I can really use a beer right now. Where did Jim go? Where did Jim go? Are we rolling? Shannon, are we actually recording? Boy, it would really be a shame if we missed this dynamite stuff. Eeyore here is not excited to taste these macro lagers. He's a Bud Light. He's not Eeyore today. Dortmunder Gold. All right. Jim's in the house. All right. Pat's been dying to do this show for a long time. We're way overdue for this. Every crappy and good beer journalism podcast, anything blog has done this and we haven't. I always thought it was a little bit of a cliche because of that. Dude, listen, macro lagers, it's what's hot in the streets. We got to give the people what they want. It's hot on the golf course. These are still the top selling beers of all time in our stores. Still as it once was and ever shall be. What's the top selling item of all time in our stores? Miller Lite? No. What is it? Voodoo Co.? Who knows? Bags of ice. Cold water. Sell more ice than anything. Never goes out of style. An anti-hero. I have this theory also. I've talked about it before, but it's been a couple of years and our podcast has been around for a long time. If I repeat myself, it happens. When I started drinking, I didn't drink beer. I did not drink beer. I started by drinking spirits because I could mix them with soda, which is what you did as a 20-something in the 2000s, right? Then I started drinking wine professionally and it took me a long time before I started drinking beer too. I think that everybody who follows that cliched college drinking at a keger, a lot of people drink a lot of this kind of beer very early in their life and it shapes their tastes forever. That's fair. I never did. Every time you guys talk about Pilsner's and I'm dying because it's so boring, it's because I never keyed into this as a big thing that I drink. You went straight to UV blue. No, as a kid, yeah, as a kid, as a 20 something. When I was 13 years old. And then by the time I got around to drinking beer, I started with really good beer and I never drank this. So I have no frame of reference, so I'm going to get them all wrong. Okay, welcome back to Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I am Pat. I am the director of Merchandising for Wine Coolers at Binny's. I got other people here with me today. I'm Greg Communications. I'm Shannon, just here to taste some beer. Good to have you back, Shannon. It's nice to be back. Shannon was on a gin episode back when she was still a manager at the Skokie store. Yeah, then she did a bunch. Yeah, now she works in the wine buying office helping those guys out. Yeah. Yeah, welcome back. Thanks. Thanks for having me. I'm Roger. I'm here. Roger's here too. Beer, beer in all things beer adjacent. Roger looks like somebody just kicked his dog. Look at how pissed off and sad he is to be here today. Come on, man. He doesn't want to do this at all. Doesn't want to do this at all. We had to fight Roger in office arm wrestling just to get him to agree to do this episode. But at the same time, Roger is looking forward to Pat going down in flames and hating on hams. There is a big target on my back. Everybody thinks I'm going to hate on hams. Joke's on you. Beer number one is not hams and I hate it. It stinks. We have beer number one already. What we're doing, we have, I guess Pat teased it last week, but he got it wrong. He said light loggers. We are tasting, blind tasting, a bunch of macro loggers. Now, I assume there are light and heavies in here, but we got to wait and see. Jim picked the beer. Jim is pouring the beer. None of us have any idea what we're tasting. It's totally blind. There's literally a wall. As we're tasting these guys, we're each going to keep our own score, rate them on a scale of one to five. If you want to go back and retaste something, I say you can request that at the end because obviously the first beer you're going to taste, the point is to measure them against each other. I haven't had a beer in six, seven months. Why did we invite her? I just probably got some experience. Have you drank macro loggers over the years? Yes, I have. You're qualified. We still haven't explicitly stated. What we're doing today, Jim set us up with the blind tasting of 10 macro loggers. The assumption here is American macro loggers, some heavy, some light. We're going to go through, we're going to score them independently. Also, I'm going to keep all of my samples so that I can compare them later. Sure. You guys are setting them next to each other? Sure. All right, number one. So number one, everybody make a score first, and I'll give you some quick thoughts, at least whether you want or not. You're scoring the very first one in a relative field. I'll go back and re-score it. I mean, if we're just scoring them objectively, all of them get 0.5. How does that sound? Well, that's because you're a snotty bitch. Jokes on him, 0.5 on a scale of 0 to 0.6. Okay. All right. Shannon, you like this beer? I do. It's got a sweetness on the nose. first beer in months, you got stuck with this turn. It's actually really, I like it. It's really refreshing. I don't know, maybe I'm just thirsty. Roger, what do you think? It's got that sweetness for sure. It's got that corniness that a lot of macros have. Big-time corn. I've got some guesses on what this could be. Dusty corn on