Death Metal Underground

Grupo Modelo S.A. de C.V. – Modelo Especial

by Cory Van der Pol on July 19, 2015

Many Americans know the comforting brown appearance of bottles of Negro Modelo, possibly the last good decent beer for sale on the shelves of your average grocery store or Wal-mart. The others have fallen to consumerism, which is separate from capitalism because it relies on mass preference, and have become the fast food version: essentially soft drinks with beer flavor and separately distilled alcohol injected. This creates a wasteland of plenty. There are many options, but almost all of them cater to morons, and so the options are paltry.

Modelo Especial turns out to be not a Corona clone, but a relatively rich beer with plenty of grainy taste and some spice behind the sweetness. I was pleasantly surprised since, given its widespread availability, I assumed it was designed for morons. However, its obscurity as a Mexican beer — at the time when most people are drinking hipster microbrews that are universally bad because they overemphasize difficult and obscure flavors over simply making a quality beer — may have protected it from the Great American Gold Rush. Every weekend, millions of zombies leave their undead jobs and get in their cars to go home. Because their heads have been drained of any thoughts by the sheer stupidity and illogicality of what they are called to do, there is one option for the weekend… get loaded! — and they do this by trotting on down to Wal-mart in their golf shirts and buying, well, you wouldn’t want to get the usual mainstream beers would you? Just something enough imported to be quality… that means you go to the 9.7-11.8 cents/ounce category of Familiar Imports… and it turns out most of these are fakes… so you grab whatever looks good, go to the checkout and head home. If you drink five of them quickly you might not notice that they are basically burpwater soft drinks flavored like beer, and get a good buzz going. Modelo Especial has escaped this crazy rush because it remains consistent and marketed at lower income, so it does not have the pretense and “unique/different” factor of hipster beers or Familiar Imports, and thus is bought only by — you guessed it — actual appreciators of quality beer. The crowd cheers.

But this beer, unlike the unfortunate Corona Extra to which it is frequently compared, has an abundance of flavor that is more balanced than it is extreme. The hipster beers shit the bed by trying so hard to be ironic they become subtly disgusting, and the audience of sheep is too neutered to simply stand up and say that these beers are vomit fodder. The Familiar Imports are all basically watery and have a pulpy, rotting vegetation taste at this point. But Modelo Especial carries on, with a slight undertone of the pungent smell of its fermented origins, but mostly a warm and broad taste that works in sweetness like a summer evening. Like Negro Modelo, this is a beer to be enjoyed during normal events in life. It will impress no one from the label, but they will actually enjoy drinking it instead of pretending to like another over-priced over-fetishized hipster brew. Full of warmth, it is like the best of Mexico, a simple but entirely rewarding experience.

***/*****

6 Comments

Tags: beer, grupo modelo, modelo especial

Amstel Brouwerij B. V. – Amstel Light

by Cory Van der Pol on July 17, 2015

Fins rising above his head and arms, the sea creature crept from the briny abyss and mounted the ladder which took him to the dock. There he assumed his stance, threatening and ambiguous, in his nightly role as a disturbed of the peace and scary of nosy observers. But as he stepped forward, something clicked under the loose boards, and a net dropped over his head.

“Now let’s sea who this deep sea terror really is,” said Fred Jones, ripping the plastic mask from the face of the oily monster.

“Mr. Amstel Brouwerij B. V.!” the team exclaimed in unison.

“This must be why he was trying to scare people away,” said Velma, pulling aside a door to show giant vats of sludgy tan goo.

“That’s right, I admit it. I made this costume to scare off passerby. You see, I’ve made quite a profit smuggling in this beer-flavored sludge from Amsterdam, and then mixing it with soda water to make an ultra-low cost beer which I sell to consumers at import prices. And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids!”

Once upon a time, Amstel Light was decent beer. Developed by the same brewer that makes Heineken and designed for the American market, it took the fuller flavor of European beer and adapted it to the market demand for lower-calorie beverages. Since it was head and shoulders better than the standard dreck, it got a good name for itself, and so the MBAs at Amstel Brouwerij B. V. realized there was a “profit pocket” — a certain amount of time they could bank on the good name by selling a far cheaper ersatz version and yet the audience would still, with insectlike motions, continue purchasing it at the higher price — and ran the brand into the ground. Amstel Light now resembles an American beer in its water, skunky, quasi-fruity flavor with the distinctly bilgy taste of most pasteurized mass-market beers. You might think that at import prices, this would be better than your average bottled drool, but they have played a bait and switch on you just like with Heineken.

