Bottomshelf Beer Reviews: Olde English 800

If you don't feel like reading all this, you can check out the video version here.

I don’t know if you were aware, but it’s black history month.  In grammar school this was generally the time of year when I got to hear about George Washington Carver (he invented peanuts.)  I don’t know much about black history.  My knowledge of black culture pretty much begins and ends with old school rap, and back in the 90’s they rapped about malt liquor about as much as they rapped about getting hassled by The Man.  So I thought I’d celebrate black history month with a couple 40’s of Olde English 800.   

I see the liberal warning lights going off in your head.  “Isn’t saying black people like malt liquor a stereotype?”  I guess it would be if I said, “ALL black people liked malt liquor,” but I didn’t, so I guess that makes you the bigot.  You racist piece of shit.  Eazy-E liked Olde English 800 or “8-Ball” enough to write a song about it.   I think it’s safe to say that I’m not an expert on being black.  I’m a square white dude from the suburbs, and I wouldn’t even consider myself an expert on that.  Eazy-E might not be an expert either, but he was definitely black and he definitely liked Olde English (and pussy.)

“Police on my drawers and I have to pause.  40 ounce in my lap and it’s freezing my balls”

Eazy-E and the rest of N.W.A. might not speak for all black people, but I would argue that rap music from the early 90’s has done more to improve race relations in the last 20 year or so than anything else. The fact that a square like me includes “Straight Outta Compton” on his desert island top five list speaks for itself.  I grew up in the 90’s in what was, at the time, a lily-white suburb, and gangsta rap changed the way people dressed, talked and acted.  Rap probably made being black look cooler than anything since Dolemite.

"That rat-soup-eatin', insecure honky motherfucker!"

Now that I’ve spent three paragraphs explaining why it’s not racist to review Olde English as part of black history month I should probably get down to the meat and potatoes of the article, right?  I bought two 40’s for 2.59 each in Chicago.  For those of you that live somewhere else in the country you should know that in Chicago everything, from cigarettes to parking spaces, costs A LOT more than it does in the suburbs.  2.59 a pop is a pretty good price, especially when you take Chi-flation into account.  It’s marginally cheaper than your average six-pack, with higher alcohol content (5.9%.)  A good deal if I ever saw one.

It tastes pretty good.  Without a doubt it’s better than Gameday and Big Flats.  Not necessarily a big accomplishment, but certainly worth mentioning for comparison’s sake.  It goes down smooth with a sweet aftertaste.  You do get a slight hint of that cheap malt liquor aftertaste that lets you know they cut corners somewhere, but it’s mostly covered up by the sweetness.  Those snobby assholes on beeradvocate hate this stuff, and I’m going to just go ahead and call them racist.  To be fair, the title is a little misleading.  Olde and English are two of the top criteria for beer snobs.  They love beers with names like, “King Arthur’s Penis” and “Dumbledore’s Hat.”  Olde English 800 sounds like something right out of Canterbury Tales or The Silmarillion; two books that are know favorites amongst racist beer reviewers, along with the Turner Diaries. 

Typical beeradvocate user

Back to the beer: Eazy-E might not drink brass monkey, but I thought I should give it a whirl.  Afterall, the Beastie Boys wrote a song about it, how bad could it be?  Brass monkey, for those of you that aren’t street, is a cocktail made from Olde English and Sunny Delight.  Traditionally, you drink your 40 down to the top of the red label and fill it back to the top with Sunny D.  Then you roll it on the ground to get it good and mixed.  I tried it out and honestly, it tastes pretty damn good.  The sweet aftertaste is amplified, and the cheap taste is almost completely gone.  I don’t really go for fruit beer, but I liked brass monkey more than most (Cherry Wheat is fucking disgusting.)  It tastes sweet and citrusy, but it still tastes kind of like beer.  If that sounds like your think check it out, or if you’re trying to get your younger sister’s friends drunk, brass monkey could be a cheap alternative to a case of Mike’s Hard.

"Hey...ugh, you chicks wanna play spin the bottle?"

