Smoke and Mirrors

        Here on Coffee and Scotch I expound about beer frequently. I think the most obvious explanation is that beer is the nectar of the gods and I would hate to think I’m pissing them off somehow by not honoring it properly or guiding my flock in its proper enjoyment. As much as I love to love beer, I also love to hate it as well. We have entirely to much mainstream bullshit piss-water being brewed and consumed in this country. When your beer of choice needs to hide behind millions of dollars in marketing and hype, chances are it’s lacking in substance and quality. I’m reminded of Absolut Vodka, whose brilliant marketing campaign carried its low quality vodka into every home in America. We love funny commercials and witty advertising more than we love decent, honest products in this country. Unfortunately for us, there is a correlation between the craptasticness of the beer and the creativity of the marketing. What happens when even the best advertising executives in the world can’t salvage the watery, disgusting taste of your beer anymore? Send in the engineering clowns.


        One secret to making even the most horrid of drafts somewhat more palpable is serving it cold, very cold. Hearken back to yesteryear with me and remember the pinnacle of stadium bathroom accessories, the trough. The trough ran the length of the bathroom wall and was a communal urinal of sorts. The very best troughs were filled with ice. Why the ice you ask? Well, cold piss smells a lot better (or at least a lot less) than warm piss, just like cold Coors Light tastes a lot better, relatively, than warm Coors Light. It stands to reason that when you’re producing one of the foulest beverages the world has ever known, it’s in your best interest to make sure your audience is drinking it as cold as possible. My guess is the same guys who engineered the trough, engineered the Coors Light cold activated cans and bottles. Ironically enough, just one degree of cold activation wasn’t enough to overcome the stale piss taste of Coors Light, so they needed to add an even colder activation state in the hopes that beer drinkers the world over would freeze their taste buds to death before realizing they were drinking the sweat from a Sumo wrestlers balls. It should come as no surprise to anyone that Busch Light is following suit with their own cold activated packaging. Do the bums and wino’s that drink Busch Light even have access to refrigeration?


        Not to be outdone by the wizards over at Coors, who are ingeniously employing technology that was a big hit on novelty t-shirts from the 90’s, the MIT grads working over at Miller designed their own technological breakthrough, the vortex bottle. Another beer that tastes like piss can swirl into your mouth with the same motion it swirls down the toilet like God intended it. I think it’s safe to say that we need the Miller Lite vortex bottle about as much as we need, well, Bud Light Golden Wheat for starters. How many ways can you manipulate the flavor of this crap? Someone with less IQ points than they have teeth left, is working on deep fried Bud Light Lime for next years Kentucky State Fair, you just know it. On some level it feels like these companies understand how bad their beers are and they’re blatantly mocking us. On the whole, the usefulness of the Miller Lite vortex bottle seems on par with the DvD re-winder. I’ve been thinking in the back of my head that this is a bit of form over function but in reality I’d classify it in the “lipstick on a pig category”. No amount of marketing gimmicks or technology can make beer taste good, in fact, I’d say the secret to good beer is exactly the opposite. Stay thirsty my friends.