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Notes -
Combining the Culture War drinking thread and the weekly What Are You Reading fun thread, what are you drinking this week?
As a big bourbon fan, I'd never quite hit on a Scotch that really got me excited, but I admittedly hadn't tried that many, so I grabbed a bottle of Abelour A'bunadh this week and it really is fantastic stuff. The sherry aging is very prominent, but stops short of being oversweet, leaving tons of fruitiness and a bit of a dark chocolate finish.
On the beer end, I've laid off my usual affinity for huge barrel-aged stouts and big NEIPAs to try to cut a few calories out, instead opting for some classic Guinness Extra Stout and Founders All Day IPA. They're both... fine. I like them just fine, but I miss the sugar bomb beers.
The usual. By that I mean regular beer aka Miller High Life, Coors Banquet, Pabst, etc. It's not that I don't like imports and craft beers, it's just that I drink almost every day and they're too idiosyncratic and expensive to really work as daily drivers. I also like to keep a ton of it in my car so that when I'm skiing or whatever I always have beer I can offer everyone freely without them feeling bad about taking as much as they want. I honestly think that if these weren't mass-market American beers but some special variety brewed by Czech monks beer snobs would rave about their crisp and refreshing taste.
While we're on the subject—as a Wisconsinite I assume you can give me a satisfactory answer to this—what the hell happened to Leinenkugel's? When I was in college and craft beer was mostly mediocre, a friend of mine would regularly bring in cases of the Creamy Dark and Red Lager back from Chicago and they were both excellent. Then you could get it in Pennsylvania and it was great. Then they started selling fruity stuff, which okay, fine. Then it got hard to find. Then you could only get the Red Lager if you bought a variety pack. Then they discontinued it altogether. The situation got so dire that my brother and I went to the local master distributor to see if he could order it specially for us. Now it seems the only stuff of theirs I can find around here is all fruity stuff. I was at a pizza place Sunday and saw they had a Lemon Haze which I wanted to try because I like hazys, but was told it had been replaced with a peach sour. Okay, I like sours, let's give this one a go. It wasn't a sour. It tasted like Leinie regular (which I can't get around here for some reason) with peach flavor. I'm really disappointed that a company that once made a quality product has let itself slide so far.
Depressingly, the Leinenkugel's disaster is what "success" looks like. They were long ago purchased by Miller, who got to work on trying to make the brand more profitable. They repeatedly tried to go national, nothing really stuck, until they started in with the shandies and had immediately commercial success. It's really unfortunate, like you said, their old school beers are actually pretty solid representatives of their styles and aren't really all that common on the market these days. The sugar bombs sell though, so pretty much everything they make is soda with a slight beer spin to it.
I still buy Leinies original when I can get it, but yeah since the sale they've mostly been focused on seasonal varieties. The lemon Summer Shandy was a big hit in that series, and led to them making loads of other fruity beers. Can't blame them too much, light lager is a crowded market.
However it goes back some ways. I remember drinking a pitcher of Berry Weiss circa 2002 or so because it was on special, regretting it more and more with each sip. Finished the whole pitcher though.
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