Busch NA. Approach with caution.
Just for fun and because I like beer.
Here’s Tampa Tribune contributor Joey Redner’s 10 Most Disgusting Beers:
10. Coors Aspen Edge If giving up carbs means giving up any semblance of body or flavor, as is the case with this “beer,” it is probably better to carry a few extra pounds.
9. Milwaukee’s Best I understand this is a sentimental favorite of many, as it takes them back to the old days. Well, human sacrifice harkens to a simpler time, too. If you want to kill your taste buds, try battery acid — it probably tastes better.
8. Sleeman Clear Lager Another low-carb entry, though here the delicate and nuanced notes of lighter fluid and Dumpster drippings on a blistering August day achieves heretofore unknown lows.
7. Cave Creek Chili Beer This is the perfect beer for people who hate themselves and desire punishment. This unholy union of a whole chili pepper and a fiendishly nasty pale lager will get medieval on your tongue.
6. Winter Park Beer While Orlando Brewing makes many fine ales and lagers, they also make this vitamin-infused blasphemy. Generally, when people say things like, “Fruit doesn’t belong in beer,” I think of the many excellent fruit Lambics and disagree. But, vitamins? Vitamin flavor doesn’t belong in beer! Heck, it doesn’t even belong in vitamins — it’s just that the vitamin companies haven’t found a way to make vitamins palatable. And neither have the brewers of this beer.
5. Bootie U95 I thought with a name like Bootie, the makers of this brew were attempting to position it as a dance club beer. Turns out, it simply describes the aroma. Tallahassee Ratebeer.com member Aurelius sums up the Bootie this way: “The name sounds like some sort of nuclear isotope in a barium enema, and it delivers all the flavor the name suggests.”
4. Hurricane High Gravity Lager This malt liquor is to beer what Carlos Mencia is to comedy: crass and phony. The unfettered use of cheap ingredients, designed solely to supply alcohol on the cheap, imparts the aroma of acetone and chemical solvents. Yummy. Safety Harbor Ratebeer.com member Ibrew2or3 has this to say: “Should I be drinking something that smells like an auto shop?”
3. Chapeau Exotic This Lambic is proof that rare Belgian beers are capable of great suckitude. Writes Orlando Ratebeer.com member Boboski: “One sip leads to a joyful drain pour. I hope it doesn’t ruin my sink.”
2. Camo Genuine Ale The can has 5 X’s on it, but all are missing the little skulls that would inform people of what is really inside Camo cans. If lethal doses of corn sugar and nail polish are your thing, Camo is your beer.
1. Busch NA Non-alcoholic beers are bad by nature. Remove alcohol, remove flavor. But Busch NA seems to have gotten around the alcohol part of the beer by steeping corn husks in seltzer water to make a tea that Andrew Zimmern wouldn’t drink.
Here’s the Ratebeer.com site for you to look at. A great site with tons of funny and well-written reviews.
I don’t know who Andre Zimmern is but I wouldn’t drink Busch NA on a dare, nor Busch for that matter. Busch was the beer my father drank back in the 70s because he was too cheap to buy Michelob. That was back in the day before American craft brews were widely available.
So when dad let me finish the last few ounces of his beer so I would not grow up to follow in the family tradition of alcoholism (on both sides) my first tastes of beer were Busch and then Miller Lite, which dad switched to in the late 70s, largely due to their entertaining commercials.
By the way, I loved those old “great taste - less filling” commercials. I had an idea for one of them (I would have made a great ad man too, but I’d like to use my superpowers for good). It would be called “The Lite Flight” and in the script the usual guys would be flying back in coach and Mickey Spillane would ask “the doll” for a Lite Beer and she’d say “ooh, sorry Mickey, I’m all out - the guy in first class wanted them all.”
Well, of course, the guy in first class is RODNEY! (as in Dangerfield) and as he’s getting ganged up on, “Marvelous Marv” Throneberry, piloting the plane of course, wonders what all the ruckus is about.
It would have been great.
It took a student trip to Germany in 1980 for me to realize just how lame mass produced American beer was. We were able to sample beer all over Deutschland and my favorite was the Hacker-Pschorr I had in their own Munich beer hall.
It was the kind of beer they serve in Heaven, if Heaven exists.
Nowadays, even with no drinking age, I doubt American kids would be allowed to imbibe in Germany because of our overweening need to overprotect our kids from the demon alcohol. This is why so many of them drink themselves into crises the minute they get to college - they haven’t been properly trained to responsibly imbibe at home.
But I digress.
It’s a testament to American chutzpah that a beer so watery and awful could actually call itself “Milwaukee’s Best” with a straight face. But what DOES come out of that city any more that is actually worth drinking? Miller?
I use to sing along to the old Miller jingle - “Millers made the American way; mass produced in the USA; just as bland as the people who are drinking it today; Millers made the American way.”
But yes, down at good old Ohio State, Eric’s dorm mates get cases of Old Milwaukee and other brands of American swill like (un)Natural Light delivered to their rooms every Friday.
How?
They found a Columbus beer store willing to pack suitcases with beer, which are wheeled right by the clueless RA’s every Friday night. The HARD part, from what he tells me, is disposing of the empties.
But I digress.
Another universally regarded (by beer snobs) awful beer we drank in college is Rolling Rock, which now suffers from the final indignity of not even being brewed in Latrobe, PA anymore. Why anyone would want to drink “green death” anymore is beyond my comprehension.
Western Pennsylvania is known for awful beers. Iron City is terrible and IC Light is practically indistinguishable from cat piss.
Almost all American light beers I consider to be “beer-flavored water.” That’s the best description I could give of them. Why people drink them I have no idea.
Life REALLY is too short to drink shitty beer. If you’re going to drink beer, and you’re on a budget, for Goddess’ sakes at least drink something Canadian (unless it’s a light beer - Canadians do those no better than we do).
Schaefer is another awful beer that richly deserved it’s awful reputation. I’ve always bastardized it’s slogan when dissing other cheap and awful beers - “it’s the beer to have if you’re having more than six”
But that’s the whole point with a lot of these cheap beers - they are generally torpedoed with the aim to get drunk fast and cheap.
BUT - you pay for that cheapness in the end. The cheapies give you the worst hangover for several reasons (I suspect some of them contain formaldehyde) not the least of which is cheap ingredients and preservatives. Smart kids knew that Michelob was still fairly cheap and a good beer to get smashed on - being rice based, the hangover was far less severe.
And of course, spending money will not always save you from the 7 a.m. pukes either. It’s the same as any alcohol - the darker the beer, the worst the hangover.
Let’s see, what else is bad?
ALL of the low carb beers should be banned by law. They are the worst tasting beers of all time and can really only be served ice cold and even then, they’re weak and awful.
ANY beer with lime already added into it. There’s a new one being marketed now. Forget it. Nothing wrong with lime in your Corona (a middlin’ quality beer I usually avoid), but put it in there yourself. You really don’t want to know how they get the lime tasting substance into the beer at the factory, do you? And then you want to INGEST that?
It DOES seem incredible to those of us old enough to remember when our beer choices were so limited to American macro beers. Hell, getting COORS (which is AWFUL, always WAS) east of the Mississippi was thought of as a major coup (hence the premise of “Smokey and the Bandit”).
Now we’re awash in choices in even the most modest grocery store. Hell, you can usually find at least one decent import at a Wal-Mart. We really should be grateful.
Here are the Rate Beer’s worst 50 in the world.
The worst 20:
Notice how many of them, um, are domestic. If you want to have fun, read the ratings from the brave souls who drank enough of these dogs to rate them.
Feel free to add your own dogs in the comments.
