Bottomshelf Beer Reviews: Natty Daddy

My father, myself, and Mr. Snowman

When I was born my father looked at my mother and said, “one day he’ll grow up to run the internet’s premier cheap beer review blog.”  Since it’s Father’s Day, I thought I’d honor my father by dedicating my review of Natty Daddy beer to him.  I bought Natty Daddy a few months ago in anticipation of Father’s Day because of the name.  This shit is 8% alcohol.  This is going to be painful.  I really love my dad. 

"The Orphans ain't got no dad! Also don't I kinda look like David Schwimmer?"

My dad’s not a huge drinker, but he did teach me a few very important lessons about drinking.  First of all, you don’t need to drink to have a good time.  There are plenty of other things that are even more fun, like crushing your enemy, see them driven before you and hearing the lamentations of the women; that and sex.  Also he told me that people with a real drinking problem have to stop drinking, a thought I find unbearable.  How would I get to sleep?

I guess I could just watch Pink Floyd's "The Wall." *YAWN* ZZZZZzzzzzz....

Just a few more Mike's Hards and this party is going to get buck wild.

Natty Daddy is an odd name for a beer.  Other than a Father’s day inspired bottomshelf blog post I don’t think anyone would purchase it because of the name.  Natty Daddy smells like beer but it certainly tastes like it’s 8% alcohol.  Your younger sister’s friends would send back the Ten-High and Coke you mixed them if it tasted this strong.  There is definitely a harsh chemical/cheap alcoholness to the aftertaste, but otherwise it tastes like beer.  It’s not good but at least it gets you drunk quicker.  I could see slamming a tallboy of Natty Daddy after I was already six or seven beer into the night to push myself into the “fun zone.”  The “fun zone” is when I fall asleep watching Conan the Barbarian and wake up when I spill beer on myself.  Fun stuff.   

Unlike Conan most of my adventures involve waking up to the DVD menu.

Actually, now that I’m halfway through this can the chemical taste is less pronounced.  This shit is fucking awesome.  I’m going to dub Natty Daddy the thinking man’s high gravity beer, because I’ve always wanted to use that phrase and I can’t think of a better use than in regards to a beer designed to get you shit-housed as quickly as possible.  Also, notice that I said “beer.”  Natty Daddy doesn’t seem to be marketing itself as a “Malt Liquor.”  I guess they want more white people to drink it.  The double boomerangs under the 8% on the side of the can are another dead giveaway.  White people love Crocodile Dundee.  I don’t remember if my dad does, but I’m pretty sure he’s seen the film and he’s certainly white, as is 92% of Australia. FUN FACT: My dad is not Australian.

However the Lord Humungous IS Australian.  FUN FACT: Humungous rules the Wasteland!

Like my father Anheuser-Busch is not Australian, they’re German Americans.  While no one has ever accused der Germans of lacking conviction, it’s nice to see that Anheuser-Busch claimed Natty Daddy as their own.  Typically alcohol makers try to distance themselves from the shit they make to get you drunk as quickly and cheaply as possible, for example the “Steel Brewing Company” that makes disgusting Steel Reserve is actually MillerCoors in disguise.  Personally, I think that kind of crap is pompous and hypocritical.  They’re more than happy to take the money from college kids, hobos, trailer trash, winos, carnies, drunks, drifters, and me but they don’t want to be associated with us.  Instead we get some bullshit “drink beer to have fun but not get drunk” doublespeak.  When was the last time you even saw someone get “buzzed” or “tipsy” in a beer commercial?  It makes me sick, and I for one applaud the fine folks at Anheuser-Busch for taking ownership of a product they fucking make.  “This shit is 8% alcohol.  Fuck you we’re Anheuser-Busch.” 

Bullshit.

Fuck yeah!