Olde English isn’t for everybody, but if you’re trying to get shitfaced on the cheap you could do a lot whole lot worse.  It tastes pretty good, and everyone from the Beastie Boys to Ice Cube likes it, so why don’t you?  Just remember to pour a little out for Easy-E.

Mel B is: olde (35,) English, and black.  This makes her perfect for this article

*UPDATE 2-27-13 VIDEO ADDED*

Pizza Delivery Adventures: Shitty Apartments

Today has been dubbed “Blizzard 2011,” “Snowpocalypse,” and even “the Snowlocaust.”  I wouldn’t go far as that, but man this weather is nuts.  It’s funny how your perspective can change over time.  When I was a pizza delivery driver shitty weather meant I was gonna make some serious money.  Granted, I never worked in weather like last night, but a good blizzard meant we’d get swamped with orders and that people would be a little more generous with their tips than usual.  It was a little more hazardous working in the snow; you could hit some black ice and wipe out, or more likely slip on some assholes front porch and crank your noggin wide open.  That wasn’t much of a concern for me.  The biggest danger in delivering pizza is getting mugged.     

Give us the pizza, and no one gets hurt.

5 survivors of fetal alcohol syndrome

The closest I ever came to getting mugged was this one time when I had to deliver to the shitty apartment buildings on the street that dead-ends on the highway.  I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at the houses on a dead-end street, particularly one that dead-ends on a highway, but they tend to be full of the most vile base degenerates and scum you’ll ever meet.  Consider this: what kind of person would rather put up with highway noise and diesel fumes than live on a street the cops can drive down easily?  Crackheads, perverts and ICP fans come to mind.  If you go on the Illinois sex offender registry and do a quick search in your neighborhood I guarantee you will find little cul-de-sacs of unspeakable horror nuzzled right up next to the highway.  The dead-end street is the wrong-side-of-the-tracks of the 21^st century.

A documentary on the subject

"Let's huff some roach spray!"

When my wife and I were house hunting we looked at a house next to the highway in an otherwise nice suburb.  It was all fat chicks with neck tattoos and skinny dudes with no shirts wearing jean shorts and drinking malt liquor.  I half expected that retarded kid from Deliverance to show up with his banjo and a paper bag full of spray paint fumes.  Some dude practically started a fight with me for parking in front of his house.  The rest of the neighborhood looked like the neighborhood Beaver Cleaver would grow up in if the show was set in the early 21^st century instead of the 1950’s.

Anyway, there weren’t a lot of places in our delivery territory I hated going, but the apartment buildings by the highway definitely made the list.  Being on a dead-end street by the highway wasn’t just a sign of possible moral depravity; it also made it a pain in the ass to get to.  To top it off, a lot of those apartments were section 8 housing, which increases your odds of getting robbed and decreases your odds of getting tipped to an almost infinitesimal percentage.  I’d be lucky if the person didn’t demand their change down to the penny, which I didn’t carry.  I mean, if someone wants 13 cents change they can go fuck themselves.

Actual photo of the door buzzer

Now, like I said, I never got robbed while delivering pizza, but I knew enough to take precautions.  I left all but about $20 in mixed bills at the restaurant so that if someone stuck me up they wouldn’t get much.  I also cased the building and verified that it was a real address before I got out of the car.  So I walk into the vestibule and rang the buzzer.  The thing was busted.  Typical slumlord bullshit.  So I tried the door, and wouldn’t you know it, it was busted too.  Apparently, at an earlier date, some psycho had kicked the fucking door in. So the door swung right open and revealed six black dudes sitting in the hallway in the dark.

It was like walking in on this.

I hear the political correctness warning buzzers going off in your head.  “Why does it matter that they were black?”  I guess it doesn’t, but it actually would have been a whole helluva lot scarier if they were white, because what the fuck would six white dudes be doing in the dark in the black apartment building?  In any case, I went immediately went into fight or flight mode, or more accurately flight mode.  There was no way in hell I was gonna take on six dudes over an Italian beef sandwich and an order of deep-fried broccoli.