the nose and then the corn sweetness actually gets fruity pebbles-y on the palate. That's what I said, fruity pebbles. Yeah, it's pretty sweet. I don't think it's a light beer, but we'll see. One's not that bad. One is brutal. It's not just the first beer. It's not that brutal. It's not that brutal. We're going to have worse beer. I'd say this ends up firmly in the middle, like 10 percent of beers we'll taste today. It's not just too corny. It's way got so much sweet corn. Not just the first beer of six months, but it's the first beer of the afternoon. It could be the- Is it afternoon yet? If it's free and it's cold, if it's the first beer of the afternoon, it's a great. Post-peanut butter jelly sandwich. Post-peanut butter jelly sandwich? Yeah. This would really set off the sweetness on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Really? pair in the Macro Lager with it. I got PB&J with Macro Lager. Let's get beer number two rolling. Wow. We're really hammering through these things. Dude, we got 10 beers. We'll discuss as we go. Whoa. Taste number two. Number two. It's so skunky. It's smelly. It's stinky. It smells like a leather shoe. I don't think it's skunky. Dude. Well, every time I'm talking about how something is skunky, this is what I'm describing. So what is it? This is beery. This is hoppy. Hoppy. It's hoppy. Right, Roger? Dude, this is awful. Yeah, you're tasting hops. That's hops. For sure. It's bitter. This is. OK. This is stinky and it reminds me of green glass. And just not knowing anything about macro luggers, I would guess this is Canadian. It reminds me of moose head. I could see that. Interesting. You know what? I like it better than the first one, though. I don't. It looks like bile like. Oh, now that come on, you're ruining it. It is kind of it is kind of bile. I don't mind this at all. This this reminds me of a lot of non light. Oh, I old school macro. I think I have a guess at what this is. Really? Yeah, I'm not sure what this one is. We'll talk about it in another round. Obviously, I've had my fair share of macro luggers recently, and this doesn't taste like anything I've had recently. I agree. When was the last time you guys had a macro lager, Roger? Couple of weeks ago. Okay. What did you have? Schlitz. Nice. Loves Schlitz. Because when you're out of Schlitz, you're out of beer. All right. All right, ask me. When was the last time you had a macro lager? About 12 hours ago. Same with me. I got a six pack of High Life Tallboy Cans and a six pack of PBRs. They're both pretty lame. I also had a six pack of High Life Tallboys recently, but then instead of PBR, I went old style. So I actually had an old style roughly like 12, 13 hours ago. We call that prepping, folks. It's what we, just what I'm drinking. You know, we call that hams has been out of stock. So I had old style. Okay. This one, woof. This one's got to be one of your light beers, right? This is just empty. Yeah, lame. I think it tastes kind of old. Really? A little flat, a little. I mean, it's not like carb flat, but it tastes like a little bit oxidized. Just a hint of grain silo, corn dust on the nose. Yeah, you taste cereal grains in this for sure. Yeah, and then like, really? Very little else above it. Color wise though, it doesn't, it actually has a little more color. I'm wondering if it's light. I could see this being a non-light. Really? This could be high life too. Yeah. I don't think it's fizzy enough to be high life. I'm curious what that is. It's an interesting balance of sweetness, but there's some hops on the finish. Like this isn't all sweet. Yeah, there's some bitterness. Well, if it's bitter, it's a tiny, tiny bitter because this is like beer flavored water. It's very dialed down in saturation. It is dialed down. Roger, do you know of any mac, if any macro lagers at all are all malt still? I don't know of any. You mean minus corn or minus rice? Yeah, just all malted barley. No corn, no rice, no corn sugar. Forever, Coors Banquet was an all malt lager, but like 20 years ago or something, they started putting some dextrose in it, which is just like a refined corn sugar that is just a space. It gives it alcohol without doing anything else. Remember that Bud campaign where they wanted ingredient labeling? But it was like, I don't know, they're like proving their own. Proving that they're self-made with rice? Yeah. Yeah. their own rice. They've done some of the Bud reserve things, so that would be technically a macro, but they're at more premium prices. I guess Michelob lager is probably all malt. Yes. That's been always made by Bud. It's pretty hard to find regular Michelob now though. I mean, we pretty much just keep it for a few token. I was reading a beer advocate thread just yesterday with a bunch of old men bitching how they couldn't find Michelob anymore, because their local distributor stopped carrying it because everyone who used to buy it is dead. Michelob Golden is like that too. Michelob Golden Light is still like a huge beer up in northern Minnesota. It's on draft at every single bar, has a handle of Michelob Golden Draft Light. I've had that on draft as recently as a month or so ago, and it sucks, big time sucks. Do you remember when we went to visit Budweiser down in St. Louis and we were in their beer garden afterwards? Yeah. They have every single