The Skunk List: 2. City LaCrosse Light

Brewery: City Brewery, LaCrosse, Wisconsin

Style: Pale Lager

ABV: 4.7%

Rating: .5 stars

Very hard to find even a picture of this beer. So bad I'm not sure where to begin.

First, I'll start by saying that if this was a list based purely on taste (you could argue that it should be), this would be numbers 10 thru 1. Looking back on the 275+ beers I had this year, nothing jumps into my mind faster than Lax Lite when I think of crap in a can. In fact, after those sentences, I need to take a quick mental break before typing any more.

Let's start here: I had just consumed twelve, count them, twelve, cans of Blatz Lite. Now, this sets the bar quite low, seeing that only Wisconsinites and desperate poor Minnesotans participating in a case race drink Blatz. After the binge, I poured myself a glass of LaCrosse Light. Keep in mind how drunk I was at this point. I COULD NOT FINISH THE LACROSSE. Not only could I not finish it, I could barely choke down a sip. At the time: "Honestly could only gulp down one sip. Have to count it, though, because I'll probably never go for it again."

For a man who's had every skunky beer Minnesota and Wisconsin have to offer, those are big words. Think of every negative adjective in the books and this one had it: flat, face-clenching, spit-out-able--this beer created new horrible beer adjectives. I almost want to have another one right now just to remember how horrible it is. After all, how can you tell the good ones if you have no reference for awful?

The Skunk List: 7. Harbin

Brewery: Harbin

Style: Pale Lager

ABV: 4.8%

Rating: .5 star


Follow this lineage: Harbin Brewery was founded in 1900 by a Russian man. This beer contains European and Chinese Qindao Dahua hops and a German malt. The brewery is owned by Anheuser-Busch, who aquired it in a nasty battle with Miller. Put it all together, and you have one crappy beer. One that I originally tabbed as the flattest beer I'd ever tasted. A statement I won't back down from.

As this list continues, I'm realizing how hard it is to continually describe the qualities of a horrible beer. It's just an agonizing process to go over again. Like most Asian beers, it seems the label and packaging is more important than the taste, and now that i know they use Chinese hops it makes more sense. I don't like Chinese hops. So, since I'm tired of trying to conjur up metaphors for the invisible flavors, I'll let the most recent raters of Harbin at ratebeer.com do the work for me.

jerohen: "General lack of flavour..."

yesyouam: "It has a funky aroma, like vegetables, melon, alcohol and rotten fruit...It has a fusel flavor. It burns my nose...It was a challenge to finish this beer. It comes in a fancy bottle, though."

Dogbrick: "Nothing redeeming about this beer, it makes Tsingtao interesting by comparison."

badgerben: "Aroma of rice, dusted with moldy hops. Corny taste, finishing with a drop of skunk."

So I'm not the only one who thinks it's skunky.

The Skunk List: 9. Minnesota's Brew

Brewery: City Brewery, LaCrosse, Wisconsin

Style: Pale Lager

ABV: 5%

Rating: 1 Star

This was one of those once-a-summer, back corner of the cooler kind of finds. Had to buy it simply because of the can (the one on the left in the picture). From the journal: "Probably deserves half a star, but I was feeling the skunk at the time." The can alone probably propelled it to the one-star level, and I seem to remember a couple friends and I struggling to finish off a six pack.

There isn't much description possible here--it was a gross, unflavorful beer that you'd need to have far too many of to get to a point where it would pass as drinkable. Maybe that's the test; how many beers needed for drinkability. There weren't enough in this six pack. The last rating on ratebeer.com, my site for beer research, says this: "Have 2 of these saved for when the Vikings reach the Super Bowl someday." Enough said. I guess tha's what happens when a beer called Minnesota's Brew is actually brewed in Wisconsin

The Skunk List: 10. Kronenbourg 1664

Brewery: Brasseries-Kronenbourg, Strasbourg, France

Style: Pale Lager

ABV: 5%

Rating: 1 star

Had this many times in my few months in London, mostly because I was poor and it was cheap. It's easy to see why. Not unlike most European lagers, your Peronis, Carlsbergs or Amstels, Kronenbourg has those unquenching bitter hops that usually taste more like river water than beer.

If it's cold, it's hard to choke down because the combination of the massive carbonation and the previously mentioned bitterness is too much for one throat to handle. If it's warm, it gets flat and slimy. If it's in the middle, it just tastes like lukewarm crap. Unless you too are on an indefinite beer quest, leave the Kronenbourg 1664 on the shelf.