I was about to drop the food and run, when one of the guys asked who the food was for.  I answered and he calmly knocked on the woman’s door. She came out, paid for the food and I got the hell out of there.  I guess it was simply a matter of the hallway light burning out and some guys deciding it wasn’t creepy or weird to sit in the dark.  I mean, who does that?  The only answer I can think of is vampires, but the only black guy that’s a vampire is Blade and he kills other vampires.  I guess there’s Blackula too, but he died with the blaxploitation movement.  

Best film movement ever.

I guess I wasn’t in any real danger, but geez for a second or two I was sure I was gonna get my ass kicked.  I guess I should count myself lucky that this was the closest I ever came to really getting the shit kicked out of me.  Some drivers aren’t so lucky, so don’t be a cheapskate and throw ‘em a few dollars.  Especially in weather like this, I mean, if their job was easy you’d just go get your pizza yourself. 

Note:  This post doesn't even mention beer.  How bout that?

Bottomshelf Beer Reviews: Milwaukee's Best Ice

When I started this blog I thought it would be kind of cool to do a bottomshelf beer review.  Not too long after my review of Mickey’s, I was at my local grocery store and I saw Milwaukee’s Best Ice.  I remember kind of laughing to myself and thinking, “one day I might even have to review that shit.”  Little did I know it at the time, but the bottomshelf beer reviews would become far and away the most widely read section of this blog.  And so when I went to the grocery store to get taco fixin’s I saw Milwaukee’s Best Ice staring back at me from the shelf, and knew what I had to do.

Me and this guy have EVERYTHING in common!!!

There are plenty of beers I love that I haven’t had in a long time, like Three Floyds Alpha King or even a simple 30 pack of Lacrosse Lager.  On the other hand, I haven’t had Milwaukee’s Best or “The Beast” in years, This is no accident.  I don’t remember what “The Beast” tastes like, and since I turned 21 I honest to God can’t remember drinking it, even once.  I DO remember swearing it off for the rest of my life, like a Samurai Warrior that’s made a vow to God never to kill again.  But like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando, I was forced out of retirement.  Arnold had to fight a pudgy Australian in a chainmail shirt. I fought “The Beast” Ice AKA “The Yeti” for you, dear reader.

Milwaukee's Best Ice AKA The Beast Ice AKA The Yeti doing what it does best.

Everyone knows that Ice Beers are disgusting, whether it’s Gameday Ice or Asshouse (Icehouse,) but what makes an Ice Beer “Ice?”  Well, to answer that you have to understand that alcohol, for all intents and purposes, doesn’t freeze.  When they brew an Ice beer, they make it a little colder than usual, so some of the water and other stuff forms ice crystals.  They filter that shit out, and since the alcohol didn’t freeze what’s left has more alcohol and less water.  So whereas normal beer is like 5% alcohol; “The Yeti” is 5.9%.  Many Bothans died to bring us this information.

"Brewing Ice Beer is a delicate process..."

Scene from the Ice Beer Wars

The first Ice Beer was Molson Ice released in 1993, shortly thereafter the so-called “Ice-Beer wars” began.  Brewers competed to make the cheapest beer that had one or two percentage points more alcohol than the competition.   Millions died, and as was the case in Norse mythology, only a few of the Ice Beers or “Frost Giants” survived Ragnarok (the 1990’s.)  “The Yeti” is one of the grizzled survivors of this ghastly conflict; it’s outlived its usefulness, a relic of a forgotten era, like the Samurai after the collapse of the Shogunate.  So it just sits there, on the shelf, costing seven bucks for two six-packs.  Fuck, how bad could it be?

It’s…actually…not that bad.  I was expecting the worst.  It doesn’t have a lot of taste, but that’s a good thing.  It tastes like someone topped off a watery beer like Keystone Light with maybe a shot of Gameday.    Not good mind you, but not as evil tasting as Asshouse or Steel Reserve.  It has some of that disgusting copper taste you get with beers of this ilk, but it doesn’t taste like someone put a handful of pennies and rotten fruit in it when you weren’t looking.  I actually drank four cans of this stuff last night, and as long as it was cold I could barely tell they cut corners to make a cheapo beer.

