Thinking on a Beer

I like Coors Banquet Beer. It was the first case of beer I bought when I was twenty-one. The details of the story are somewhat hazy to me at this point, but I remember something about renting Return to Oz and watching it at my friend Blayne’s parents’ house (I remember nothing else about this particular visit to Blayne’s parents’ house; I later returned for an Easter egg hunt).

My rediscovery of Banquet Beer came not as the result of nostalgia but budgetary concerns: I was laid off from my job in October and, though I had a part time job for a while and the fine state of New York has gone out of its way to support me I have, nonetheless, needed to scrimp and save where possible. This necessity for scrimping and saving has coincided nicely with a move on my part away from the more respectable/expensive brews I drank regularly in my halcyon cab-hailing days towards the kind of stuff my dad drank circa back whenever he drank beer--usually off-label Pittsburgh Brewing products such as American Light, which couldn’t possibly have been good, on any level. Basically, I think, as someone from the suburbs of Pittsburgh, I reached the point of getting sick of the fact that the vast majority of New York bars and even the bowling alleys have only craft brews and imports on tap.

The flagship beer of the down-with-craft-brews/imports crowd has, of course, been Pabst Blue Ribbon. I know PBR and have consumed many, many cans of it (many of which at Blayne’s apartment when we were in college; Banquet Beer was, to use my dad’s phrase, on special the night we went to her parents’ house to watch Return to Oz). So I am qualified to say that it is shitty-tasting. The beer most people drink when they’re not trying to make a statement but would like to save a buck and/or can’t be bothered to think of something more original to order is, of course, the King of Beers, Budweiser. But Budweiser, while not bad tasting, is just a little bit too sweet for my taste. I mean, I’ll drink it and have certainly done so to the extent that it’s safe to say that Budweiser is the beer I’ve consumed more than any other, but it’s not a beer I’ve ever taken too much delight in drinking.

Banquet Beer is different (sort of). It isn’t just the subtly retro design (adopted in 2008 to (re)connect drinkers to the brand’s actually fairly impressive history: first brewed in 1873; not available east of the Mississippi until the late 1970s; the commodity at the heart of the Burt Reynolds flick Smokey and the Bandit)--though I will admit to being a fan. The taste is crisp (when the beer is cold), not particularly malty or hoppy but detectably bitter, strongly carbonated, vaguely metallic, with a hint of corn: basically like drinking cold, bitter, carbonated, vaguely metallic corn water. Which I guess is what Coors Banquet Beer (not unlike Budweiser) is. It is American beer best drunk out of a can. Have I mentioned the subtly retro design?

The most important thing, I guess, is that Coors Banquet Beer looks and tastes (and costs) the way I imagined beer would when I was growing up. As I get older, I guess, I’m finding myself in search of a path home. Not necessarily back to Pittsburgh, but, certainly, to a place where beer was cheap, easily drinkable, and more involved in the business of masculinity than hop index.

I don’t want my beer to challenge me; I want it to refresh me, give me a buzz, and, if possible, have a cool, subtly retro design that makes me feel like I’m part of a long tradition of free-thinking but conventionally masculine beer drinkers. I want to be able to drink several cans over the course of a football game without becoming belligerent. I like craft brews as much as the next guy, but, when I’m home in August, unemployed, sweating, debating whether or not I should put on a shirt and go around the corner and buy a slice of pizza from Carmine’s, a craft brew feels heavy-handed. Coors Banquet Beer feels just right.