Sex in a Canoe
Written: Nov 04 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: You can get buzzed cheap.
Cons: It takes three or four to kill your tastebuds.
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| optionexplicit's Full Review: Meister Brau |
Two jokes come to mind when I think of Meister Brau Light. The first involves the title of this review. The second goes something like this:
A German brewmaster, baffled by the success of mass market American beers, brings a bottle of the stuff back to Germany with him. Embaressed to be seen with it, he makes sure to hide it in his luggage until he can get it to the lab at his brewery for chemical analysis. Not even wanting his own chemists to know that he's been carrying around this horrible American beer, he gives it to them in an unmarked Mason jar and doesn't tell them what it is. A week later, having put it out of his mind, he receives the lab report.
It reads, "We are sorry to report. Your horse has diabetes and will probably die."
Whenever I tell this joke, I think of Meister Brau Light.
This July, I may have been the first person to ever legally drink a Meister Brau light. My friend told me he had to show me something funny in his refrigerator. Trepidatiously, I followed as he explained that his local Chinese restaurant had been offering a free beer with a ten-dollar purchase. He reached into his refrigerator and brought out a can of Meister Brau Light.
I recognized the can immediately even though I hadn't seen one in over ten years. Up until that moment, I thought that Meister Brau Light existed solely in the market niche of underage drinkers looking to get a buzz for under five dollars. Even when we were seventeen, we turned our noses up at this stuff, preferring Budweiser or Moosehead for a couple of dollars more a six pack. When we were feeling downright decadent, we would spring for Heineken. But, Meister Brau Light was the very bottom of the barrel.
Other than underage drinking, I have another confession to make about my childhood. I used to collect baseball cards. That, in and of itself, is nothing to confess. But, somewhere around 1989, I bought an unopened 1978 pack of Topps baseball cards at a show. In 1978, Topps baseball cards were called "bubble gum cards" because they came with a hard, pink stick of chewing gum that, despite being forbidden by basic laws of physics from ever forming a bubble, was called bubble gum. This gum was an iconic part of the baseball card collecting world. "Serious" collectors hated it of course because it would often damage the last card in a pack. Liking it and chewing it gave you some kind of weird indy cred as if your love of the game were particularly pure.
At the time, my weltanschlauung included the belief that indy cred was somehow valuable and important to have even if it was forced and artificial. Opening the pack of eleven year-old cards, I flipped it over and popped the gum in my mouth ready for the sweet taste of indy cred.
Indy cred, as it turns out, tastes like sugar left in the sun too long, dissolves instantly and turns into a gluey substance it takes hours to get off your teeth.
Until this July, I thought I was beyond such things. I still hope I am. Maybe it was nostalgia.
I reached out for the can, "Give it to me."
He looked at me, "Have you ever drunk one of these?"
"Not in about ten years," I answered, "I want to see if it's as bad as I remember."
"Dude," he said, "you remember what it tastes like? I don't think I ever had one of these until I was too blotto to care what I was drinking."
"Give it to me."
He handed me the can, shaking his head.
"Give me a glass." If I was going to do this, I was going to do it right.
"Nobody drinks Meister Brau Light out of a glass," he said, "It's unnatural."
"Don't you have a Flintstones glass or something?"
"I've got a Taco Bell commemorative cup." he offered.
"That will do." I said. Pouring it in the glass, I held it up. It was hard to see the color or clarity through the opaque plastic, but I think it came out as "weak" and "cloudy" respectively. Sadly, it also reminded me of the lead character in Johnny Get Your Gun in that it had no legs and very little head.
The first impression I got upon tasting that beer was that it was nothing like the Meister Brau Light I'd quaffed as a teen. Then, I realized what was different. It was cold. The Dairy Mart we used to buy it at didn't even want to waste valuable cooler space on it and sold it warm. Besides the obvious difficulty in trying to explain a six pack cooling in the refrigerator to our parents, any time we were desperate enough to buy Meister Brau Light, we were also far too impatient to wait to drink it. So, it was always warm.
As it turns out, we weren't missing much. The only advantage chilling a can of Meister Brau Light seems to have is that it kills some of metallic flavor that this beer picks up from the can.
Swirling it, I inhaled. It had a complex bouquet of cleaning fluid, sugar water, and just a hint of burning tire. I took a sip and swished it around my mouth. Once it hit my tastebuds, it tasted stale. That meant it was fresh. When Meister Brau Light is genuinely stale, it tastes like a possum drowned in a keg of real beer. Fresh, it merely tastes like you washed your socks in it.
Beneath the overwhelming staleness, Meister Brau Light is very complex. While many wines have a metallic finish, Meister Brau Light is metallic right away. Somehow, the beer, weak as it is, manages to erode a bit of the inside of the can.
Also notable is an undercurrent like orange Tang. Combined with the smoky staleness and cask, this makes the beer immediately identifiable as Meister Brau light. It was still as awful as I remembered it.
The title of this review is part of the other joke that makes me think of Meister Brau Light, asking why American beer is like sex in a canoe.
The answer, of course, is that it's <expletive deleted> close to water.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
optionexplicit
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Member: Jekke Bladt
Location: New York, NY
Reviews written: 94
Trusted by: 71 members
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