That is, until I woke up today.  I had a motherfucking headache, and I don’t get headaches from drinking.  Despite what the Castro brothers will tell you, I am not the Superman of drinking.  That being said, I don’t really get hangovers.  If I get completely shitfaced I’ll wake up with cottonmouth or a queasy stomach.  But I sure as shit don’t wake up with a headache after four fucking beers.  I didn’t even get drunk last night.  What kind of shit are they putting in this stuff?  Turpentine? 

The secret ingredient

I can only recommend this beer to people that plan to die before they wake up the next day, and serious Prohibition Era history buffs.  Like the bathtub brewed swill of yesteryear, this shit is a liquid headache.  I won’t be surprised if I go blind.  Carrie Nation died too soon.

Carrie Nation is awfully fug, so here's a picture of Carrie Underwood where you can kinda see her nerps.

 

Childhood Stories: The Deep Sea Battle

Danny O'D age 8

This post is part of a series of my childhood stories.

Ahh a sequel, (to The Monk Battle) I bet you were all waiting with baited breath.  This story like the one before was written for extra credit in Mrs. Lynn’s second grade class.  Specifically it was written on May 1, 1991.  This story was also inspired by an illustration from The Great Waldo Search; however it has far less to do with the original illustration and bears little in common with the source material save for the fact that they both take place under the sea.  It is also shorter than the first story, because a paragraph at the time was defined as being ten sentences long and a paragraph was the minimum I had to write to gain the extra credit.  I could’ve written more…IF I WAS A SUCKER! Daaammnn!

Note the lack of any sort of battle.  I seem to be moving away from plagarism.

  THE DEEP SEA BATTLE

                      by Dan O'Dwyer

Once upon a time, in an ocean by where the monk battel was.  There where

a lot of things under the sea.  And the things that lived on land

where going to do plan X.  Who would know about good old plan X ?

The water things would(I would  write a Dum-Dee-Dum-Dum thing but,

I can't write music).  So the battel came around the sea.  No whon

could get in but,the person who was in power of the mane controll

broke a nail.  And scremed so loud she broke the controll.

                                              EEEEEEEEEEEE

TTTTTTTTT    HH       HH    EE

    T                  HH       HH    EE

    T                  HH       HH    EEEEEEEEEEEE

    T                  HHHHHHH   EE

    T                  HH       HH    EE

    T                  HH       HH    EEEEEEEEEEEE

    T                  HH       HH

                  END

Rereading this story now, the plotline is a little (read: a lot) incoherent.  In retrospect I should have written a few more sentences explaining what the hell was going on, but that would have diverted valuable cartoon watching time.  What is plan X?  How would it help the land creatures fight the sea creatures? 

As the author I wish I could shed some light on the subject, but I undoubtedly forgot before I was old enough to grow hair in “funny places.”  There’s also a strong possibility that I never actually had the details of Plan X figured out; however I can guarantee that if I did have it figured out it undoubtedly involved ninjas, M.C. Hammer, surfers, dinosaurs or some combination thereof.

Plan X?

This is also one of the only stories I’ve ever read that contained music within the narrative, which I think is a nice touch. Unlike the songs in the Lord of the Rings novels which were just fucking stupid.  The “music” in this short story is also superior to the music in the LOTR because it’s short, relevant to the story, and not about shoving an elf penis up a hobbit’s ass. 

Typical woman

The joke that women freak out when they break a nail seems a little sexist in today’s PC culture.  I have since seen the error of my ways and I would like to apologize for this stereotype.  Women don’t need to break a nail to flip out; they’ll flip out for any or no reason because they are insane.  Glad I could clear that up, but seriously she broke a nail! Get it?  Ho ho ho! I slay me.

