This Is My Blood: Milwaukee's Best

 

TEN THOUGHTS ABOUT MILWAUKEE'S BEST

1. I do not remember the first Milwaukee's Best beer I ever had. Like other beers such as Keystone or Lionshead or Natty Light, certain beers come in and out of your life. I don't remember if there was a moment in time when, say, Milwaukee's Best 30-birds were cheaper than other beers, like in a beer sale at the distributor or something. I don't remember if a certain friend brought it around and influenced everyone else to buy it subsequently. My personal story with Milwaukee's Best is one without a beginning, and... I guess that doesn't bother me too much.
2. It's possible that we appreciated this beer more so than other beers of a similar ilk because of its insanely stupid and illogical nickname: BEAST. It was so dumb that it worked. We loved saying that we drank Beast.
3. Unlike other cheap beers, Milwaukee's Best never really leaned into its reputation with, say, chintzy commercials or meme-ified packaging. In fact, I remember one labeling decision during my teenage years that said to me that Milwaukee's Best was actively disinterested in the "Beast" moniker. For a while, 30-birds were adorned with the nickname "Best Chest," as in, I dunno, a "treasure chest full of tasty beer" or whatever. Obviously, the word "chest" doesn't rhyme with "beast." It only rhymes with "best." Doesn't matter—we still called a 30-bird of Milwaukee's Best the "beast cheast" for a while.
4. For some reason, I associate Beast with the act of drinking semi-warm beers in my garage, at least more so than the other cheap beers. There was one time when Burholme was practicing (Andrew R***** was there too) and we had filled a large beach bucket up with Beast and ice, which melted quickly and didn't really do its job. Still, we were eighteen, and beer was great even when it was lukewarm.
5. One weird urban legend that persisted in my younger days—mainly through the young high school drinkers I worked with at the Laf while I was in college and past my Beast days—was that Milwaukee's Best Light was actually heavier ABV-wise than Milwaukee's Best Premium, and that Milwaukee's Best Ice was actually the lightest of the three. This makes no sense, logically, and was probably the first Fake News that I ever remember sincerely bothering me.
6. The case I bought for this weekend very conspicuously features the ABV (4.8%) on the packaging, and I was theorizing with Pam that this was to address the old urban legend, and finally put it to bed. Beast Light is lighter, and Beast Ice is heavier, because that's literally what those descriptors mean. C'mon!
7. So anyways, I bought a case of Beast for this weekend. The Beast Cheast doesn't really work when you are only drinking one beer per day, but this weekend was a three-day-long exception to that 2020 rule—with friends, no responsibilities, kids back in Rockledge—so I figured this would be a fun cheap beer to drink at a reasonable pace, and maybe even play some beer pong with (Team K*** went 4-0).
8. Speaking of drinking games, Allison was telling me that there apparently exists a game called "Beaster Egg Hunt." I would assume this is an Easter egg hunt, but with cans of Milwaukee's Best. If I was told the details, I don't remember them, but I'm filing this one away for future fun, if only for the great play on words.
9. I've been continuously caught off guard while drinking some of the cheap beers I've delved into this year, especially regarding how sweet they are. I would have never associated beer with sugar if I didn't learn about adjuncts in cheap beer this year, but now that the doors of perception have been blown open, it's all I can think about—this Beast is sweet. You get used to it, especially if you consume half of a case throughout the course of a day, but those first few sips are interesting.
10. It had been like ten years since I had my last Beast, which is insane. Time flies, and all that. But I loved having the opportunity to kill a Beast Cheast once again. It's not that I have a ton of memories tied up with drinking Beast, but it's more of a general sense of nostalgia while drinking a shitty beer. Drinking beer isn't as "edgy" as it once was, mainly because I've long passed my 21st birthday, but I get to feel an approximation of that edge once again while I'm drinking BEAST. God bless it.

NOTES

BEER: Milwaukee's Best

STYLE: Adjunct Lager

ABV: 4.8%

BREWED BY: Miller Brewing Co.

LOCATION: Milwaukee, Wisconsin

PURCHASED AT: Tioga Beer

PAIRED WITH: Man... there were a lot of pairings today

GRADE: 5 pukes out of 5

 
BEER COUNT: 392 (fifteen Beasts plus 0.5 champagne with grapefruit juice)