It may not seem like the preceding paragraph has much to do with Father’s Day, but my dad taught me above all else to despise disingenuous hypocritical pieces of shit with no personal conviction.  On that note I must confess that Natty Daddy is a lot better than I thought it would be.  I still don’t think I’d recommend giving it to your dad for Father’s Day unless you think it would be in your dad’s wheelhouse.  Of course if your dad is the kind of guy enjoys drinking cheap high gravity beer you probably don’t know who he is, which makes the whole Father’s Day thing kind of a moot point I guess.  If you’re not a bastard I suggest showing your dad the Kate Upton “Cat Daddy” video.  It kind of sounds like Natty Daddy and it’s pretty much the best thing in the history of the internet.    

Arnold Schwarzenegger Top 10 Part II

Three boobies, what an age to be alive.

This is the second half of my list of the best Schwarzenegger movies of all time (check out part one here).  Pass it around and feel free to write back in the comments section or facebook me about the list.

5. Total Recall

Two weeks...

This movie contains many of the same themes as Vanilla Sky.  The biggest difference between the two movies being that Total Recall is better in every single way.  Quiet introspection is replaced with machine gun fights; Jason Lee is replaced with Michael Ironside; and Cameron Diaz is replaced with a young Sharon Stone.  The romantic lead in Total Recall is kind of fug and can’t hold a candle to the always sexy Penelope Cruz, but this is completely overshadowed by a woman with three boobs.  You read that right, three boobies.  The special effects, plot, and action sequences in Total Recall are all undoubtedly awesome but a woman with three boobies puts this movies completely over the top.  This movie also has one of the best examples of henchmen syndrome: when those dudes jump Schwarzenegger and they’re all armed and he disarms and kills a few of them why don’t those guys take off when he gets his hands on a gun?  He already kicked their asses and now he has firearms.  The only thing in this movie less plausible than that is when Sharon Stone offers to go at it one last time and Arnie is still able to suss out that it’s a trick.  If I was in his place, I would have most definitely died at that part. 

Penelope Cruz's butt

4. The Terminator

Nice pants gross dude.

Remember that part when he kills all those cops?  Or that part where he rips his own eye out?  If you watched it on TBS or WGN you probably don’t, which is part of the problem most people have when ranking this movie within the Schwarzenegger pantheon.   The only problem I have with The Terminator is the part when Kyle Reese takes that homeless guy’s pants.  Dude didn't even have underwear on.  He wears them for the rest of the movie and as far as I know he never washes them.  I know he’s from a dystopian garbage future, but that’s fucking gross.  Couldn’t he change or at least wash them or something?   Terminator holds the distinction of being the first R rated movie I ever saw and I assure you that if you’ve never seen it uncut you are depriving yourself of an awesomely violent action movie.  Spoiler Alert:  you see Linda Hamilton’s boobies.  These are the first boobies I ever saw that didn’t belong to a saggy black woman in National Geographic. 

3. True Lies

Lots of movies attempt to blend action and comedy with varying degrees of success, but True Lies stands head and shoulders above the competition.  Part of the success lies in the fact that it could stand on its own in either genre.  You could take out the jokes and have a perfectly serviceable action movie, or take out all the machine gun fights and have a movie about…well without gunfights I don’t know what it would be about, but I bet it would still be pretty funny.  True Lies is also Tom Arnold’s best movie.  I guess that’s not saying much, but if you’ve only seen Little Giants and never seen True Lies I assure you this is a vastly superior movie.

Eliza Dushku is the daughter in True Lies

2. Conan the Barbarian

Become slave of Thulsa Doom, tap two manna for each action

Conan is based on a character created by Robert E. Howard, and most fans of the original stories hate the movie.  I on the other hand, like them both, but then again I’m not an annoying fucking fanboy douchebag.  Things aren’t exactly the same as the book?  Maybe that’s because they’re two different artistic mediums.  Conan is about yelling “Crom” and punching camels and this movie had plenty of both.  I always liked this movie, but after I read the aforementioned short stories it’s become one of my favorites.  In this one Arnie the plays the titular (tee hee) character: Conan the Barbarian.  When asked, “What is best in life?”  Conan replies “crush your enemy, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of the women.”  That line really sets the tone for the movie, because for Conan it’s not enough to defeat your enemy in combat, you have to make his wife cry about it.  The rest of the movie follows that general tone.  When Conan isn’t decapitating snake cultist, he fills his time drinking tankards of ale and having sex with beautiful sluts.  Along the way he teaches us the riddle of steel and we don’t even have to drink Steel Reserve.

