No Fear: "Bad" Beer

by Alex Van Buren, Posted Apr 2nd 2009 @ 4:00PM

Ah, spring, when a young man's fancy turns to ... beer.

Can you blame him? Winter may have seen us curling up with hot toddys and warming red vinos, but now the beer gardens are creaking open their retractable roofs and bars are unveiling outdoor patios, luring us in with delectably frothy quaffs.

It is, in short, beer weather.

That said, it's a rough time to pay $4 or even $8 for preposterously priced pints (for which we can thank the enormous boom in craft ales and extreme brews).

So although this writer owns up to being a microbrew aficionado, nothing warms the cockles of her cheapskate little heart like the memory of a 40-ounce Pabst Blue Ribbon on ice in a champagne bucket at Portland, Ore.'s divey Delta Café. In 1996, it cost next to nothing, and now PBR is my favorite "bad" beer.

Other suds snobs also own up to a soft spot for the cheap stuff: Gourmet.com beer expert Josh Bernstein has been seen at parties clutching a 24-ounce, 99-cent can of the Silver Bullet (since he's a Slashfood pal, we would know) and the Oregonian brew guru John Foyston has been known to partake of an ice-cold Bud on a steamy July afternoon (though he qualifies, "I would never drink malt liquor!")

Vote and tell us why in the comments.

Which "bad" beer do you hold dear?
Busch	27 (3.7%)
PBR	272 (37.2%)
Old Gold	3 (0.4%)
Coors Light	111 (15.2%)
Budweiser	91 (12.4%)
Miller High Life	165 (22.5%)
Schlitz	63 (8.6%)

Chew on This

Royal Wedding Cake Details Revealed! - YumSugar

Make Your Own Pop Tarts - CHOW
Denny's Introduces a Maple Bacon Sundae - Eater
Whole Foods Opening Bars in Stores - USA Today
Rules Of Bar Etiquette -- For The Bartender - HuffPost Food

Reader comments (Page 2 of 2)

4-05-2009 @11:00AM cheese said... SF99, I don't know where you get your numbers, but the Coors brewery in Golden can product over 20 million barrels of beer a year. That's more than Sam Adams sells, so I don't know how you can possibly think that Sam Adams is the nations biggest brewery.

Get over the beer snobbery, folks....beer is beer. Yes, there are different recipes, but every brewery can make every beer.
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4-05-2009 @9:39PM Laura said... I put Miller High Life as my answer, but I'm also quite partial to Yuengling. Both are good when you specifically need beer that comes in a can (for grilling a beer can chicken, for example).
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