In an effort to brew something that satisfied both the night before and the morning after, they instead created what is officially the worst beer I’ve ever tasted.

Hoppy where you don’t want it, tart in the rest, its just some kind of beer experiment gone wrong. Like, the flavors so bad that they decided to overcompensate by adding citrus “flavors”. “Needs more dog” as the saying goes.

You know, the bottle has this tagline on it. “Brewers of Quality Beers”. Really? My sink doesn’t agree. Don’t get me started on Widmer, whose business lobby makes you pay for little things like tatoos and stickers. Somewhere along the way, local Oregon brewery turned into cash obsessed money machine. And the taste of the beer seems to gone along with it.

At least I didn’t have to pay for it. Except in watching the Charger game with the buddy who brought it over. But I’m not bitter, really. Jubelale on the other hand …

But as time wore on, and I tried more and more beer, I began to notice the flaws in Widmer. The Hefe was just a touch too bland and overdone. The Drop Top was well, not so great for parties anymore, and the Snow Plow tasted like a burned tree. And so, like that girl in college who pasted a “I didn’t really want to break up, I just wanted to scare you into being more serious” note to my apartment door, Widmer and I were done.

And so it was with Brrr. I wanted to give the local boys another shot, after all, the bottle wrapper was excellent. I poured a glass and drank. At first, it was good. Crisp, a little bite, but tasty. But then I drank more, and the bite continued. With one last swig I tried ot give it a go, and it had just turned undrinkable. I can’t explain exactly what it was. It may as well pasted a note as well, cause I just wasn’t able to take it any more.

I know I can be a cranky drinker, but this one at least is coroberated by Chris of Ruby McGowan, who caught me in the hall to remark that he too had a quick break up … and that he has a winter ale brewing as we speak.

So the lesson to take away is this, no matter how fancy her wrapper is, she has to be smooth on the inside. No wait. No matter how fancy her wrapper is, the second time down she’ll start to bite. No wait thats worse…er…dont drink bad beer.

So goes Hibernation Ale by Great Divide. Someone in the brewery said, lets give it more flavor! And out came the funk dropper. The label says “Robust”. But what they really mean is “Really f*@$!ing Rubust”. Rubust like a sweaty sumo wrestler. And tasting the same too.

This one was not terrible, but it really stands out for fizziness. The “beer” was astoundingly carbonated. Just so much bubbles, fizz, and accompanying bloated feeling, that I wondered how much actual beer there was in the bottle along with the CO2. If it’s warmer this month than usual, blame my beer review for doubling the global warming effect. Malt liquors in general are more carbonated, and oddly carbonated, than regular old beer — you can tell that whereas a homebrewed beer, for example, contains bubbles from natural fermentation processes, malt liquors contain bubbles thanks to the support of some scary industrial surfactant. Needless to say, I was absolutely charming in the eyes of Mrs. Liquor that night, with my horrible beer breath and need to burp every 3 seconds.

What’s this I see on the label? Lo and behold, Old Milwaukee is brewed and distributed by Schlitz, which makes my least-favorite malt liquor to date. Given the flavors of both, it seems that Old Mil is the upscale, high-quality product, the Lexus to Schlitz’ Toyota. I’d drink this over Schlitz, but not much else — I really can’t recommend it for taste. If you’re entering a burping contest in the next 30 seconds, or you need to inflate a lot of backyard jumpy toys by hand this evening, I heartily recommend it. Otherwise, save your money, and save our world from more global warming!

This first beer I chose, some french* job named Belzebuth, immediately grabbed my attention with its gratuitous marketing. Taking up most of the neck was the massive announcement that this beer was 13% alcohol. Savoring dreams of being piss drunk after just one bottle, I poured the bottle into a glass and realized the second thing evil about this beer.

It didn’t fill the glass! (See the picture to the right). I knew the french were annoying, but to make me angry before I’ve even had a single sip was a special accomplishment. I soon discovered however, that the bottler was actual doing me a favor.

A little bitter, but still excited, I took a sip. Reaction: “WTF is this?”. It was like I was chewing it. Full of all sorts of heavy flavors, like gulping a rotten fruit salad. I was a trooper though and resolved to get through a bit more. Thankfully the next sip didn’t taste so rotten. As a matter of fact, it didn’t taste like beer at all. It was more like tonic water with a bunch of whiskey poured in. The kind of whiskey that comes in a plastic bottle. Evil indeed. This stuff was so nasty that even though I poured it out after only three small swigs, the boozy hobo aftertaste stuck with me for the rest of the evening.

If one can call this beer, then I wouldn’t hesitate to call it about the worst beer ever. Quoth Mike Myers: “It’s not just evil, its ‘e-veel’. Like the fru-its of the de-veel”

Grandpa Goodness was in town, and we shared some of the yummy Hitachino Nest, both coming away with what we thought was a new appreciation for Japanese beer. Sadly, one day while I was away at the salt mines, Grandpa, flush from the success of the previous evening, decided to go to the local beer pusher and pick up something new from Japan to try.

And so begets what is about the worst beer I’ve tried in the 60+ reviews on this site. It’s been a long time since I’ve had those college mainstays Keystone and Natural Light, but if my memory for nausea serves me right, they have a Japanese equivalent. Light like urine, rancid tang like urine (wait, how would I know that?) this stuff was … less than stellar.

There are quite a few things I like to recall from college, but what the frat party beer tasted like isn’t one of them.

I can’t remember why it was, but for some reason I had it built up in my head that this beer was this awesomely brewed past lover. I imagined us strolling on the beach together, sharing a good laugh and sipping from each other’s malts.

But in a scene straight out of a college “post beer goggles” morning wake up, what greeted my lips was something just short of totally nasty. Wha? Where was that beautiful yummy glass of pure joy I remember? All I can guess is that some really big burned tree fell in the vat. Because that can to be the only excuse for something that tasted straight out of the SoCal Wild fires.

I wanted to give this beer a 3 for the good times I remember us having, but in the immortal words of Bruce Campbell, “Baby…you got real ugly”.