A Review of Two Beers Built for Tailgating

I know we haven’t been dating that long, but somehow I feel I can be totally honest with you. When I revealed my secret love affair with Mickey’s Malt Liquor , you didn’t flinch. When I bared my soul to make highly questionable racist jokes, you didn’t rebuke me (though you probably should have, filthy racist). It’s why I feel safe sharing something that could potentially out me as only being 98% of the superman that most of you believe me to be.

I don’t care about football. Not at all.

Note that I didn’t say I dislike football. Football didn’t break up my parent’s marriage or try to give me badtouch or anything like that. As a sport I like it just fine. I’ll even back it when European upstarts insist that soccer is more deserving of the name. Foreigners, you can’t call it a sport if it ends in a tie. That’s called a “scrimmage.” (**Editor’s Note: Real football can end in a tie also. What the hell are you talking about, Cheesman?)

Soccer players: Great athletes, better actors

The problem is that I don’t follow any teams. It’s hard to get invested in a sport when the Tampa Bay Who Gives A Fucks are playing the Atlanta Anonymous ‘Roidmongers. I see no reason to claim allegiance to a local franchise when virtually none of the players are from here anyway. Even when I attend a game, I’m usually lending my support elsewhere:

Seriously though, they do important work over there

However, there is one aspect of team-worship that I get excited about: tailgating. I love the culture of people gathering together to prepare for drinking and hollering by drinking and hollering. Tailgating not only inspires community, but innovation. The logistics of partying solely out of your car requires an adaptability and creativity that Americans are more than happy to waste time on:

Bonus: the added weight of the grill really pulls the back end through turns

If you’re going to stoop to doing something so un-American as driving an export, the least you can do to compensate is convert it into a grill. A deep fryer would be more American, but the logistics are a bit hairier.

Man, all this charbroiled cholesterol sure makes a fella thirsty. If only there was a way to combat it with some alcohol and high fructose corn syrup (preferably blended in equal measure) while emitting festive plumes of CO2 into the atmosphere…

The beauty of this design is if you can control your pull-start mower, you’ve already been trained up for this blender. In fact the only thing that could make it better would be an actual mower residing beneath it so you could multitask.

After a full afternoon of cured meats and alcoholic slush, you’re not going to want to move very much. You could set up a lawn chair, but why do that when you can pay ten times more to sit on a steel-reinforced pulley system?

As wonderful as tailgating is, it is virtually assured that shitty macrolager will accompany it. That’s not unreasonable, though. A tailgate beer is ordinarily just something refreshing to drink that will chill easily and keep some semblance of a buzz rolling. A more potent beer runs the risk of spiking the delicate B.A.C. balancing act you’ve been titrating for hours, nudging you from Vocal Fan to Guy Who Choked A Pretzel Vendor For Wearing Opposing Team Colors.

Courtesy of Tailgate Brewing in San Diego, you may no longer have to choose between craftbrew snobbery and your desire to keep beer flowing toward the Boisterous Hollering centers of the fan-brain. They have released two beers specifically constructed to bridge that gap. They’re slightly higher in alcohol content than your average light beer, but not dramatically. They’re even canned so your His and Hers NASCAR beer cozies need not be neglected.

Blacktop Blonde (5.0% ABV)

This is normally the part of the article where I detail the appearance of the beer in semi-poetic verse. I realize it’s the kind of beer pornography that only appeals to a select few, but nerds like me love to obsess whether a beer meets all the breed standards. However, for a beer that demands you drink it while pre-gaming, it seems disingenuous to decant it into a tulip glass and swirl it about. Therefore all reviews of this beer will be conducted in situ.

(For the unschooled, that’s Latin for “in a bunny rabbit cozy”).

This beer looks like a can of beer. The smells are definitely more prominent than I would expect for a blonde ale, favoring wet grain and the lemon aromas akin to those in cleaning products that try to perfume the germs into submission.

The flavors in this beer are a step up from the usual pre-game fare without being overly aggressive. The lemon flavor, which again rings a bit tangy and artificial, dominates the experience. Beneath that I catch a light spiciness and some herbal/grassy hop notes. It finishes relatively dry and prickly.

This is by far not my favorite style of beer, but its advantages over the usual yellow fizzy fare are immediately evident. It would probably be a great beer for a tailgater looking to step up their game, but it’s not something I’d ordinarily seek out.

Grade: B-

Hefeweizen (4.9% ABV)

This beer has a metallic yellow luster and is fairly cylindrical. Man, reviewing the can sure makes this gig easier.

The aroma in this one is pretty light, with hints of straw and grain (and aluminum, natch), but none of the wackier smells that can come with hefeweizens. The flavor is likewise a bit askew from the rank and file hefeweizens, but not a complete departure. There’s a solid citrus note and some light spiciness that gives this one its character, but the finish is more dry and bitter than I would expect. The mouthfeel is thin to moderately full with a considerable fizziness that is a little off-putting.

I think this beer suffered a bit by constraining it to the can. On draught it would likely open up a bit more and dissipate some of that effervescence that overtook the feel of the beer. The drier finish is probably optimal for the tailgating experience, but it doesn’t have the traditional hefeweizen character I was looking for.

Grade: C-