*/*****

16 Comments

Tags: amstel brouwerij b.v., amstel light, beer, heineken

Cervecería Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma, S.A. de C.V. – Dos Equis Special Lager

by Cory Van der Pol on July 4, 2015

This drivel sells under import prices when it is essentially repackaged American beer. Gone are the Dos Equis highlights of the 1980s, when XX brown was a thick flavorful beer that provided an alternative to the dreck on the big shelves. Now you get the watery drivel that happens when a firm decides to maximize profit based on the — not lack of information — low ability to discern shit from gold that identifies the average consumer. This liquid tastes pulpy and soapy and has low alcohol content, or at least low effect. It may be because if not drunk absolutely cold, it resembles the pulque substance they make in prisons more than beer. Any pretense that this is superior to Michelob are nonsense; it is a pale shadow of its former self, made fruitier and vapid so that Average Citizen Idiot can bob his head while listening to the “edgy” Ramones cover band at his local icehouse and talk up the fat women hanging like vegetative overgrowth around the bar, as everyone around him imitates past edginess in an attempt to seem like anything but the corporate stooges they are. Seriously, this is Mexican-flavored Miller Lite. Every burp feels like a vomit about to happen, except it is just the taste of this bilgy sweetened pond water masquerading as beer. Speaking of corporate stooges, this beer is undrinkable, unless you have already numbed your taste buds to the point of accepting the mediocre as the norm.

Quality rating: 1/5
Purchase rating: 1/5

3 Comments

Tags: beer, dos equis, special lager, xx

Independence Brewing Co. – Convict Hill Oatmeal Stout

by Cory Van der Pol on July 2, 2015

As much as I enjoy a bitter beer, or an idiosyncratic one, Convict Hill Oatmeal Stout confuses the outward appearance of refined taste with the taste itself. An intensely sour and dark beer, it swings away from the pleasurable dimensions of beers toward small rooms full of “experts” who like highly demonstrative, artificed tastes. Such drinkers are looking for a beer to talk about how much they enjoyed, rather than enjoying it, while overpraising it like metalcore in a big heavy metal magazine. They will discuss its oddities, use vague terms like “creamy,” and generally miss the point: this beer is designed toward unbalanced extremes to make talking points, and has character within.

As a result, it makes a terrible everyday beer, and while it might be good as a Guinness substitute in a black and tan where a dark and bitter beer is necessary to offset the Bass or other pale ale used in contrast, by itself constitutes the same kind of unpleasant drinking experience that eating straight dark chocolate provides to the culinary palate. Like gourmet food that carries the pretentious epithet an acquired taste, this oatmeal stout misses out on the balance of a really good version of this sub-type, in which harvest flavors balance the bitterness to create a sense of transition, and instead aims toward something for gritted-teeth hipsters to use as a conversation topic when explaining the superiority of their taste to yours. At that it succeeds because there is so much to talk about but none of it is interesting. Take for example the separation of flavors so that the aftertaste is a tarry version of the foretaste; or perhaps, the strange fermentation overtones as if something random were included in the vat, or the process did not quite complete. Independent breweries are quite trendy now but this beer shows that it is not the size of the brewery, but the intent of the brewer, that makes a great beer instead of a faddish mediocre one.

Quality rating: 2/5
Purchase rating: 1/5

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Tags: beer, convict hill, oatmeal stout

Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. – Sierra Nevada Pale Ale

by Cory Van der Pol on June 29, 2015

Only an American company could come up with this: a bitter beer wracked by a sweet fruity aftertaste. It is the approach one takes to bribing children to eat the disgusting faux nutrition that is “health food,” namely by making the food as vile as possible and then dumping a bunch of sugar on top so they will eat it for that. On the tongue, Pale Ale tastes like a European delicacy like Grolsch for just a moment before undertones of vinegar kick in, followed by a sugary fruitness resembling a Kiwi fruit swimming in corn syrup. The result is vomitous, a race between extremes in which the middle point — the balance of flavors that makes a good brew — vanishes entirely. Instead, you get get hipster cred for liking this “acquired taste” while having a big dollop of cupcake icing to follow it, with the assumption that you will not vomit from the clash of tastes on the palate. In favor of this beer, it is cleaner than most American beers, without the murky swill of unintegrated fermentation byproducts that makes American beer taste like stagnant rainwater. On the other side, however, it is like a car with the engine in the trunk that you steer with the stereo. Absolutely no integration of flavor leaves it feeling more like watching a crowd of random people pass, than the smooth ballet of a good beer.

