Friday Beer Disaster...er...Blog

This pretty much sums up this week's selection:


This week, I had the distinct displeasure of sampling Crazy Ed's Cave Creek Chili Beer.

I provide you with a picture of this beer so that you will know what to avoid. Consider the inclusion of this picture more of a mug shot than a photo. Like when you go to the Post Office, they show you mug shots so you know who to avoid and more importantly, who to report if you see them. Same concept.

There was nothing redeemable about this beer.

It poured a urine-sample yellow; the kind of urine sample that says you're well-hydrated. Pale yellow, little warm ring of fizz around the top. That kind. Strangely, as it poured, it had a slight greenish hue to it, most assuredly from the festering chili pepper slowly rotting in the borttom of the beer. The worm on the bottom of a tequila bottle is macho. The chili pepper rotting in this beer? Offensive.

All I smelled was chili. There was a vague insipid lager smell, but mostly, this was completely overshadowed by the chili. This should have been where I drew the line.

The taste was...polluted. Awful. All redeemable tastes of malt and barley were burned to a crisp by the overpowering chili taste. And by redeemable tastes, I mean like drinking an ice-cold Busch Lite at a tailgate on a freezing morning in late November. That kind of redeemable taste: just glad you can't taste it. Here's where they really get you, though. This beer coats not only your mouth but your entire throat with a burning rage that is chili pepper. Remember how you use beer to put out the flames of, say, a hot bite of wasabi or some toasty Indian curry. Well, this beer is that food and there is simply no hope.

Understand: it's not that it's hot. Hot is fine. It's that this tastes like spoiled cheerios covered in red papper flakes.

This beer is so undrinkable that it is tragically funny. I look back on this disastrous occasion and chuckle about it, the same way I do when I look back on that time an RPG went off over our heads or that time I totaled my car.

Stay away from this beer.

I imagine that in Hell, this is what they serve.