beer known to man there. So I walked up and I just want to order a Michelob, and they're like, what? That's hilarious. I just want regular Michelob. They're literally like they had to check and see if they had it in a bottle and the answer was no. I remember that. I remember that. Greg was on that trip, too. I was drinking Hoogarden. Since we're talking about that trip, do you remember how ornate their brew house was? It was all tiled and golden and stuff. Yeah, copper vessels. Yeah. Really nice. That sounds a lot cooler than Coors Light. The Coors Light was awesome. I don't know. From the outside, it looked like- From the outside, it just looked like a brick factory. Staline, concrete. I loved seeing the maltings at Coors, though. The fact that they malt 100 percent of their own barley is crazy. Did you go on the automated tour or do you have the headphones on? I don't remember. Yeah. Most of these beer trips, I'm a bit hazy. Okay. This is what happens when we have an all macro logger episode. We end up talking about the difference between turn of the century ornate architecture versus utilitarian concrete monolith. I was expecting to see a red fist on the side corner of the Corse brewery. I mean, it was Stalinist. That ominous music. It's like, Creepy boring. Yeah. You guys need to get like some graffiti artists out here to liven this place up. Well, then it's just going to look like the side of a train. They should just do a huge mural of Burt Reynolds. Yeah. The hero of Curse. He's bounding down. Okay. Number four. Did everybody taste number four? Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty rough. I just got it in me. You think it's pretty rough? I think this is awesome. What is that? It's very grainy on the finish. It's just grainy. It's super soft and fluffy carbonation. It's got a balanced sweetness to it. It's not too sweet. It's not bitter and bile-y like number two was. It's more citrus-y. I think this is fine. This is totally fine. Tastes kind of washed out to me. It does taste washed out. It tastes washed out and light, but- Until the finish when the grain lifts it up and you feel like you just ate a spoon of Cheerios. Yeah. Yeah. This is enjoyable. It finishes dry enough that drinking more feels fine. It's not sweet on the finish. I like that it's not sweet. Others have had noticeably more sweetness to them. I disagree with that. I agree with you saying it's like Cheerios on the finish. Yeah. That is sweet to me. Well, I guess there's the perspective difference. Obviously, I grew up in a house where we put a bunch of sugar on top of our Cheerios. That's hilarious. Got to carve up those carbs, boy. It's going to be a long day of school. That was something my grandma always did. Whenever we had a bowl of Cheerios in my grandmother's house, they were never Cheerios, they were like the generic black and white box toasted oats, and we'd always think we were clever and change it to goats on the box. But she would pour us a bowl of these fake Cheerios and literally put two tablespoons of table sugar on top of them. Spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down. Yeah, I mean, it shouldn't be the spoonful of Cheerios. Spoonful of sugar to make the Cheerios go down. Yeah, but I mean, for kids, Cheerios are super bland, aren't sugary. And plus, these weren't actual Cheerios. They were for sure 40% cardboard, 60% oats, like government assistance Cheerios or something. I'm surprised they weren't in the plastic bags and they were in a box. Yeah, right. This was before generic stuff came in those big plastic bags. I transitioned to those big plastic bags in high school. Of the knockoff Cocoa Puffs and stuff. I'm changing my score on four. I like it less and less the more I step in. You're allowed to do that. Yeah. Although it's still, like, of the first four, this is in the 75th percentile. I'd agree with that. All right. Oh, man. Look at all these different shades of beige we have in the glasses right now. Shades of straw. Yeah. Number five. Whoa. This one's heady. Such an absence of nose. I mean, it's kind of remarkable how similar these are. You have to admit. Yeah, that's a good point. We should describe. Well, they all have no nose. If there's this whole spectrum of colors all across the Roy G. Biff, we're talking about from the greenest of yellows to the yellowest of green yellows. You know, this little segment of the spectrum of flavor. I do not care for the nose here. This has got a little DMS to me. Dymethyl sulfide. Is that the butter one? No, that's a diethyl sulfide. So what's dimethyl sulfide? That's a vegetal one. So like think like creme corn, a can of beans, green bean, cabbage, people with small hands. I don't get it, but Jim does. That's what matters. It's an Austin Powers reference. Okay. Jim's losing it over there. I love it when Jim laughs. It's great. It gets spicy on the finish and there's something more than grain on the finish. I bet there's corn syrup in this one. At first I said it's got a malty sweetness to it, like there was a distinct malt character, but that's going away the more I taste it. Yeah. I agree. I absolutely agree. The very first burst, it felt like spice or something. Yeah. This is tied for my lowest rating so far. Not a fan of this one. They literally are all 0.5 right now. I mean, out of the five