16 Ounce Macro Lager Can Shootout

I drink this semi-regularly because I love Mexican food and there are usually specials on this at my favorite places. Anymore I would rather have this (and with a lime when the mood strikes) than so many DIPAs/IPAs.

 

I always order a Modelo or Tecate when out to the Mexican Restaurant, perfect with the food. The only beer on that list I probably wouldn’t buy would be the MGD, I find Miller beers a tad sweet, the MGD a bit more so. But I find a blind test to be a real challenge, especially given the prejudice we grew up with at a younger age etc.

 

Agreed, I think the biggest thing with age is that for folks who were drinking beer in the 70s and earlier there were a lot of regional brands making mostly lagers (it seems to me) so those folks have an understanding of these multitude of brands as beer.
Whereas us younger folks who didn't start drinking until the 2000s experienced the 6 or 7 big beers (coorses, buds, millers) under the context of "this is big commercial beer and is cheap and bad, these ales over here from Bells or Sierra Nevada or whoever are 'craft' and are good and fancy". I think it has certainly led to a general mistrust of those bigger brewing labels and a strong negative bias towards their beers

 

I’m another on the Hamms band wagon. I can get a dozen 16 oz cans for 10 bucks. Always in my fridge.

Only just discovered this in the last year, which isn’t he time I’m back to appreciating beers for what they are.

 

Your right. Back in my day a top shelf beer was a Michelob, or Heineken, and to a lesser extent Lowenbrau. We did mostly drink regional stuff, Schmidt’s, Rolling Rock, Ortliebs, Piels, Iron City. My grand pops generation mostly drank Schaefer.

 

Banquet kicks ass.

 

That was long the standard and most common method of pasteurization - beer was bottled (and, later, canned) and then run through a "tunnel" on the packaging line in which the packaged beer was first heated and quickly cooled in multiple steps as described in @JackHorzempa copy/paste above.

Flash pasteurization, where the beer undergoes the process before packaing, didn't really become possible until kegs (in the form of the closed Sankey keg), and later, bottles and aluminum* cans could be sterile filled under aseptic conditions.

*IIRC, steel cans couldn't be? Maybe just the seamed, double-lid ones?

 

I did this as well, so here's the link to my thread about it.

To save you the time and make an amendment, the results were as follows:

1. Hamm's
2. Pabst Blue Ribbon
3. Miller High Life (tie)
4. Coors Banquet (tie)
5. Old Style
6. Lone Star
7. Stroh's
8. Leinenkugel's Original
9. Red Dog
10. Schlitz

Of the ones that didn't finish Top Ten that you also had in your tasting, we found MGD nearly undrinkably sweet, Budweiser bland and boring bordering on flavorless, and Grain Belt Premium the third worst of the whole tasting (which was 26 beers in total), due to the overwhelming sweetness and grape soda notes.

If you click the link to my tasting, you'll notice that Hamm's didn't finish first there. That's because the can we had was very old. We retested it against the top five of the original tasting (blind again, of course) and found that Hamm's was the new winner. Hamm's is now my macro of choice.

To your questions, I find High Life and MGD very, very different tasting (and again, this was blind, so it's not a prejudice or anything). PBR and Hamm's are also very different to my palate (though both are on the hoppier side and are very good in my opinion.

 

I wish I could've had Narragansett in my tasting. I had it recently and loved it, but it was when I was out East, so I couldn't compare it to anything directly. It's a great beer, and the East is lucky to have it.

 

Not framiliar with that beer as far as I can remember. If I saw a pic of a bottle it might jog my memory. I used to rag on my dad for drinking Black Labels back in the day, used to tell him it was a shit beer. It wasn’t.

 

Ah that accounts perhaps for Coors ending up on top.

 

No doubt, palates are different, of course. I prefer drier, more balanced stuff, so that's why mine shook out as is. Tag me in your next blind tasting, if you do one!

 

Gennesse Cream Ale or Miller High life in bottles for me. PBR might be third. I need to try Hamms

 

Yep! My local has 4 pack tallboys of Bitburger for $5.99. I pick it up a lot at that price. I like it better than most of the comparably priced American AALs.

That said, I grab PBR as my go-to with Gansett a close 2nd. They do the trick nicely when I'm in the mood.

 

Do you mean Modelo Especial?