1. Terminator 2: Judgment Day

I’m going to get kind of spoiler-y in my description of T2 AKA the greatest movie ever made.  I don’t know why I bothered warning you.  If you haven’t seen this movie by now you are either

 A.) Lame

or

B.) too young to be reading this blog (you kids still listening to Fallout Boy?)

A scene from Wayne's World that kids are too young for

Beautiful CGI

Why do I love this movie so much?  Well the action scenes are unparalleled awesome: like when the T-1000 is ramming the pickup truck and Arnie walks from the bed of the truck onto the hood of the semi and machine guns the T-100 right in the fucking face.  You never see something like that in a movie today, unless it’s done with bullshit computers.  Kind of an odd coincidence I guess, since this movie was one of the pioneer CGI films.  Unlike most CGI films though, T2 perfectly blends CGI with conventional effects.  This movie came out 20 years ago (shit I’m getting old) but still looks really good. 

The dominant theme for the movie is that there is no fate, and we set our own future.  I’ve never been a fatalist myself so this resonates with me.  It also flies in the face of the two subpar sequels that followed T2 but what can you do?  I don’t know, but you should definitely not watch those movies unless you’re happy burning two hours of your life that you’ll never get back.  I guess if you saw them you could go back in time and warn yourself not to see them, but then why would you warn yourself?  The movie handles this problem brilliantly by creating a time loop.  Miles Dyson creates Skynet from the chip in the first Terminator’s head.  Skynet goes on to build the Terminator, which gets sent it back in time to get crushed in the first movie.  Miles Dyson takes that chip etc.  I guess it’s kind of hard to wrap your mind around, but at least it’s not goddamn insulting to your intelligence like most time travel movies.

Saddest part of any movie ever.  Literally makes me tear up.

I guess that about sums up this top 10 list.  If you haven’t seen any of these movies you should definitely correct that problem.  I’ll be back next week with for my Top 10 Eric Stoltz Movies Part I, so come with me if you want to live.  Until then hasta la vista baby and um…I need your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle.    

Arnold Schwarzenegger Top 10 Part I

Prepare to fucking die!

When I grew up, the biggest movie star in the world was Arnold Schwarzenegger.  How big?  So big spellcheck knows how to spell his last name, which is good because I sure as shit don’t.  Recently, Arnie has been in the news for having sex with a really really weird looking woman.  Gross, I know, but it’s times like this I think it’s important to remember why we liked Schwarzenegger so much in the first place.  To that end I’ve put together a list of the top ten Schwarzenegger movies of all time, which puts them high in the running for the top ten movies of all time.

10. Commando

Alyssa Milano plays his daughter

Compared to the other movies on this list Commando isn’t that good, but it deserves a place on the list if only because it’s such a prototypical 80’s action movie.  It’s the kind of movie where they have a shootout in a mall just because it increases potential for violence exponentially.  One of my favorite parts is right in the beginning when you see Arnold carrying a tree.  Seriously, a fucking tree. Right away you can tell he’s stronger than any human ever.  In general the plot is just okay, but my biggest gripe with this movie is the arch villain: a chubby Australian in a chainmail shirt. I mean, what the fuck?  Are we supposed to believe he’d be any match for a man we earlier saw carrying a tree?  And why is he wearing a chainmail shirt?  Was he worried about crossbows or did his mom just drive him home from the Ren-faire?  The world may never know.

"I'm here for the gay po- I mean action movie."

