Hip Hops: June 2007 Archives
Happy Fathers Day, dad dudes! It’s the only day of the year where your kids won’t give you a hard time for finishing the whole Sunday paper on the pot or commandeering the remote control! And you deserve it. But is it weird to have Richard Nixon to thank for your special day? From what we understand, the dick proclaimed Fathers Day a permanent, national day of observance back in 1972, right when Vietnam was freaking you and your buddies out.
What better way to celebrate our dads, we thought, than to toast to them — their support, their advice and all their lessons in sensitive masculinity — with a high-class glass of malt liquor.
It may just be the one day of the year where beer can really say “I love you.” Evan looks back fondly on turning sixteen in Berlin, Germany and sharing a couple of cold Warsteiners with his father, Roger, at a Steglitz beer garden. And Alex holds memories dear to his heart of dad, Billy Brown, drinking the occasional King Cobra 40 oz. (That classy brand of brew is a whole other post entirely.)
So, this weekend we cracked a frosty brown bottle of Dad’s Little Helper, a malt liquor from Rogue Brewery — think Mickey’s brewed to strict purity laws. The kitsch value of this beer makes it as corny as our dads’ jokes: off-color and endearing. No, literally off-color: Dad’s Little Helper, true to form, is piss yellow. Held up to the sun, it looks like a foughty through and through. There’s no head to speak of, no nose save for scant scents of sweet starch. The carbonation is surprisingly subtle. And the stuff feels strong. As for taste, the syrupy corn and malt flavors hit the middle of the mouth nice and straight-forward. The result is a familiar foughty taste without the sting of acrid booze. If Rogue set out to imitate, and perfect, the actual taste of mediocre malt liquor, by George they have done it. For the most part the beer is pleasantly smooth and guzzlely, assuming it is frosty.
Even if your dad has better taste in beers than this, we think its worth bonding over. For memory’s sake if nothing else. Cheers dads!
Dairy Pairy: Chive Double Gloucester
Soundtrack: Billy Joel's Glass House
If we were skiing down a black diamond hill in the Alps and we hit a tree trunk and blacked out unconscious and woke up buried in a snowdrift with no use of our legs and an aneurysm that was slowly filling our skull with blood, it would all be A-OK if only a St. Bernard rescue dog was standing over us with a barrel of St. Bernardus Abt. 12 around his neck, the spigot frothing forth.
This premium Belgian brewery, with its tagline “Heavenly nectar within reach,” churns out biggy ABV bubble brews with extremely high fermentation levels, meaning fruity and yeasty kicks — OG Belgians to be sure. Pouring these bastards takes foreverrrrrrrr, just cuz the froth is so kicked up. The wait, however, is worth it.
The Abt 12, St. Bernardus’ highest achievement and priciest export, is a smooth and crisp but extremely dark ivory-colored pinnacle of traditional brewing. There are notes of ripe bananas and lemons and a yeasty, earthy nose. The taste is like pure gold looted from the layman by dirty, stinking drunks of the cloth. The irony is this shit is so good, we'd be giving ourselves concussions just to be rescued.
Dairy Pairy: Aragones
Soundtrack: Darkane’s Rusted Angel
