Beermergency: Four Tips for Surviving a Terrible Draught List

It happens to all of us eventually. You’re not some intolerable beer geek who won’t shut up about obscure microbrews or anything, but you enjoy a good beer, and you feel like you’ve really earned one.

Then it happens: you don’t pick the restaurant and wind up at some miserable chain. Or you’re in the middle of nowhere. Either way, you look at the draught list and it brings nothing to mind so much as a vast sea of horse urine.

Here’s how you get a good brew without coming off like a total jerk, and put in descending order of preference.

Look For the Local

Anywhere you go in the country, there’s a regional or state beer that’s usually pretty good. If you’re in Pennsylvania, there’s Yuengling, which has two advantages: it’s good, and it’s cheaper than even the worst swill the “Natural” company can inflict on us. The Midwest has Leinenkugel, which has everything from the mellow, delicious Sunset Wheat to the Berry Weiss, which is basically what happens when a wine cooler pretends it’s a beer. New England has Sam Adams, Harpoon, and Magic Hat, because all there is to do in New England is brood, drink beer, and bitch about snow, unless it’s spring, in which case you bitch about the Sox.

In short, if you don’t recognize it, it’s probably local, and worth a shot. At the very least, it’ll have more alcohol content than the macrobrews. It also has the added advantage of making your waitress happy; everybody likes local spirit.

Look For the Foreign Beer

One upside to America’s melting pot heritage and ongoing status as a beacon of freedom to the peoples of the world: They bring their beer with them.

True, some foreign beer is terrible. You’ll notice nobody’s in this huge hurry to bring anything the French have brewed to American shores. It’s worse than their hip-hop, and that’s really saying something. But most of it is at least decent stuff. Most nations pride themselves on having a lowest common beer denominator better than America so they can lord that over tourists when the tourists get all uppity about how their civil rights are better. Except in the case of the British; they have superb beer because everything in Britain is boiled, fried or both, and you’ve got to have something tasty on a regular basis.

OK, so Nova Schin or Abita or Tsingtao are one step up above beer with color changing cardboard boxes or beer with citrus flavoring dumped in it…but they’re still better than the alternative.

See What They’ve Got In Bottles and Cans

One huge advantage to the annoying microbrew trend in the ’90s, when every jackass and his mom thought he was a brewer because he’d bought Baby’s First Brewing Kit from the Sharper Image, is that there were so many of them that once the fad collapsed, enough stuck around and kept turning out the brewskis that everywhere in a fifty-mile radius feels obligated to at least keep a six-pack handy. It’s guilt-trip beer.

Even canned beer is starting to not suck: the cans are being treated with new coatings, which means you don’t primarily taste rust when you drink out of cans, and people are even putting craft beer in cans. For example, the Oskar Blues brewery in Colorado puts out their beer entirely in cans, and they’ve got everything from a tasty IPA to a stout that’s intentionally packaged to look like motor oil, it’s that thick.

So check that list: At the very least, if it’s terrible, you’ve learned something.

Go For The Beer Cocktail

This is the final option because depending on where you are, this might get you beaten up, but if all else fails, do what man has done with terrible booze since time immemorial: Mix it with something that tastes better.

Most beer cocktails are, essentially, boilermakers. True, there are also shandies, which mix beer with a soft drink like lemonade, but the objective here isn’t to get you drunk more slowly.

Basically, look behind the bar and see what’s high quality in the liquor department. Even the worst dive will have some Jack Daniels handy. Dump, drink and repeat.

Because, let’s face it, if you can’t get a good beer, it’s well past time to get wasted.