This Is My Blood: Hard Rock Hard Seltzer Hurricane

I recently had lunch at one of the local bars here in Center City, and discovered something pretty swell on their beer menu. I appreciate you allowing me to unearth this crusty-ass PoYB beer column so that I have an opportunity to tell you about it.

The bar was Cavanaugh's. No, not the one in University City—I've been exploring UC bars recently, but I'm pretty this one closed during the pandemic. No, not the one on the banks of the Delaware River—I haven't been back since I was 22 years old and peeing on the bar every time I went up to order a drink. No, not the Headhouse Square one—shit, I'm just realizing now there are four different Cavanaugh's?! Nah, I'm talking about the one tucked into a sleepy portion of Sansom Street, close to Rittenhouse.

I was with another one of the 38 current PoYB certified Contributors, though due to concerns about employers finding out about any sort of liquid lunch, I will refrain from saying his/her/their name. No one involved with the blog works at Sterling Cooper, as far as I know. Drinking while on the clock isn't cool! Don't do it!

Sorry, sorry, here's the lede: Cavanaugh's has on their beer menu an option called "Mystery Beer." If you order the Mystery Beer, the bartender reaches into a fridge and pulls out a beer can or bottle that has been pre-wrapped in a brown paper bag, and gives you one at random.

It was an utter delight ordering from this option for more than a couple reasons. Primarily, it allows me to put my skill of "I'll drink anything" into a positive light. Doesn't matter if I get a nice IPA, a bottle of mid-shelf mass-produced lager, or a motherfucking hard seltzer produced by a hotel chain, I'm going to drink it. Unless they are handing out bottles on whisky in those bags—at no point did I see any indication that that was even a remote possibility—then I'm going to enjoy what I'm drinking.

 

And I get to enjoy the surprise too! If you didn't think the simple act of being handed a beer could be improved upon, then you are wrong, because now imagine being handed a beer but still being held in suspense as to what beer it actually is. Taking that first sip becomes a spectacle. I really enjoyed the experience.

 

Finally, there's a matter of simple math and probability. The Mystery Beers were $3.50. This was by far the cheapest beer option on the menu. The "shit beers" of the American Adjunct Lager Industry (Miller, Bud, Coors) were all available at $4.50 for a can. The cheapest drafts were Miller Lite and Bud Light at $5 a pop. Not much else was below $6.50 (though they did have Kenwoods at $5/can, if that's your thing). The WORST CASE SCENARIO, in considering price points, is that you are getting handed a Miller Lite randomly in a bag and saving one dollar. But the law of probability says that the worst case scenario isn't going to happen all the time. Sometimes you'll get a better beer, and thus will save even more money.

 

The rules of the Mystery Beer are as follows: "No returns, no trade-ins. CASH ONLY." I understand the no return/trade-in policy. That makes sense when you are dealing with randomization. Clearly, if the rule wasn't set in place, then you could just keep handing your beer back to the bar, exchanging again and again until you get something you really like. The possibility of getting something that is just okay is the point. That's the trade-off for the lower price.

The "cash only" thing gave me pause, however. What's the deal with that? I luckily had cash on me, and didn't even really think about it too much at the time, but now afterwards I'm wondering why we had to pay for the Mystery Beers separately from our actual check. Is it related to the no-trade-back policy? Like, is taking your cash before giving you your beer the only way to signal that the transaction is final? Maybe. You might even imagine a wild scenario in which an unruly patron is so upset about the beer he received that he calls a credit card company to cancel the transaction. Cash Only takes that haunting possibility out of the equation.

I was also thinking it might be connected with the beers themselves. Maybe they don't want it on the books that these particular beers sold so poorly that they had to reduce the price (whether that would look bad for the brewers or the bar, I have no idea). Maybe the beers are being sold in this way because they were received by the bar in the first place under certain circumstances that keeping their sale off the books would be judicious—like, maybe they were a free promotion and Cav's is trying to make a quick buck. Maybe they were in the bar so long that they are past the date of expiration and the bar can't legally sell them to the customer but do so anyway.

For the record, I don't really give a fuck about any of that (not even the expiration date thing—the date is just a suggestion anyway, and I have no qualms about drinking an "expired" beer as long as the price is right and it's not so expired that it makes me gag). The main point is that there are price-savings available for the young beer drinker at their local bar establishment, and they come in a brown paper bag.

My three beers were a Goose Island IPA, a Modelo, and, well, yeah, a Hard Rock Hard Seltzer, which was "Hurricane" flavored. I didn't even know that latter one was even a thing until I unwrapped my second brown paper bag of the lunch. I don't even want to say it tasted bad. It didn't. It tasted fine. Not great, but fine. I would have never in a million years picked a Hard Rock Hard Seltzer off of a drink menu and ordered it, but that's not the point of this exercise, is it? The point is to be surprised and to drink something drinkable and to pay a lower price for that drink than you would have for your typical choice of drinks. All three points were checked off while drinking this hard seltzer made with vegetable juice.

If this was the worst drink they could've given me—and maybe it really was, I dunno—then I will gladly choose the Mystery Beer every single time.

NOTES

BEER: Hard Rock Hard Seltzer Hurricane (and, like, I'm not even complaining that the "Mystery Beer" ended up not even being a beer!)

STYLE: American Spiked Seltzer

ABV: 6.0%

BREWED BY: Blue Marble Inc.

LOCATION: Indianapolis, IN

PURCHASED AT: Cavanaugh's Rittenhouse

PAIRED WITH: a dozen wings in hot buffalo sauce (Cav's wings are even better than their Hard Rock Hard Seltzers in a paper bag!)

GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5
 
BEER COUNT: no