Well, they both sometimes come in big bottles.

But I think the malt-liquor-for-the-sophisticate role might already be filled by superpremium vodkas.

Well, they both sometimes come in big bottles.

and have high alcohol contents.

superpremium vodkas.

No, that's Everclear for the sophisticate.

Upon further reflection--is the defining characteristic of malt liquor alcohol content, or cheapness?

Alcohol content. The higher price (and better taste) is where the sophistication come in. But make no mistake, bothe Arrogant Bastard Ale and Olde English 800 will get you nice faster than say, Sam Adams of Budweiser.

odd thing is, Pips says that when I drink the cheap malt liqours like OE or Colt 45, I get obnoxious drunk, but when I drink the strong ales like Hairy Eyeball or La Fin Du Monde, I'm just mellow.

I agree, I think this aged beer and strong ale nonsense is another way to make money.

I thought of you when I was listening to a show about old and rare beers. They had this foodie woman on talking about how these aged beers are comparable to a special aged wine. That they pair well with certain foods, like cheeses and nuts, blah, blah. It's beer, people! Don't try to make it anything more than beer. There are trendy bars that go out to auction houses just to buy rare and special beers. I would try to find the radio segment but I'm tipsy.

Pips says that when I drink the cheap malt liqours like OE or Colt 45, I get obnoxious drunk, but when I drink the strong ales like Hairy Eyeball or La Fin Du Monde, I'm just mellow.

That's because malt liquors can have all sorts of funky shit other than what's needed to make beer (politely called "adjuncts"), whereas your ales are water, malted barley, yeast, hops, and that's it.

Also, nobody buys malt liquor for the taste.

The other thing, I think, is that American craft beer culture has a very wide because-we-can streak in it. Now that hops content has been pushed about as far as it can go, the next frontier seems to be alcohol.

I'm drinking an Avery Mephistopheles now. Not a strong ale, but definitely a HAC beer. And goddamn delicious.

Lori, don't misunderstand me, there definitely is a notable difference between the cheap stuff and the good stuff, but yeah, I hear you sometimes it's a bit much hearing people talking all that silly gourmet nonsense to justify getting sozzled.

box: I'm having a Hairy Eyeball ale from Lagunitas. It's very tasty but it'll have you on your ass.

I think that the term "Malt Liquor" is something of a strained neologism which helps fit a product as old as human agriculture to the procrustean bed of the BATF, and their bureaucratic need to establish a metric to impose a taxation schedule, nevermind the intrinsic validity of the metric, or the intended market niche of the product.

/me tries to look sophistimicated

*taps bottle, twists cap, passes 40 to triode*

Throw in something about racism/classism, Triode, and I couldn't agree with you more. Malt liquor is the crack of beers.

and OTB is the crack of gambling. (Seriously, there's an OTB parlor right near my subway stop, the whole exercise is kind of similar)

of course this is all tangential to my original point that no matter how much you pay for that extra-strength bottle of beer or how good it tastes, you're still getting loaded.

Most winters I make a 90 Shilling Scotch Ale. It's a strong ale for sure, just shy of barley wine. It is a very nice brew with a lovely smoothness and very little alcohol taste. And if you drink it like a session beer, it will kick your ass up one side and down the other. One is good for sipping through a winter's night. Two will make it hard to walk straight.

One of my sons had the idea of marketing a 44.6 ounce malt liquor so you could spill 10% for your lost homies and still have a full 40.

I was originally going to mention the Dogfish Head World Wide Stout as a certified butt-kicker at 18 - 20%, but then I saw their fearsomely apropos Liquor de Malt (bottle conditioned! with hand-stamped brown paper bag!), which sadly seems to be on hiatus.

But in any case, they make a number of fine oat sodas. I fervently wish I could get 'em out here.

my original point that no matter how much you pay for that extra-strength bottle of beer or how good it tastes, you're still getting loaded.

That's a silly point to try to make. Do you really think quality doesn't matter at all?

So it doesn't matter how well written something is, you're still just reading a book; Richard Price no more worth your time than Dan Brown?

So it doesn't matter how good a song is, you're still just listening to music; the Dictators are no more worth listening to than Duran Duran?

None of us believes you actually think that, Jon, so why the pose when it comes to alcohol?

Ha, I had the Liquor de Malt once. Good stuff, and honestly I'm glad I had it, but for the money I probably should just have gotten 3 40's of Old E.

Old English is neither Old, nor English, nor 800. Discuss.

Well, if your goal is to simply get loaded, then you might as well drink what the winos drink. They've had many years to figure out how to get the most bang for their alcohol buck. For others, taste is more important than getting sloppy. Amazingly, there's room for both in this world.

As to LoriFLA's "it's just beer" comment. Hey, it's just a room. What do you need all that snooty design crap when all you really need is a place to sit. Who cares how the so called art hangs on the wall, and why do you need it anyways? Oh, and that's a name brand couch? I got mine for free.

Just about anything can seem snooty if you don't understand or like it, and in everything there's someone to take it over the top. Some people get enjoyment out of matching flavors, others get enjoyment out of matching the carpets and drapes. Again, it's a big world out there, and there's room for everyone.

I had a Dogfish Head 120 Minute IPA a month or so ago, at the brew pub in Falls Church, VA. Good stuff, but, with tax and tip, I think it ran me something like $22. On the other hand, at 20% alcohol, it's the equivalent of, what, 4 or 5 regular beers?

I also have a few bottles of a Russian Imperial Stout I made in 1992. I share it only with very special friends, folks who will really appreciate it.

I also have a refigerator full of Yuengling now. Some beer is just beer, just like some chocolate is just chocolate, some cars are just cars, some food is just food, some art is just art, etc.

mmmm yuengling. That's my favourite go-to "everyday" beer.

