REVIEW 34: BUDWEISER

COUNTRY OF ORIGIN:  USA

BREWERY:  Anheuser-Busch

STYLE:  Adjunct Lager

ABV:  5.0%

PURCHASE:  Case of 24 12-oz. bottles, $20.99.

SERVING:  12-oz. bottle, poured into pint glass. A standard pour yielded an initial head of roughly three inches, that whittled down to under an inch quickly. A slower pour (30 seconds) cut the initial crown to two inches, with the same swift dissipation. Head retention is all but laughable.

APPEARANCE:  Crayola should make a new crayon and call it "adjunct straw." Very transparent. This is one of those beers you can hold to your face and watch TV through it. Sports the typical slightly off-white adjunct head. Lacing is essentially nonexistent, at least from the bottle. 

BOUQUET:  Bready for the most part, even yeasty. No real hop or true malt presence in the nose. Just a generic, streamlined doughy aroma. Not that that's bad.

PALATE:  Thin body with seltzer-like carbonation that crescendoes softly. Sweet entry, with a yeasty overall mouthfeel from mid-palate forward. Somewhat ricey finish; this conflicts with my past experiences with Bud, when corn seemed to be the adjunct ingredient of choice. Aftertaste features a trace of hops and nuances of cooked vegetables, but generic yeast and cereal grains--as well as seltzer--still dominate. Smooth as a surfboard, though. Forget "drinkability," the "poundability" factor is high. Sometimes I wonder if adjuncts are worth this degree of analysis.

MUSINGS AND METAPHORS:  Bud. The flagship brew of Anheuser-Busch, the quintessential specimen of American macro-banality. (I got dibs on coining that term.) The very definition of a standard, everyday brew. In other words, PBR minus the hipster factor. 

Like PBR, it edges many other adjuncts from this continent (e.g. Labatt Blue, Miller High Life, Corona) due to its somewhat fuller flavor. And like PBR, it in turn is edged by other adjuncts from this continent (e.g. Foster's, Molson Canadian, fellow A-B stalwart Michelob) due to their somewhat fuller flavor. And as with PBR, the craft beer snob in me can still respect it, for one simple reason: It knows what it is. Bud doesn't try to be anything that it's not. It knows its role in the beer world, and has mastered it:  The ultimate barbecue-and-ballgame brew. 

Not that I would overpay for one at an actual ballgame. 




GRADE:  C