Beers for All Your Slow Friends

A lot of my beer drinking is done in the closed environment of the DCU Center, where we watch the Sharks, and as is the case in many arenas, the selection is mostly limited to the major breweries.  My options are usually Bud, Bud Light, Coors Light, Miller Light, Heineken, and occasionally Michelob Ultra.  To their unending credit, the DCU Center has started serving beers from the local (and excellent!) Wormtown Brewery as well as Sam Adams* in their Charter Zone.  This is not entirely the fault of the DCU Center.  They have advertising and stock agreements with the various companies, and those agreements dictate how and where the beers are sold in the building.  That's a whole other problem.  What I'd like to talk about is how maybe, just maybe, we might be able to see the ascendance of the Wormtown Breweries of the world, because the big breweries are clearly wigged out by the fact that people are starting to realize that beer doesn't have to taste like a foot.

The clearest indicator of this concern that non-boring beer might be on the rise is shit like this: 

From top left: beer for your slow friend, beer for your concussed friend, beer for your clumsy friend, and beer for...your friend who doesn't know to hold onto their beer?

Whenever I see a commercial for one of these bottles, I feel like chugging a case of Brawndo and checking to see if President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho has been elected yet.  Coors Light is my particular favorite.  Would you like to know the most efficient way to figure out if your beer is cold?  Pick up the damned can.  It's literally been working since the beginning of time.  Babies can do this.  However, Coors Light not only thought people could use a hand figuring this out, but thought they needed more detailed help and rolled out a can that has a "cold" bar and a "super cold" bar.  Here's a question.  If you went to a bar, and every time you ordered a drink, you had to listen to the bartender call you a moron, in great detail and at top volume so the whole bar heard them, would you go back to that bar?  Of course you wouldn't, because that bar would be a shitty place with a douchebag behind it, and no one wants to deal with that shit when all you want in life is a beer.  Coors Light is that bar.  STOP GOING TO THAT BAR.  

The other bottles have their own weird stuff; the Miller Lite vortex bottle is apparently for people that never learned to tilt the glass as you pour a beer (or, you know, just drink out of the bottle), and the Bud Light bottle...?????? If you need to rely on your beer bottle for entertainment, you probably have more problems than a little square of personalizable space on a sub-par beer can solve.  But what is consistent across all of these is that the beer itself is not being marketed, but rather the container it's in.  That's a sad statement on consumerism and the way we approach beer, isn't it?  "Buy this thing, it's shiny."  It seems to me that these beer companies acknowledge that their product cannot compete on a taste level, which to me only says good things about the smaller breweries who have begun to be more visible in recent years.  I hope so, not only because I would like some non-gross beer to be available, but also because I think business is most productive when many smaller businesses are able to compete amongst each other and strive to create the best products possible.  

All that said, I'd like to commend one beer for their searing honesty.  That beer has chosen to market their product with this spokesperson: 

Smooth like Keith Stone.

Exactly, Keystone Light, exactly.  Your skunky-ass beer tastes EXACTLY like this sheisty hipster-failure looks.  Well done.  Not sure if it's actually good to point this out, but...you know.  Bravo?

* NB: This is not to say Sam Adams is not a major brewery, but rather that it produces beer that tastes less like piss-water than the others noted.  This is less an assessment of quality and more an identification of the fact that Sam Adams at least has a flavor, rather than going for "generic beer."