New Scaratings

The Highlands Grille in Kennesaw GA where I play most of my trivia redid their menu.

I walked in this week and along with the food menu, that handed me a huge beer menu.

They have a lot of microbrews on taps, and they lovingly, and at length, described each draft beer, along with specs and awards.

"Unique".. "light-bodied"... "blueberries".. "hint of"...."1998 World Beer Festival Bronze Medal".

A pretty long paragraph for each beer.

Now, they have an ice cold $5.00 pitcher of PBR on draft, so I hadn't paid much attention to their $4.00 to $7.00 pint beer.

So, I started reading down the list.

Got down to the Pabst, and instead of a loving paragraph it simply said:

"Pabst Blue Ribbon - When Price Matters".

I laughed a lot.

Lots of places would have shuttered if it wasn't for the "value menu".

I don't know if anyone else has been to the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, but I have gone a couple times as part of my job. (Yeah. ) As the major breweries in the U.S. are huge sponsors of the event, there are several categories designed specifically for their crappy yellow beers to win. Whenever PBR grabs a medal, which happens every two or three years, every single one of the hundreds of craft brewers in the hall cheers louder than at any other time the whole weekend. It's truly an impressive sound.

The only thing cooler is the bagpipe procession that opens the event, but you have to be in the hall already for the effect, so only brewery workers and volunteers get to hear it.

One of the bravest, and exceptionally successful, beer business moves I have seen, was at my old home bar the Lewiston Village Pub. A somewhat spartan place in an unspectacular suburb of blue-collar personified Buffalo, it opened with 20 taps and owners who refused to put a single macrobrew on any of them. They also sold every draft, from Great Lakes Pilsner (the closest to Big Yellow they originally sold) to Ommergang Three Philosophers, at the same price - $4 a pint or $6 a 25 oz.

Piss-beer drinkers bought bottles or nothing.

They expanded the place twice within two years, packed the place to the rafters daily, and never put anything from AB or Coors etc on tap until they went to 40 drafts.

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Please forgive any strange typos or grammar errors. I am typically using voice recognition software to enter text, and sometimes editing works differently from how I expect.

SCAR, how big are the pitchers...? If they ain't those little tiny ones, five bucks sounds like a good deal. Pabst ain't bad, but even if the deal was for Blatz or even Olde Frothingslosh, I'd buy them at that price.

Check out "What'll You Have?":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvhVz5hPfAA

p.s. After two mugs of beer, the only thing that really matters is what they cost.

p.p.s. It looks like English majors, who specialized in creative writing, are finding work composing exotic descriptions of beers for bar drink menus.

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"The game is afoot."

I saw something in the PBR ad that I've never seen before in a beer commercial in this country: a person actually drinking beer. Amazing.

My BWW has PBR on tap for $2.75 for 24 oz.

Every now and then they decide to stop carrying different microbrews and put them on sale for $1 a bottle.

Last week it was a hefe from Magic Hat--Circus Boy. Drank them right out of it. The week before was Duquesne, out of the old Rolling Rock brewery that was vacated by AB after they bought them and started brewing somewhere else..NY maybe.

Went through many a Lake Erie brew for a dollar earlier in the year, too.

Waiting for the Chimay to drop to $1...EGADS!!!

Last year I bought a four-pack of Chimay Bleu at the grocery store that was marked at $4.99. I told the cashier that that was probably the single bottle charge but when she scanned it I was only charged the $4.99 for the whole pack. So I went back and bought the other one that was on the shelf too.

Not quite down to your buck a bottle price threshold but I was very pleased. Alas they fixed the price when they restocked.

How big are the pitchers ?

One I may get a little tipsy; two too fast and Bigdog drives home.

Reckon about a standard size, but certainly not overlarge... they sell pitchers of everything else as well in the same size.

And Cloudy... you can smoke in the bar after 10 pm... you should come down for a visit.

I just might do it... I'll talk to Helene about it, and will let you know if we can make the trip down to see you and BIGDOG. It would be good to see you guys again, and get to serenade Nina with my version of "Carolina in the Morning".

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"The game is afoot."

I always thought there was a law against anyone drinking alcohol in an alcohol commercial.

You are right, for some decades now the government will not allow beer advertisements to show someone drinking beer that is being advertised on TV. However, back in the old days, when we were free, people drinking beer in commercials was okay on television. How stupid it is today that the government doesn't allow beer commercials to show people drinking beer in commercials. Seeing that beer commercials are still allowed on television, what does the NAZI Nanny State think those, who watch them, will think all of that beer is going to be used for...? It probably cost several millions of tax payer's money for them to come up with justification to disallow showing beer being consumed on TV ads. From personal experience, I will say that this government ban has accomplished NOTHING, and it was just a stupid waste of money to enact the ban.

If I had the ability to warn people what might be coming next back then, I would have said that this is just the beginning of an intrusive government, that someday will be telling you how big a soft drink they will allow you to buy in New York City. I have not mentioned many other things that the government has done to control our lives, that not all that long ago, we were allowed to decide for ourselves. The insanity of what the government is doing to us is only surpassed by our insanity to sit by and let them do it to us.

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"The game is afoot."

Same deal in Canada. Buxom models can walk by in thongs, but apparently quaffing a brew is what ruffles prudes and warps kids. It's kinda like car companies not being allowed to show the vehicles being driven

But on the flip side, this kind of restriction spares us the sight of fifty- and sixty-somethings getting it on to peddle boner pills, so let's not be too hasty to complain

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