The end of the story is spelled out quite literally in giant letters, although the reader can’t be quite sure exactly what happened in the story at least they know that the story came to a definite (and sexist) conclusion.  I do remember that writing the word “THE” took more time and planning than writing the actual story itself, leading me to give up on writing the word “END” in a similar fashion and instead simply typing the word out.

I wish I could tell you things have gotten a lot better since then, but I wrote this commentary on The Deep Sea Battle a few years ago.  Lazy, lazy, lazy. Granted I had a busy week at work, and I’ve got a cold.  It took a herculean effort just to post this.  I’ll have something brand new for next week.

Sorry for falling BEHIND!  I don't want to BUM you out! Also Jessica Alba has a nice ass.

Bottomshelf Beer Reviews: Coors Light

Coors was founded in 1873 by Adolph Coors.  They are now the third largest brewer in the United States, after Miller and Anheuser-Busch.   In 1873 America was largely racist, sexist, homophobic, and anti-union.  Things have changed a lot in America since 1873, and at Coors, well…at least they stopped having Klan rallies on company grounds.  In 1984 William Coors was talking to a group of blacks and said that, if they thought it was “unfair” that their “ancestors were dragged here in chains against their will…I would urge those of you who feel that way to go back to where your ancestors came from, and you will find out that probably the greatest favor that anybody ever did you was to drag your ancestors over here in chains, and I mean it."  Jesus Christ, that’s pretty fucking harsh.  In fairness to Coors, that was all the way back in 1984, and now the can says, “Do something cool. Recycle.”  Progress.

Tap the Rockies with Lindsey Vonn's boobies

Coors is not only America’s most progressive beer company.  They also make the biggest deal out of coldness.  If you go to their website it’s all icy peaks and ski lodges. They also talk a lot about how Coors Light is cold brewed and cold filtered and all their trucks are ice-cold.  I mean I like cold beer, but I don’t see the connection between beer brewed in an igloo and phenomenal taste.  It’d be kind of like if I had an instant coffee factory that I kept at a scalding 212 degrees.  Who cares?  And I got news for you, all lager is cold brewed, that’s what makes it a lager.  The can also has some mountains on it that turn dark blue when the beer is cold enough, which I think is actually kind of nice.  There’s nothing worse than warm beer, except Lo Pan.

Oh shit! It's fucking Lo Pan.

Catherine Bach as Daisy Duke.

Coors and Coors Light used to only be available west of the Mississippi, and were considered a delicacy in the Eastern half of the country.  This was the subject of the 1977 classic Smokey and the Bandit, which is probably my second favorite hillbilly movie, after 2,000 Maniacs.  In the movie Burt Reynolds and Jerry Reed are hired by two Boss Hogg-like brothers to smuggle a truckload of Coors from Texas to Georgia, and hijinks ensue.  The film’s only flaw is that Sally Field’s part should have been played by that chick from The Dukes of Hazzard.  Nowadays, Coors is available everywhere, and no one really cares that much.

Look, I don’t hate Coors Light, but I don’t really like it that much either.  Usually if Coors Light is available something I like better is also available at a cheaper price.  As far as light beers go it’s far from the worst.  It’s certainly better than Miller Lite, but as a general rule I don’t like light beer.  Light beer is like beer flavored Kool-Aid.  It tastes like beer in many ways, but you can tell something is missing.  Light beer compared to beer is like Major League II compared to the original.  When you’re flipping through channels you might get taken off guard for a second then you realize the jokes aren’t that funny, there’s no swearing, and what the hell happened to Wesley Snipes?  Light beer happened to Wesley Snipes (that and tax evasion.) 

Coors Light might not be the best beer in the world, but at least it’s drinkable.  It doesn’t taste like much, but at least it doesn’t taste bad.  And what it lacks in flavor it makes up for in racist right-wing ideology(?).  But my biggest gripe with Coors Lite is those fucking commercials where they take NFL press conferences out of context and have a couple of fucking idiots pretending to ask the coach questions about Coors Light.  They’re not funny and I usually see like ten of them during a typical game, which is ten too many.  Fuck your marketing department Coors Light.

