beer

HEINEKEN Lager—but DON’T read this if you’re underage

Tweet from HEINEKEN today:

“Thanks for following! Our content is intended for people of Legal Drinking Age so please don’t share it with those who aren’t. Cheers!”

I’m really glad HEINEKEN reminded me about this. I would never want to divulge the existence of alcoholic beverages to people under legal drinking age. To the best of my knowledge, most teenagers are unsullied by any awareness of beer. This is good for North America, because knowledge is dangerous, and knowing about beer could be a gateway for knowing about wine, and vodka, and tequila. OMG.

Drink responsibly.

Teenagers already make a decent effort not to learn anything, so if HEINEKEN’s on track with this idea, shielding them from any information about alcohol should enable them to glide past its temptations—at least until Dad buys them their inaugural 19th-birthday drink at the bar, little knowing they’ll have a dozen more with their friends later and need their hair held back over the vomit-gulping toilet.

I wonder if HEINEKEN would apply the same logic to sex. Don’t tell teenagers about sex, and it won’t occur to them.

Now, to whom would this logic be logical? Oh yeah—half of North America. The half that overlaps with the young-earth and intelligent-design clubs.

Amsterdam's Red Light District (Wikipedia)

I shouldn’t really single out HEINEKEN; this is obviously a policy thing, a hedge against a litigious world where, heaven forefend, someone might sue them for sewing the seeds of drunkenness in the impressionable. It just hit a funny note for me because HEINEKEN comes from the Netherlands, whose Red Light District is internationally famous for liberalism about sex, drugs and drinking.

Getting to the point, what is HEINEKEN, and should we drink it?

When people think HEINEKEN, they think skunky. The skunkiest of popular beers, this lager nevertheless holds mainstream status. HEINEKEN pours yellow, fizzy and watery, the carbonation dissipating quickly. The fizz is essential to HEINEKEN’s drinkability, as whatever pleasant malty taste might be in there is playing second fiddle to the headlining aromas, so some fireworks are necessary to distract the mouth from the nose, or reconcile them, or something.

Knowing about alcohol leads to deviant behavior.

All that said, I really enjoy HEINEKEN. It reminds me of Amsterdam, where I’ve never been but where I expect I might find interspecies couplings like the one I sometimes enjoy with my girlfriend Dolly when she’s in the mood and her nose is plugged up.

Are there boy/girl drinks? And where do bears fit in?

My Fellow Inebriates,

I got some new tasting notes from my friend Michael:

With Michael's bear Gustav. Can you "own" a bear? Whose outfit is sillier?

right now i am tasting a white russian. it is creamy and girlish but slightly strong and very bearly. tooodles liquor store bear

One of the first things to go when you’re drinking any quantity of vodka is punctuation. Add some Kahlua and you can say bye-bye to your caps as well. Michael’s notes are my very favorite kind—when you are three sheets to the wind you can be totally honest.

The White Russian didn’t originate in Russia; but it contains vodka, hence the name. Add cream to a Black Russian and there you have it.

There are dozens of variations on this drink but the classic method is to pour vodka and Kahlua over ice cubes and then add half-and-half. It’s totally, totally, totally yummy.

Michael mentioned that the drink is “girlish,” which raises the question: Are there “girl” drinks and “boy” drinks?

Here at LBHQ we don’t go in for gender stereotypes so much as we do massive, unspecific overgeneralizations. To put it more honestly, I’m freaking scared that someone will hunt me down if I start spouting off about which spirits I like to wear a dress while drinking (and there are some). So instead here’s a sampling of personality traits and drinks to match.

White Russian, fave drink of "the Dude" Lebowski. Drinking makes us all better people.

BEER—You’re down to earth and easy to please. Sometimes you leave appliances in your yard.

COOLERS—You’re underage. Or maybe a sugar junkie.

BLENDER DRINKS—You like drama in your relationships. You also like loud, mechanical whirring sounds.

COCKTAILS—You’re purposeful and know what you want. To you, blender-drink fans are your bitches.

WHITE WINE—You’re optimistic but sometimes insecure. You’d like to be a nudist but you don’t know how.

RED WINE—You’re classic and confident but not very street-smart. For instance, you wouldn’t know how to shiv someone with a broken bottle.

SHOTS—You don’t like wasting time. Ideally you’d like to get naked right now.

DUCHY ORIGINALS ORGANIC OLD RUBY ALE

My Fellow Inebriates,

Others have reviewed this nice organic ale much more thoughtfully than I, and even taken their own pictures. My mum bought it because it was $3.50 and she didn’t feel like using her debit card “to bootleg for animals.”

The label and marketing remind me a bit of Marks & Spencer; the bottle has that generic big-corporate-entity feel to it, like the beer you can buy at Trader Joe’s or Costco in the States. It’s not totally evil though—the beer is organically produced on land administered by Prince Charles as part of a charity project now 20 years strong.

I was a charity bear once, so I’m gladdened to know some of the profits get skimmed off to help people in need. And just as cool, OLD RUBY ALE is produced sustainably. Even a hedonistic bear with an apocalyptic bent can appreciate that no one’s raping the land to create beer.

It’s also nice to know that if I get a head-splitting hangover from OLD RUBY ALE it’s because I drank enough to get thoroughly shitfaced—not because of chemical additives.

But how does it taste?

My tastebuds are Canadian, so essentially they’re ADHD tastebuds—they need beer to crackle and fizz and spark in the mouth like so much microscopic bubble wrap. I can’t crack a beer without automatically anticipating fizz. So when our bottle of OLD RUBY ALE opened not with a burst but a sigh, I sighed also. But I still wanted to drink it very badly. I had some bad-ass DTs to manage or at least get down to a dull roar.

The low carbonation was less disappointing than you’d think. After all, a lot of Canadian swill needs to be hyper-carbonated to mask its offensive flavor, so you have to hand it to a less fizzy beer like OLD RUBY ALE for strutting its stuff without that effervescent crutch.

It had a lovely auburn color in the glass. It wafted malt and slight breadiness in nice harmony. First sips hinted initially at bitterness but morphed into sweetness—a bit simple on the palate. It felt thin in the mouth and, while never offensive, failed somehow to deliver much beyond those first impressions. And, of course, it was flat.