What is your favorite recovery beer?

Keystone Light

Shiner Bock

less filling taste great wrote:

Bud light for me.

everybody has different prefs and tastes, so there is no "wrong" answer, but i never understood the attraction to bud light, it has a bit of a "tin" taste to it and not much else.

i think miller lite has more taste, but not much taste.

both are so bland as to be nearly tasteless.

when i was in the Jaycees we had a competition every year where about 6 beers were lined up. people were told what beers were present and had to identify the beers.

EVERYONE, and by that i mean EVERYONE began the process by pointing out that he would not have any trouble matching up the names of the beers with the beer drank.

virtually no one got all of them right, and the vast vast majority got less than 50% right.

the beers used were usually: miller high life, miller lite, bud, bud light and then two others. they were always common beers, that people would have experience with.

it was very common for the person who said they "hate" miller products to select a miller product as their favorite.

the funniest thing that happened over and over again was some guy telling his gf how much he knew about beer, how he can tell the difference between bud light and miller lite etc... this would be followed up with him saying he would never drink _______, because it taste like crap and so he always drank _______, which was what he told her he was drinking. When the names of the beers were shown, it often turned out the "crap beer" he would never drink was the one he liked best, and the one he drank, was the one he thought tasted the worst.

i came to the conclusion virtually everyone drinks beer for reasons other than taste. marketing plays THE KEY role in beer drinking, marketing is far more important than the actual taste of the product.

i helped run the competition, a couple times a year for several years and believe very firmly very few people know much about beer, and almost everyone thinks they do.

Whatever beer my friends have and I can take it from them.

Consumer Reports recently published an article on light beers. Michelob's did well in their test taking the top 3 spots...Michelob Ultra Amber, Michelob Light, and Michelob Ultra. Then Coors Light, followed by Sam Adams light, and then I think Bud Light. I'll have to look at the magazine at home. All the Millers scored pretty poorly. I think Busch Light was up there, in the top 10 for sure, which was surprising. The bottom two were Corona Light and Beck's Light. I think other Euro-light beers like Heinoken Light and Amstel Light were way down the list as well.

The comparison tasting you mentioned sounds fun. I'll have to arrange something like that this summer and see how it turns out.

Dogfishhead 90 Minute I.P.A.

Hands down the best bottled beer in the universe.

A nice wheat beer for me.

German hefeweizen if it's available, or Blue Moon or a micro equivalent.

I guess I'd go for the beer which is most like water. So the answer would be Rolling Rock.

Dusty Bones wrote:

I guess I'd go for the beer which is most like water. So the answer would be Rolling Rock.

Rolling Rock Light is even more like water.

Guiness, but not too cold though

Fat Tire has always connoted Colorado for me, and hence running. The last time I went "skiing" there, it was 70 degrees, so I spent most of my time running and drinking Fat Tire, which wasn't available back home.

corona

drinking used to be more fun than a tub full of tits, but alas, no more for me (although it would have been a case of Coors Light in one sitting.

right now it's a nice, strong cigarette and some fresh lemonade from which i can't keep myself after a nice long run...

sam w wrote:

i came to the conclusion virtually everyone drinks beer for reasons other than taste. marketing plays THE KEY role in beer drinking, marketing is far more important than the actual taste of the product.

i helped run the competition, a couple times a year for several years and believe very firmly very few people know much about beer, and almost everyone thinks they do.

Look, I see what you are saying, but you were comparing all crap beers to begin with. I agree, there is NOT much difference between Bud, Miller, Coors, Busch, etc. That does not surprise me that the supposed connesieurs of piss beers could not tell the difference. But if you threw in beers with markedly different tastes (different styles too of course), of course people could tell the difference. Who can't tell a Guiness from a Corona from a Sam Adams lager from a Heineken from an IPA ? That should be easy. Some of these beers have very unique flavors, so when someone says they love Guiness more than Heineken, I don't think it is marketing. The beers taste very different.