and we're grading these for what they are. I mean, I don't know I go that low. Right. Okay. But it's like we're tasting like, hey, we're going to taste six different margarines. Pick your favorite margarine. What are we doing? I think that's kind of easy. Land of lakes. Okay. Sorry, Shannon. We're trying to burst through, smash through preconceived notions here. Number six. This one's weird on the nose. It's weird. It's like a tinny, like the rubber sole on a new tennis shoe. Yeah, kind of. Yeah, that's like the most processed of flavors. Yeah. And the aftertaste. It's like thick water. weird. Thick water? Thick with two C's? Yeah, thick with two C's. Thick water. I like that. I think this is pretty full of corn. This is beer-flavored water for sure. But it's thick though. It's grown on me. It is crispy on the back end. Yeah. I hated this so much that I dumped it by mistake. It's like, no, that's where this goes. Oh, man. Maybe some grass too? I don't know. It's all over the place. But again, it's a grassy hop character. It's a tiny, tiny little notes of difference here. Oh, just a tickle. A little tickle of each. Yeah. I don't dislike it as much as the last one. I'll put it that way. I would prefer number five over number six. I'm a well-wisher in the sense that I wish it no specific harm. No specific harm. Oh, this is so weird. Why are we doing this? Hacky premise. This needed to be done. Shut up and enjoy your afternoon crispy boys. Yeah. Not that any of these are particularly crispy. Not particularly. Okay, number seven here is super heady. Are you pouring them consistently, Jim? Or is this a- Well, this is a- What an accusation of amateurism that was. Sorry, dude. This is zero faith. Yeah, right. Yeah, he's doing Spanish cider pours on this one. This one is 40% head on number seven. The ones he likes, he makes look appealing. The other ones, not so much. This beer is great. Really? It smells like electrical tape. This is the exact beer I'd like to drink 30 of. Seriously, he's calling it right now. I'm not calling it right now. This is a very good beer though. I will put it that way. I don't know that this is hands. Joe and his cards. I can't even tell it from the last couple at this point. Have you gone tongue blind from drinking the exact same thing seven different ways? Yeah. What if the hook here is that it's just the same beer? I think Pat might be right though. I like this one. It's got that finish. I don't know. Pretty well balanced. It's not leaning towards sweet, but you're describing some of the greatest virtues of the beloved. All right. It has a little bit of a baking spice finish too, which is saying a lot. I'm overseeing it. I think professional beer people would prefer number two over number seven here, but I really like number seven. I agree with that. I take number seven over number two. All right. Going back to number two, it is absolutely lemon peel citric by comparison at this point. Yep. Total lemon peel. This is when we should be interjecting with Gucci Mane's Lemonade as our music break. But Greg won't cough up the five bucks for us to use it. Yeah, right. What? Okay, number eight. Number eight already, man. Just powerhouse. I just stuck my nose in it. You ever do a power hour with light beer when you were in college? What's a power hour? You take one shot of beer every minute for 60 minutes. You never did that? I never found the need to do that. You never did drinking games like that? We don't want to promote drinking games, but boy, I used to play a lot of drinking games. Okay, guys, this is like the origin story episode for all of us. Drinking games for me involved the liquor. Yeah, they did that as well, but I like the beer drinking games. Because they go a little longer, and people don't puke as much. Right, but you get full and burpee. My home on the north side of Chicago smelled like awful beer for like six consecutive years. Speaking of awful beer, how about number eight, huh? I like number eight. It's so sweet. I don't get super sweet, but it seems very light. I think it's similar to number five in the sweetness. Yeah, I think this is a light beer. There's nothing going on. There's nothing going on. Sorry to segue right back into the blind tasting that we're doing so hard right now. Hey, hey, settle down. I think it's a little more crisp than some of the other ones. This isn't bad. It's fairly balanced. It finishes fairly crisp. I'm putting this in the upper third probably so far. Roger, what do you think? Yeah, I don't know. It's a little too washed out to me. It seems very light. It seems light. It seems like a light beer, but it wouldn't surprise me if this was like my favorite of the ones that are labeled light. Yeah, I could maybe give you that. I think this one's spelled L-I-T-E. That's what I'm kind of thinking too maybe. I'm going to the White Sox game tonight. I'm going to have lots of those. You know what? The White Sox, they have the best beer selection. You have no excuse. And I'm not going to drink any none of it. No excuse. They have literally the best beer experience of any stadium in Chicago. They have the best beer experience of any stadium almost in all of Major League Baseball. I love that place. If I could, I would just get a Nosebleed ticket and I would sit in the right field bar. You found a place that