Beer: High Speed Steel
Brewery: 3 Floyds Brewing (Munster, IN)
Style: Pilsner – Other
5.2% ABV / 23 IBU

“Ten Cent Beer Night” might’ve been the more obvious choice for a beer tie-in to Municipal Waste’s titanic seventh album. Alas, ten cent beer night belongs to the city of Cleveland and can only be used to capture the, uh, magic of Stroh’s. But “High Speed Steel” is one of the sickest jams on Electrified Brain and the always reliable O.G.s at 3 Floyds are keeping the focus where it should be with this “lager for shredders”: putting beer in bellies.

That’s not a challenge with High Speed Steel—it slides right down the pie-hole. As for the style, it’s a little confusing. 3 Floyd’s calls it a lager. Which it is. Beer nerds have this flagged as a pilsner on Untappd. Which it is, too—it definitely has the crispness and effervescence of a pilsner, plus the lighter body we generally associate with that style. It also sorta tastes like this brew is using pilsner malt—not uncommon in non-pilsner lagers. Working backwards, a pils is a pale lager. So we’re going with pale lager in the style of the Bay Area thrasher fave Heineken (the superior Dutch version not the skunky American version).

Of course, it’s 3 Floyds so there’s going to be a little more going on, so High Speed Steel is really a mildly hoppy pale lager. At 5.2% it’s a notch above sessionable, but it’s a great—and maybe a little surprising – turn to have something that doesn’t punch you in the face. This Munster, IN brewery has show time and time again how elite it can be with higher gravity hijinks; High Speed Steel shows how effective 3 Floyds can be when dialing back the hops and delivering a mid-range buzz. As crushable as this is, it’d take a return of The Inebriator to fuck anyone up. Trust Muni Waste to set the pace—they wrote the book on partying, after all.

For more info on 3 Floyds Brewing, please head here.