AFFORDABILITY: You know, this and the Destroyability category sort of came together in my thinking as I was drinking upon this beer. This is like super hippie beer, with Sierra Nevada Pale Ale as your basic launching point for hippie beers. Anchor Steam is like high-level hippie beer, for those too kind to drink simple Sierra Nevada. And I used to date such a hippie girl, and I remember her being all excited about this special Merry Christmas and Happy New Year beer, coming out once a year. The price was like $9 a 6-pack, which is high for getting drunk, especially when, contrary to super hippie propaganda, good beer doesn't get you drunker than shitty beer. But all good beers tend to be in that $8 to $9 a 6-pack range now, and most good beer sucks. Being this one, even with my anti-super hippie prejudices, turned out to be a good time, so I can't completely hate on it's price. Plus, around the holidays, motherfuckers like me be blowing money left and right, on shit far more useless than expensive beer, making $9 not seem like so much. 3 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: I am a drinker, maybe even a drunkard, so drinking beer probably doesn't have the effect on me that it does on many. I would say a majority of folks can't keep up with me when I put my heart into knocking 'em back, and I don't say that with pride so much as stating the fact. It's actually embarrassing that my body lacks the physical emergency shutdown mode most folks have and I can easily be stumbling around doing naked sentons on unsuspecting people after 25 beers whereas the average person would have retired to the nearest couch by that point. But I will tell you this about the Anchor Steam special seasonal ale - it knocked me on my ass. After half of my third, I was feeling silly like a teenager, and by the time I'd plowed through the sixer, I was fairly sloppy. We had some green sugar cookies the kids had made that I was eating on, fucking around with the fire, and I was definitely pretty damn sloppy, but in a good way, not all malevolently drunk like Milwaukee’s Best Ice would do. I felt good and drunk, which being at least a third generation alcoholic (I don’t know shit about my grandpa’s dad, so it might go further down the family tree), feeling GOOD and DRUNK is, how you say, nice. Plus, the beer was one of the better tasting beers I’ve had in a coon’s age. Too many holiday beers end up trying to taste like Sierra Nevada clones (probably because of the aforementioned hippie demographic, which makes sense because who has plenty of discretionary income but also likes to get fucked up other than hippies), but this one tasted like the good spices like a pie and not like a handful of dried out hops. 5 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: The label’s pretty weak, some green pine tree looking all rural NorCal and shit. But it is a light green with a nice red cursive lettering plus green fake handwritten font telling the 411 on a cream background. Subtle holiday style, unlike most beers with bright colors and stupid shit all over their bottles. Also, the label explains this is the 34th special ale, different every year, and it makes me feel good, like I was part of something special. So by being weak, it ended up being better, this stupid beer bottle label did. 4 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: The Anchor Brewing Company, of San Francisco, which is probably some trendy uber-annoying shit to west coast people. But being most all of my life has been spent within half a day’s drive of the Atlantic Ocean, to me it’s just some company that makes hippie beer, since hippies used to all glorify weed from northern California as well. I cannot fault the Anchor Brewing Company for that, as they seem independent from where I sit, and most of those I’ve met who tout their products tend to be chronic lawbreakers anyways (chronic is applicable both traditionally and slangishly), so I have to give A.B.C. the benefit of the doubt. 4 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: Dude, it was Christmas week, I was using a credit card I should have shredded into bits last year to buy stupid presents for my children when we should probably just be hanging out eating penny candy and saving up for a woodstove for Maw like on Little House on the Prairie. But instead I was going deeper into a debt that I may not be able to survive being the economy is fucked and I’m not the most presentable job applicant in the world, and burdened by multiple chips on my shoulder that keep me from putting on a presentable face for authoritarian types, often in spite of myself. So this beer getting me drunk during the depressing consumer frenzy of an American Christmas is pretty goddamned awesome. When we have flipped houses and refinanced ourselves into oblivion, will history regard our form of representative democracy as the same failure that Russian communism was? Seems to me both ended up being pretty perverted versions of what they claimed to be, so it as probably man’s inherent perversion that fucked it all up not so much political belief system. But what do I know? I’m a fucking drunkard housepainter. 5 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 4 & 1/5 STARS!
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