Now as far as shit beers go, I agree that Miller is probably actually a little better than the others. On a 100 degree day at a cookout, after you've run, and you really want a beer that won't immediately go to your head or fill you up, and you plan on drinking more beer the rest of the night, and taste is not a priority for now, a 16 oz Miller Lite in a can is pretty good. Yeah, it tastes like water, but for that moment, I WANT something fairly watery to re-hydrate me and buzz me at the same time. But you need the can, because the can actually adds a tiny bite to the flavor. A bottle will be just too bland. Go with the can.

fast chick wrote:

Pabst Blue Ribbon before and after a good run

I... I think I'm falling in love..

not gonna happen wrote:

Look, I see what you are saying, but you were comparing all crap beers to begin with. I agree, there is NOT much difference between Bud, Miller, Coors, Busch, etc. That does not surprise me that the supposed connesieurs of piss beers could not tell the difference. But if you threw in beers with markedly different tastes (different styles too of course), of course people could tell the difference. Who can't tell a Guiness from a Corona from a Sam Adams lager from a Heineken from an IPA ? That should be easy. Some of these beers have very unique flavors, so when someone says they love Guiness more than Heineken, I don't think it is marketing. The beers taste very different.

i understand what you are saying and generally agree. tyically one of the beers in the taste test was a guiness or sam adams, which is pretty easy to figure that one. keep in mind, the people who drink miller/bud/coors...were the ones that said they could tell the difference from the other mass produced beers.

the beers most people drink are the buds, miller lites etc and those people have pretty fierce loyalties to their chosen brand.

part of why the testing was done (other than to raise a couple bucks - it was a competition and if you got them all right there was a prize) was because everyone said it would be easy. truth is, it is not.

when i was in college, wednesday was when most of the bars had "import nights." bottles of import beers were much cheaper.

some friends and i went to "the avalanche" a bar that was famous for 50 cent "red white and blue" beers. rwb is a brand of cheap beer. 50 cent blues were available everyday. on this day we took turns getting imports, but kept buying one guy 50 cent blues. we all discussed how much better the imports were and how easy it was to tell the difference. he was the most vocal about this.

at the 'lanch, all beers were poured into cups. the mgmt was trying to stop a long tradition of breaking bottles on the floor after you drank the beer. so everyone got their beer in a cup.

to this day we still kid him about thinking hewas drinking corona, guiness, becks...when he had a 50 cent blue.

20/20 ran a story one time with a similar theme: yuppie Manhattan vodka connoisseurs who insisted on Grey Goose or somesuch, and who swore had a better taste than more middlebrow vodkas, "failed" taste test after taste test, opting for Skye or Stolle or whatever.

On arelated note, the same show had art critics and connoisseurs who could not reliably or consistently distinguish between works by name artists that sold for the hundreds of thousands of dollars and works by kindergarteners.

Goose Island 312

sam w, you have inspired me to attempt a similar blind taste test. I don't profess to know my beers, but I am curious to see which cheap macro lager I prefer. How's this for a lineup: Stroh's, Labatt Blue, Molson Canadian, Bud, Miller, Michelob. I don't drink lite beers so those are out of the question.

BTW, as to the topic of this thread, my favorite recovery beer is a bottle of my own homebrew.

Lorenzo the Magnificent wrote:

20/20 ran a story one time with a similar theme: yuppie Manhattan vodka connoisseurs who insisted on Grey Goose or somesuch, and who swore had a better taste than more middlebrow vodkas, "failed" taste test after taste test, opting for Skye or Stolle or whatever.

On arelated note, the same show had art critics and connoisseurs who could not reliably or consistently distinguish between works by name artists that sold for the hundreds of thousands of dollars and works by kindergarteners.

I saw that vodka segment. Funny stuff. It was nice to see those self absorbed types who swore by their brand and would so much extra for it not have a clue about any difference in taste betwee that brand and all the other much cheaper ones. That was good.

But again, there are many different styles of beer. So if one swears by Guiness over say a German Oktoberfest, they probably have their valid taste reasons. On other hand, telling the difference between some of the Oktoberfest versions might take a refined sense of taste (though I know could nail at least some).

Good topic.