Unless of course, your marketing department made this.

Childhood Stories: The Monk Battle

This entry is part of a series of my childhood stories.

I feel old, and kinda creepy

This is the first story I could find on my hard drive.  The file was last modified on April 22, 1991, meaning that I wrote this before Miley Cyrus was born.    The date would seem to indicate that this was written in the latter part of the school year, but I thought I started writing before Christmas.  I might have deleted some of my earlier work; in fact I seem to recall cleaning some things off the hard drive in the fourth-grade because my Doom mods were taking up too much space.  Whoops!  It’s also possible that I modified this story at a later date, although one could ask what revisions were made; I obviously didn’t fix the spelling.  In any case, this seems to be the first thing I wrote on a computer that still exists.         

                      The Monk Battle

                      by Dan O'Dwyer

    Once upon a time  some pople where  pigging out.  intill one day a

    wizard came to the land.  Althou he was a bad wizard who made

    tarer in the place, but his brother was a good wizard.

    Then is when the monk battle started.  They fought on rocks

    but, there were lots of holes in the ground.  Some of the holes

    were volcanos.  There were clifs, mountains, rivers, motes, and

    bridges,and reuins.  And the monks baddled for millions

    of years.  People got destroyed, I'm not going to tell

    how (you don't want to no how).  Anyway, the wizards

    had a BIG FIGHT and they all retreated because they got tired

    and hungrey.  The bad wizard made a  maze so good gys could not

    get in the casel.Not a good idea because he never put

    a brain in the beasts in the maze.He sent all of his

    men out with a lader he didn't want to waste his migic.

    The bad was winning intil the good used magic. The

    brother went in maze the other brother pland for him

    to get knocked dead, but he was a wizard, so he survived.

    Then they fought and the good brother won.  And the bad

    army melted.        THE END

This story was written for extra credit in Mrs. Lynn’s 2^nd grade class, as are many of the other stories in this collection.  Like many of the other stories I wrote for Mrs. Lynn’s class, this story is eerily similar to an illustration from Martin Hanford’s “Where’s Waldo?” series.  I would also like to point out that William Shakespeare only wrote two stories that were not based on history or legend.  I guess that makes me a pretentious dick, and a plagiarist.  Oh well, it wasn’t really my fault.  I got a Waldo book for Christmas in the first grade, and I would spend literally hours soaking in every nuance of the insanely detailed illustrations.  I guess I could’ve watched more TV, but we didn’t have cable because my parents were cheap.

Note bridge, river, rocks, holes in ground, and monks

My original copy, ruined by cookie stained hands

Now, the two wizard brothers were probably inspired by the 1977 animated film “Wizards,” which I remember being fucking awesome.  The reason I didn’t tell the reader how people got destroyed was…laziness.  Definitely laziness.  The armies getting “tired and hungrey” was no doubt inspired by the two biggest problems in my 8 year-old life.  Twenty years later you can add sobriety to the list. 

After the bad guys go into the maze with a “lader” the story gets a little choppy choppier.  You can still tell what happened, but there are absolutely no details.  This was probably because I’d already hit the minimum limit for the extra credit and decided to bail.  So the good wizard didn’t get knocked dead, and he defeated his evil brother (somehow.)  Then the bad army melted, which I would contend to this day is a pretty sweet ending.*

Not hot

*I was trying to find some babes to spruce up this article, so I searched for “sexy Waldo” expecting a bounty of hot chicks dressed as my favorite literary character in a low-cut candy cane striped sweater.  No such luck, apparently the only girls that dress as Waldo are really fucking nerdy.  I did find a sexy Waldo costume available for purchase.  I don’t know how sexy it is. I mean, it’s certainly a costume, I guess.  If you’re trying to dress as your Aunt for Halloween I guess it might work, provided you’re trying to have sex with your Uncle.  On the other hand, if you’re trying to get a nerd boyfriend, just dress as Princess Leia from Return of the Jedi.  

Now that's more like it.