OMG I. Love. Yuengling! Might be my all time favorite. Although Modelo Negro is pretty damn awesome too.

I would try a Hairy Eyeball just because of the name.

Yeah, Negro Modelo is the best macrobrew (for want of a better word) in North America.

When you remove the whole thing from the identity question, there's nothing weird about different kinds of beers. It's only the huge companies and mass manufacturing and governmental regulations of the 20th century that make us even think there is a 'normal' or 'basic' kind of beer and that other kinds of beer is for some Other Kind of Person.

Humans have been brewing beer a long long long long time, and no colonial brewmaster was measuring his alcohol content to an exact percentage, or worrying about marketing in the same niche-focused, identity-determining way that we do. People made ales and beers for all different reasons - seasonality, available ingredients, how well it withstood shipping and climate, how well it withstood storage, whether men women or children were going to drink it, regional culture and taste, etc.

There was a plethora of brews in the US before Prohibition - local brew culture everywhere, no two brews alike. Everything was what we'd call 'craft brew' today. One effect of Prohibition was just to end up shutting down brewers completely. Only those who could survive as underground operations, diversify, or just go into dormancy long enough survived -- and that turned out to be a very small bandwidth of wealthy well-connected brewers who we know today as the likes of Annhauser Busch and Coors. The narrow brewing styles and flavor types they could offer cheaply, on a large scale, were all that survived - mostly German-style lagers. We lost the diversity of ales and beers that our forefathers and mothers had enjoyed for a long time. In a way, we lost a serious birthright there, and we impoverished our culture through the application of Prohibition. It was a real setback. Had American beer production never experienced this setback, we wouldn't have needed a 'microbrew revolution' -- we'd never have lost our beer variety in the first place.

I personally am thrilled that America's beer culture is being rebuilt. Snobbishness is the least of my concerns or worries - good beer is just good. It tastes good. It feels good to drink. What someone else thinks about it has nothing much to do with whether or not I enjoy it. And the variety, in and of itself, makes it fun. Beers do pair differently with different foods, desserts and cheeses - everything pairs in this life. There's nothing necessarily snobbish about putting two foodstuffs together and saying "hey, these taste good together." And there's nothing inherently 'normal' or 'regular' about choosing a mass-manufactured, narrow-spectrum, yellow lager from a major corporation that managed to trounce upon and blackout the competition after Prohibition.

It's never 'just' beer - never has been.

Of the thousands of brewers alive in 1919, only 160 made it to see the end of the dry days in 1933. Today less than 20 of these pre-Prohibition brewing concerns are still producing independently, according to beerhistory.com. For those that did make it, times were not about to get easier. The strain of Prohibition had set up a struggle that would result in five decades of consolidation into what are now the three major players in the industry with one style of beer. Only in the 1980s would the microbrewery revolution bring back the diversity.

Account of some reasons why so many American beers became so much lighter and weaker in character than they were prior to the mid-20th century

Around these parts, Yuengling is known simply as "lager." It's the default beer.

I used to think that all beer was essentially the same until we visited Germany and the Czech republic. Seeing the hops growing the field, then tasting the pils made from it...comparing that to German beer and learning about the Reinheitsgebot--it was pretty cool. And while I still don't consider myself a beer snob, I'm happy to speak the "language" of beer, so to speak. Sometimes I'm in the mood for a heffeweizen, other times I want a stout. It's nice to be able to put a name to things.

Yuengling is super delicious. When I go to PA for wrestling trips, I try to bring a case back to Chicago - can't get it here.

None of us believes you actually think that, Jon, so why the pose when it comes to alcohol

Believe whatever the fuck you want to believe, dersins. NTM, you missed my point entirely, which was this: yes, some beer tastes better than others and all things being equal better tasting beer is well, better. But the first purpose of beer is to get you drunk and both strong ales and malt liquor will do that equally well, which is where your analogy to music and books breaks down. Now kindly buzz the hell off.

the first purpose of beer is to get you drunk

Most people are able to have a beer or two (or even three!) without getting drunk, jonmc. Perhaps they're failing to achieve their "purpose," but perhaps you are misunderstanding it.

the first purpose of beer is to get you drunk

Yeah, I totally don't agree with that. I often have one beer or one glass of wine with dinner. I enjoy a mild mellow slight intoxication from that, but it certainly doesn't get me drunk. I don't think drunkenness is the purpose of beer. It certainly is the result of drinking several beers, but not everyone drinks beer (or wine, or anything else) to get drunk.

Yeah, I'm gonna have to third that. Having a beer with lunch is not the same as tanking up at PJ McPootertoots on a Friday night. The purpose of beer is to be a beverage; anything after that is up to the drinker.

So, if bber didn't contain alcohol at all, would you still drink it?

Yep, I would. As long as it tasted good and not like shitty shitty O'Doulls.

What gaspode said. If it tasted the same and had the same mouthfeel, absolutely.

So, if bber didn't contain alcohol at all, would you still drink it?

I drank my fair share of NA beer when I was pregnant. It's not as good as the real thing, but there are certain foods like crabs and buffalo wings that just demand beer.

if beer didn't contain alcohol at all, would you still drink it?


Totally! Yeah, as long as you could get it tasting exactly the same as alcoholic beer (which is the really hard part, you know, since it's fermentation that creates the fragrances and complicated flavors)

It's flavorful and lively and bubbly but not sweet - it has all sorts of different taste possibilities and smoothness and astringency possibilities. All the variety you could ever want. Refreshing when you want, warm and comforting when you want that. It's a terrific thing to drink.