Quality rating: 2/5
Purchase rating: 1/5

9 Comments

Tags: beer, sierra nevada, sierra nevada pale ale

How we write our beer reviews

by Cory Van der Pol on June 4, 2015

Why read a review at all? For some, it is like reading a catalog: find the basic attributes of a product. For others, it is an investment in the judgment of others to tell how well the product fits together. Any idiot can cobble together a checklist of trendy things that consumers have indicated they want in user-response surveys. It takes a stronger human being to figure out where they intersect, how to balance them, and from that how to make a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. This applies to music, smokes, literature …and beer.

I write all the beer reviews for Death Metal Underground. These are my opinions and mine alone, but I base them on years of sampling and enjoying different beers. I bring something else to the table, which is practicality. Any idiot hipster can write a review gushing over the radical new ideas — not all that’s new is good, mind you — in some IPA made by two guys in a garage using only wild-grown hops, antique oatmeal and West Alabaman cardamom. A practical writer looks at what the beer has to offer and how that fits into the life of the person who will be drinking it. You know that phenomenon where you or someone near you sees an advertisement and thinks, “You know, that’s what I really need to complete my life — a combination hedge-trimmer and ionizer!” and rushes off to buy it, without having ever recognized the need for something like that before. This is the most common human failure of understanding, what Brett calls “reversed cognition” and William calls “islands,” where instead of thinking of what we need in a logical manner, we stumble along and see what crops up that might fit the bill and then buy it. All advertising works on this principle, and so do all hipster beer reviews. Your life just isn’t complete until you taste this beer… but why did you want it in the first place?

My reviews look into the utility of a beer. That seems like a Walmart-level consumer attitude, but it is a practical one. It involves two questions: Why would you drink this over all the other options available? and Why would you buy this in comparison with the prices of other beers? Beer is, like everything else, a market; demand balanced against supply determines value. Sometimes, demand is irrational, like all the people rushing out to buy bitter but saccharine IPAs so they can tell their hipster friends, “No, man, you haven’t lived until you’ve had Broken Alternator Upside-Down Ale, broslice.” But metalheads are more practical folk. We drink for flavor, true, but also for alcohol (who buys non-alcoholic beer except designated drivers?) and for the situation in which we are going to drink the beer. Drinking with friends in a San Francisco bar, where every beer costs $32 and twenty cents of that goes to starving orphans in Malaysia who are so poor they have never even seen Twitter, is different from everyday life where you’re picking up a half-rack to pound down with friends.

To that end, every review has two ratings: a quality rating, and a purchase rating. They look like this:

Quality rating: 3/5
Purchase rating: 3/5

Note to the curious: on a scale of five, a “three” is the equivalent of “take it or leave it,” dead center in the middle of your options.

The quality rating determines how good the beer is as an everyday drinking or weekend drinking beer. This is not for people with giant beer cellars who prize rarity and oddity over hassle-free enjoyment. It is also not for people who are uncritical and buy whatever the beer giants put out in 18-packs on sale at the local Ralph’s, because that group does not need beer reviews; it needs coupons and (probably) Alcoholics Anonymous. For your practical-minded metalhead, which is the type of person who reads this site, my quality rating provides an assessment of how good a beer is independent of how novel, weird, “interesting” or unique it is. That jive is for giggin’ hipsters (definition: a giggin’ hipster is one working a series of day jobs while “working” some vast artistic project that will never come to fruition, or will be garbage welded together with boar semen entitled One Day in the Multiverse (Republican Cadillac Genocide, part II)) and no metalhead wants that. The purchase rating gives a sense of how worthy it is to seek out this beer given the other options available. If Pig Wrasslin’ Pale Ale is 20% better than Humpty Dumpty’s Riverhead Lager, but also is 40% more expensive, it suffers on this account because the added quality is not worth the leap in price. That may seem shallow to you, but your money matters. The extra bucks you could drop on fancy beers that do not really add that much more to the party, especially after the third glass, could go toward buying rare Demoncy LPs. Mull that over when you have your next beer.

Like most things on this site, my reviews aim to be controversial not for its own sake, but because the truth is usually controversial unless a question is so universal (“who likes to poop? raise your hands”) that it answers itself. I write for this site because they will let me get away with this, where on Beer Advocate or other metal sites I would be drowned out by hep cats listing off their favorite beers which can only be purchased during the full moon for two weeks in December on a ferry between unnamed islands in the Agean Sea. If you like them, great. If not, I extend a hearty classic metalhead-style middle finger to you, a wink, and hope you enjoy whatever overpriced fad swill you’re chucking down on Daddy’s trust fund account.

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Tags: ale, beer, keg, lager, suds, writing

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