9. Eraser

Vanessa Williams

This was the last good Schwarzenegger movie, and as such it deserves a special place on the list.  After this one Arnie started crapping out turd salads like Collateral Damage and Teminator 3.  This one has Vanessa “not the porn star” Williams as a black chick that needs to be Erased after she finds out something about guns that see through walls.  I rented this when it came out, and probably watched it 6 times within the span of my rental.  In retrospect, I guess I wasn’t as popular in Junior High as I remember.  Eraser was made in what I call the CGI dead zone: after studios abandoned conventional effects but before CGI stopped looking like absolute shit.  Most of the effects in Eraser hold up pretty well, but the scene with the crocodiles is laughably stupid looking and comes off about as real as the alligator dance scene in Fantasia.  Still, sweet movie and James Caan is the bad guy.

"You call that a Crocodile? This is a crocodile."

8.  Conan the Destroyer        

"Holy Diver you've been down too long in the midnight sea..."

Ronnie James Dio did not do the soundtrack to this movie, which is unfortunate.  Every scene from this movie looks like it should be painted on the side of a conversion van.  Unfortunately this movie is also rated PG.  Conan is all about decapitating people and having sex with women (not necessarily in that order,) and the absence of those two things is a little sad.  Another major problem with the movie is Conan’s sidekick Malak.  Like all comic relief in a movie aimed at 12 year-olds, he’s fucking stupid and annoying and no one thinks he’s funny.  He Scrappy-Doos the shit out of this movie.  All that being said, this movie is still heavy metal as shit, boner-ific and fun that the whole family can enjoy.

I looked up the female lead for Conan, and a picture of Olivia Munn kissing another girl came up.  I don't think the blond is the same chick from the movie, but I no longer give a flying fuck.

7.  The Running Man  

Clap if you love Dynamo

Probably the most underrated Schwarzenegger movie on this list.  It’s tempting to put this movie higher on the list to compensate for that fact, but I happen to take my lists very seriously.  Anyway, I hate it when people like the AFI try to educate you and declare “Some Like it Hot” the funniest movie of all time on a list that doesn’t even mention Porky’s.  In The Running Man, Arnold is accused of a crime he didn’t commit, and is forced to fight for his life on a game show.  If that doesn’t get your juices flowing (if you know what I mean, ladies) you should know that the game show consists of Richard Dawson and boss fights.  Arnold is helped by a nerd, a black guy, and a hot chick as he kills a bunch of dudes as gruesomely as possible.  It’s even better than it sounds, and thinking about it now I’m tempted to jump it higher on the list.  There’s only one thing holding me back…

6. Predator

"They took the whole Cherokee Nation..."

I would be remiss if I didn’t give Predator at least the 6 spot.  As it stands, I know I’m going to chap a few saddles putting it this far down the list, but it’s my list an if you don’t like it you can make your own list…I guess.  In this movie Arnold teams up with a bunch of stereotypes which includes Jesse Ventura, an Injun, Carl Weathers, and the funniest man in the world who tells the funniest jokes in the history of comedy.   They travel to some godforsaken shit-hole in South America to fight an invisible alien that skins people alive.  The plot is simple, direct, and full of steroids.  You can practically feel you tits getting bigger when you watch this movie.  Your penis would also shrink from the steroids but I guarantee you will have a boner throughout your entire viewing experience.  Everything about this movie is awesome.  I have never met anyone that didn’t like this movie, but if I ever did I would kill them without even thinking about it, because fuck those people.

Part II coming soon…   If you have questions or comments about the list so far leave a comment or hit me up on facebook.

Bottomshelf Beer Reviews: Steel Reserve

What is “the Riddle of Steel?”  According to the documentary Conan the Barbarian, if you don’t know the answer Crom will cast you out of Valhalla and laugh at you.  Sucks to be you.  To discover the Riddle of Steel we will be drinking one of the worst beers imaginable: Steel Reserve.

