Monkey! Tuesday Open Thread

What is up, party persons? Reverend Mayhem here for Budweiser beer. When I sit down in my recliner after a long day at work, the last thing I want is an alcoholic beverage filled with nuance and complexity to stimulate my tastebuds and brain. After all, why am I drinking if not to kill those braincells before they can haunt my dreams and nightmares with the shallow emptiness of Western suburban masculinity? That’s why I reach for Budweiser. Ice cold or tepidly warm; fresh from the womb of horrors where it is birthed or discovered after six years in a poorly insulated garage; you can always count on Bud to “taste” exactly the same. Budweiser: Comfortingly Shitty.

Hello all. After weeks of increasingly shrill stories about the Great Bud Light Trans Ad Disaster, AB InBev’s panicked St. Louis marketing executives began a nationwide search for the greatest living example of Concentrated American Testosterone to shill for their mainline brand of pisswater. You know, maintain its image. Reassure their core demographic of self-medicating White Males Age 25-50 that they still have immense market share that should be pandered to.

Hence: me.

Yes, I am mocking Bud (and it’s shitty Stephen Belichick failson Bud Light). But not because AB InBev’s marketing drones took a brave but stupid chance to try to pander to a new and different niche.

No, I mock them because their products genuinely fucking suck. No number of good deeds cynically done can erase that fact, and I will not be bullied into buying a case of skunked pisswater just because they angered the right people. Especially because their Executariat immediately retreated with a half-hearted “our beer is for EVERYONE, as long as they don’t have a sense of taste” apology. Fuck you, your beer should have died out when the modern craft beer movement took hold in 1991.

Speaking of alcoholic drinks that shouldn’t exist:

It’s Jeppson’s Malört, but in whiskey form!

I managed to grab a bottle of this and waited until my wife and kids were in bed to open it, in case things went…poorly…

Having fortified myself with arcane runes to ward off evil and commended my soul to any god that could find it, I cracked the seal and drank straight from the bottle, lest my courage fail me.

It was…boring. So incredibly milquetoast that I had to check the label. Jeppson’s- check. 100 proof- check. Yes, it was bitter, but more in that vaguely irritating “too much corn and rye, not enough barley” way than something that shares any relation to Malört.

Because it turns out it shares almost nothing with it’s more infamous “cousin”. Diving in, it turns out CH Distillery (makers of Malört) had no hand in actually distilling this. Instead, they did what the majority of “craft” whiskey “makers” do: they bought a bunch of barrels from MGP (a megadistiller in Indiana) and a couple from a smaller distiller (OZ Tyler, whose stuff is also shit) and made their own blend. What a crock of shit.

This is not to belittle the importance or difficulty of whiskey blending. I got to tail a master blender for an afternoon once, and the skill and judgment involved was mindblowing. She took the same couple barrels and showed me how different the taste can be just by tweaking the ratios. Dark magic.

But if CH starts with the same couple of mainline ingredients as everyone else, it’s not surprising that they ended up with a soulless, empty brute of a whiskey. I hate Malört. It disgusts me. But at least it has Character.

NFL NEWS:

-Davante Adams has apparently joined the vast majority of NFL players and fans in hating Josh McDaniels. The all-World wideout was interviewed about his first season with the Raiders, remarking that between himself, McDaniels and inevitable Ex-Patriot Flop GM Dave Ziegler:  “we don’t see eye to eye on what we think is best for us right now.”  That is a pretty hard slam from Adams, who does not have a reputation for casual shit-stirring.

WHAT’S ON TONIGHT:

Los Angeles Lakers of Anaheim vs. Denver Nuggets (ESPN, 7:30 DFO Time): Fuck the Lakers. Like their Idiot Fan Bandwagonmates (the Cowboys, the Yankees and Duke basketball) they deserve nothing but failure and scorn.