Trashy Beer
Loving beer isn’t just about drinking the one-offs, the famed rarities, the high-octane, super-stouts or insane IPAs. It’s not just about looking for the next tick, the next Top 50 beer, the latest hyped-release from your favourite brewery. Loving beer is more than that. And, sometimes, bad beers are good.
Most of us started our drinking with lager, I’m sure. Tins and bottles with mates, drinking when we shouldn’t have been, learning about life, growing up, getting drunk and being silly: learning life-skills while holding a container of beer.
We can look back on the beers we grew up with with a fond despair. We wouldn’t drink many of these now but there’s still something about them which we are inextricably linked to. Those cans of cheap lager, pints of snakebite and black, bottles which have been chilled in a bath tub full of ice, strange beers because they were going cheap at the store… There’s something about these beers which makes them important to us. They may be trashy choices, but you just can’t help loving them. And there’s probably one which stands above all the others.
It’s this trashy beer which is important. It’s the beer which it seems you alone love; the beers which you shouldn’t like but just do; the fruit beer, the lager, the novelty beer; the one which always makes you smile, but not necessarily the one you’ll shout about. You’ve got one or two hidden away somewhere, just in case, or there’s always the temptation to pick up a couple when you see them in the store or a bar.
For me it’s Desperados. It’s fizzy, it’s sweet and you need to put lime in it to make it taste better. These are very bad traits in a beer, but I don’t care. I love Desperados for the memories I have of it: drinking bottle after bottle at university with mates; sharing kegs of it on my birthday; another keg we drank in a swimming pool; getting up at 6am on my 21st birthday to drink a bottle with my best mate; always getting excited when we found a new bar which sold it; the time we forgot to buy lime and had to use a lemon; the beer night when it rated higher than some world class beers because we all love it so much. It’s important because it’s a relaxed beer, drinking it from the bottle, tasting that tang of lime juice with the first mouthful, drinking it with friends.
I don’t drink Desperados often but when I do it just floods back a lot of happy memories. Beer can do that; it has the power of a time machine to transport you back to any where and any when. Do I love the flavor of it? Sure, but I like the memories more.
What’s your trashy beer?
Keystone light will always have a special place in my heart. All we could afford in college, and reminds me of hanging out with buddies, at homecoming, pumpkin chunkin, and on a Saturday afternoon. We even had a kegorator with keystone on tap. You can’t beat $10 for 30 Stones when you’re a poor college student!
FAT CAT LAGER!!!
You know, I think I just realised I’ve always been a beer slut. There’s no single beer from my early drinking career that stands out. It was all Bud, Coors, Miller, Carlsberg (Ireland in the late 80′s early 90′s didn’t have much choice) and Jack and Coke.
Actually, now that I think of it, and if I had to choose, I’d say Jack and Coke as that drink that I have real fond memories of, sorry it’s not a beer, but the rest were simply delivery systems before my sense of taste developed. 
But Mark, Desperados!?
Mark, I have a feeling that my recent articles’ content might have something to do with having consumed the Nicaraguan equivalent of Desperados for most of the past year.
Good memories: Yuengling in Pittsburgh, Anheuser-Busch’s Bare Knuckle Stout (who knew?) in upstate New York…
And if I was in Minnesota, I’d live on Grain Belt Premium.
yea, i used to be a huge fan of bud and bud light before and during my stint in the us marine corps. but now my cheap beer of choice is yuengling lager but i cant even think of it as a trashy beer. good everyday drinker.
I was a keystone light man as well. We drank so much keystone light at school that the walls were completely covered with the middle divider that had the funny slogans on them. Great article because while I may have grown up a little in my taste for beer, there is always a night or two here and there where I just wouldn’t mind drinking a “stone” with the guys.
Here are a few beers I appreciate only in context.
Carling Black Label was the first beer I got drunk on 50 years ago. I haven’t tried it since but I still remember that awful taste.
OB (Korea) was my friend on those cold nights in Daegu.
Red Stripe is a recent find, and I know I’ll try it again, but only when I’m dancing.
Someone in the wedding party requested PBR at a wedding I recently attended. It reminded me that I was also drinking PBR that night I first got drunk.
I hated the taste of beer most of my adult life, then someone suggested Strohs Dark.
Pabst Blue Ribbon !
This beer is cheap & tastes better than bud light