 My most vivid memory of drinking Steel Reserve in the past was at the apartment of Ramiro Castro Jr.  I remember being anxious to try some after hearing about the high alcohol content, so I stopped and bought some at the 7-11 on the way to hang out with the bros Castro and Brian Skaj.  I don’t remember all the details of the night but I remember that we played risk till 4 AM and the night ended with me vomiting all the Steel Reserve I drank into the toilet whilst Ramiro stood by the open door laughing his fucking ass off.  In fairness to Ramiro, it was pretty funny.  Painful, but funny nonetheless; kind of like getting kicked in the crotch.  Anyway, I returned the favor a couple of years later after he had a few too many pitchers of Olde Style.

Welcom to Loserville. Population: You

Steel Reserve unlike most beers or other malt liquors is a whopping 8.1% alcohol.  For comparison’s sake Miller Lite is 4.2% and Olde English is 5.9%.  It’s cheap as hell too, costing only $1.19 a tall boy.  Steel Reserve is also available in a six-pack or 40oz bottle.  I chose to go with the tall boy, because it was cheaper than the other two, and it meant I had to drink less Steel Reserve.  I went into this review with mixed emotions, on one hand I would have to drink Steel Reserve; on the other hand, after this review is posted, I will never have to drink Steel Reserve again for the rest of my life. 

To lighten the mood, here's Cassie Steele's tits.

Big Ben drunk; about to rape these girls

 The can says that Steel Reserve is made by the Steel Brewing Company, but I did a little research and it’s really just made by Miller.  I guess they were afraid that marketing a “high gravity malt lager” towards homeless people and base degenerates would sully the Miller name.  If they are really concerned with their image they should pull that commercial with the fat dude in a speedo  The can also has a giant 211 on it, which they claim is a “medieval symbol for steel,” but I’ve never seen it used that way anywhere else (and I went to college.)  It’s more likely a reference to the police code for robbery, which gives you an idea of what kind of scum this shit is marketed towards.  The perfect Steel Reserve pitchman would be Ben Roethlisberger.  He’s a STEELer, a serial rapist, and he lives in a boxcar.  

I know nothing about this chick, but I guarantee she'd be down for anything.

I guarantee this tastes better than SR

As for the flavor, Steel Reserve is an apt name because it tastes like metal. Although, personally I think it tastes more like copper than steel.  The metallic taste is a clear indication that they made this shit on the cheap.  Cheaper beers, (anything you’ll read about on this blog) use things like corn, rice and sugar to save money in the brewing process.  It’s true that you can make corn into delicious Kentucky Bourbon, but that only after you filter it, distill it and let it age in an oak barrel.   Corn, fermented on its own tastes like shit and it’s full of poison, not coincidentally Steel Reserve tastes like shit with poison in it.  It tastes really bad cold, and as my tallboy warmed up it became gag inducing.   

I remember reading that during the prohibition era they would brew non-alcoholic beer legally, and then after they sold it to a bar, the owners would typically inject it with moonshine.  Steel Reserve tastes like someone did that.  It’s disgusting. It’s not Gameday bad, but nothing is.  In fact, before I had Gameday Ice I always thought Steel Reserve was the worst beer of all time.  Now I know better, but Steel Reserve sucks.  I don’t recommend it for anyone, except Ben Roethlisberger, because fuck that guy.

"Let it sit in the sewers for awhile.  Then the Steel Reserve will be ready."

 But what is the Riddle of Steel?  According to Thulsa Doom, “steel isn’t strong…flesh is stronger…That is power: the strength and power of flesh. What is steel compared to the hand that wields it?”  But, Thulsa Doom is not to be trusted, and he is wrong.  Sometimes you’re stronger than Steel Reserve, and sometimes you end up tossing your dinner into the toilet while your asshole friend laughs at you.  Contemplate this on the tree of woe.

Conan rules

Would you like to know more?

Check out their website.  Considering Steel Reserve’s base demographic of glue sniffers and dudes that live in refrigerator boxes, it’s surprising that Steel Reserve has a website.  It should be noted, that the website looks like my geocites page I made in high school, and has literally the same amount of information as the can.  There’s not even a crappy flash game.

Would you like to know more?

Did you know that the greatest band of all time (The Ramones) recorded a couple of jingles for Steel Reserve?  

Greatest band ever.