Given the opportunity to write about craft beer every month in Decibel has been eye-opening. The idea that our “Brewtal Truth” column would have lasted more than four years (and counting) and even spawn a book—The Brewtal Truth Guide to Extreme Beers, out in November—is pretty amazing. Now it’s time to bring a little “Brewtal Truth” to the Deciblog. Normally we won’t post anything here that we haven’t happily poured down our own gullet, but we will occasionally make an exception—like this week—just to spotlight a beer worth mentioning for one reason or another.
Since the AC/DC beer recently became available in Canada (but not the US yet), it seemed like we ought to take it for a spin. As we’ve pointed out in a previous Deciblog post, there are a lot of AC/DC-inspired craft beers out there. Clearly, this is a band that goes well with beer. Some prefer the copious-amounts-of-cheap-stuff route, while others like to go more-expensive-and-more-flavor. To each his or her own. It’s probably not hard to guess who this officially branded brew is geared toward. For $2.50 Canadian (in BC), you can get a 500ml (that’s a pint, more or less, in America) can. The question is, would anyone want to drink a lot of this? Or even a little?
AC/DC
Euro Pale Lager
Brasserie de Saverne
France
5% ABV
It’s worth noting that the AC/DC “Australian Hardrock” beer we sampled was brewed in…France. By a brewer with not a particularly sterling reputation for beery excellence. There are obviously brewers in Australia capable of making this same exact style of beer, which would at least lend the slightest whiff of Down Undah authenticity to it. But no. What’s worse—and we haven’t even gotten to the taste of the beer yet!—is that on the website for the beer, it is shown as being brewed in Germany, so at least you would have the German Beer Purity Law preventing the addition of cheap adjuncts. But that beer apparently hasn’t made it to Canada yet. No, we get the French version made with god knows what.
Nothing but disappointment awaits with the crack of the pull-tab. The first thing we do with any beer is take a good sniff of whatever scents have just been released. This smells of canned peas. Deep sigh. Poured from the can it produces little in the way of head. In fact, we feel embarrassed for how ineffectually it fills up a glass. It tastes of dirt and corn and has a dry finish that leaves a sour taste in our mouth. This barely qualifies as a beer. They should just put a little target at the bottom of the can with a note saying “Puncture Here,” because this kind of utterly tasteless “brew” is good for one thing only: shotgunning.
It’s really not that hard to make a moderately decent beer. It just takes a small amount of quality ingredients and a modicum of skill in the brewery. Admittedly we don’t spend a lot of time tasting our way through various adjunct-laden lagers, but we haven’t experienced a beer this unappealing since we bought a sixer of Heidelberg tallboys and drank them warm in a cabin on Oregon’s South Santiam River. That must have been 20 years ago. This is a good-looking can filled with utter swill. You’ve been warned.
And since AC/DC have slapped their name on a canned beverage pretending to be beer, we leave you with a Spanish band pretending to be AC/DC. Which, honestly, we prefer considerably more than the beer.