serves 12 percent double IPAs. Yeah. It's great. They also have a Veggie Dog. So thank you, Comiskey slash sell slash. Yeah. Is that what it is? No, it's guaranteed rate. All right. Number nine. Why does this taste like lime? I was going to say, excuse me, licorice. Licorice? I get lime. I think I get rice syrup on the nose. I've never had rice syrup. Me either. I've never smelled rice syrup for sure. What are you using rice syrup for? It's interesting and random thing to say. I've smelled it at homebrew shops. Yeah. Be careful what you say or Roger is going to come up with an all rice syrup at this point. Sorry, Roger. I'm really looking forward to that one though. Well, it's traditionally served over this rambutan. Roger had a great idea for an episode that was different sugar sources for syrups, which is cool. But if it doesn't carry itself, then we could do a fruit syrup second half. That sounds like a great idea. This kind of has a crisp acidity to it, like a quenching acidity on the finish, which I think is kind of unsettling in beer, honestly. Why am I getting any acidity in this? If you look at it, it's more carbonation than all the rest of them. And a little darker. Well, I mean, let's not judge carbonation in plastic doers cups. They're allowed to doctor water to their liking, so there could be more minerals in this. That's true. I don't actually, you know what? I'm going to revise this one up a notch for me. I don't mind this one. There's some complexity to it, if not in a strange way, but. What was that you just said, Shannon? It's a little cerveza-y. A little cerveza-y. You're getting the acidity and just associating it with lime. I don't think Jim would do that to us and throw in an imported beer in this. Of course, we didn't say domestic. You might be surprised what Jim would do to you. Okay, at number 10, rounding it out, rounding it out at number 10. This one's back to smelling dusty and cheap. I think this one's not bad. It's like flowery. Flowery, yeah. It's the floral English hops. Okay, I was thinking flowery like cornmeal. I'm going to really piss off Roger. I think it's like flowery like flowers. Yeah. Roger dumped that one too. Leave English beer out of this. Tassad disapproval. I'm getting stale in the crevice of the child seat vomit. I like it. I don't care for it at all. Let me lick the seat for you. I think this is totally forgettable. My kids have totally puked in the car and the car seat smelled like this the next day. See, I feel like I could just keep drinking this and not even think about it. Yeah. I enjoy everything about it except that very faint reminisces of puke smell. What? I don't know where you're getting that. All right. Stop talking about puke for a second. I have a feeling I know this one because this has a very distinctive flavor to it. Okay. What do you think it is? Because I'm guessing Mick Ultra on this one. I can't remember the last time I had a Mick Ultra. It's probably been 20 years, probably 15 years. At the Mick Ultra launch party? No, whatever. We don't need to record why I ended up with 26 free cases of Mick Ultra once in college. 26. I worked on them for a couple of months. Roger, what do you think it is? I think this is Coors Light. No wonder I love it. Coors Light. Those would be the closest to Mick Ultra in flavor. I agree. Before we reveal anything, in my experience, what I would say is I find Bud Light to be the sweetest of the lights followed by Coors Light and I generally go Miller like because I find it to be driest and it doesn't give me a headache like Bud Light does and Coors Light is kind of the halfway in between. I could see this being Coors Light, but I'm really not sure. I just didn't live a life where I have such a thought out opinion of all of these beers. No, you're just a vapid idiot when you drink stuff. You just don't think about it at all. I never drink these beers. You've had a Coors Light in your life. Okay, yes. But I haven't had a Coors Light in 10 years. I guarantee you, I probably had all these beers. I guarantee you there's three beers here I have never had before. That's, I mean, really? I will blow up one statement with an exact contradiction. I probably had all these beers. I guarantee there's three beers I haven't had. I guarantee there's three beers on this table I haven't had. I guarantee it. But we will see. Interesting. Everybody take another pass through, maybe give them another, see if you need to revise your ratings. And then I say we each say our- I'm getting pretty burpy from all these. Yeah, same. I say we each- They're starting to get kind of warm. We each say our favorites, and then we trash each other for disliking the ones that we like. Oh, one smells like tooth decay now. Man, what is up with two? Two is so hoppy. I can't believe how hoppy two is. Very hoppy. It's so significantly hoppier than all the others. Three is so sweet. Three is lame. Man, when these get warm, they are awful. Yeah, they're terrible. Lemon-y. I'd still drink two. Of course, you would. Get out of them hops. The hops do help with stale cereal. My least favorite so far is six. I think six is the worst. Six is bad. Aluminum garlic garbage. That's what I have written down on them. That was the one I said, it smelled like a shoe. It's bad. It's bad. All right, number nine, I'm just loving it. