that we went through the trouble of making sure the cow was dead before you ate it? We did. We made absolutely sure that fucking cow was dead before we put it between your buns. We even licked it to double check. That’s how much we care about dead cows.”

Now let’s apply that same logic to beer making:

“When you drink Urinification Ale, did you know that we make it almost entirely out of barley, hops and yeast? We do. We even heat up the stuff first, to make sure it’s purified. That’s exactly how much we know about brewing. Shit, we even wash out the fermentor for you. ”

Let’s back up here a second. Beer 101: you put hops in at different times. You just do. No matter what. You put in bittering hops early in the boil. They basically cook in there and add bitterness to the beer. Then you put in some flavoring hops later in the boil. Boiling them for less time adds another layer of flavor to the beer, and some aroma. Then you add aroma hops. Those make it smell good– they cut what’s left of the sugar smell and, hopefully, leave you with a fresh-smelling tasty adult beverage. Sometimes you even add hops after the main fermentation– dry hops — that give it an extra, aromatic, kick. I learned this when I was 18 years old.

So Miller is, essentially, telling you “we make beer according to the instructions. We’ve done absolutely nothing interesting or different to our beer, which is why you’ll like it, because we’ve pretty much determined that you, our customers, are made up of uneducated middle America and you just don’t give a fuck about much. Yes, we think that little of you. So drink up and dull those wits even more, because no matter what, we’re gonna be easy and you can always pan handle enough dough to get yourselves a 40 of our schwag.”

Chew on that a minute.

Granted: not everyone knows how beer is made. I get that. But fuck, am I the only one who is bothered by the fact that they would take something so totally ordinary and then mount a multi-million dollar ad campaign around it??

Don’t get me wrong– for years beer ads have been the source of endless entertainment for all of us. We all look forward to the super bowl beer ads. Funny thing is: none of them are ever about the beer. And I don’t mind. Because Miller, Bud, Coors aren’t really about the craft of beer making either– they make a beverage that goes well with BBQ, beach, football, baseball, breakfast, gambling all-nighters, college parties, high school parties, and fishing. They make a social stimulant that cools you down while you’re sitting on a hot San Diego beach and also fits in when you’re rolling out of a Vegas titty bar at sunrise with a half-full bottle in your hand and a cigar stub clamped between your teeth. And they make it light and refreshing so you can drink a shitload of it while trying not to burn down the backyard with lighter fluid while BBQing.  Domestic beer is the gas in my paddle-powered canoe’s engine.  My beef here is that Miller has just tried to assert themselves as “a real brewery” by giving the public a lesson in beer 101, assuming we’ll all say “oh, wow, they really know how to make the stuff. I mean gosh durnit, they actually put them hops thangs in it.”

It’s “Mission Accomplished” with that Jedi mindtrick finger wag all over again, accompanied by the arrogant certainty that that the inebriated masses will say “that’s fucking cool!” and take the bait, hook, line and sinker.

(4 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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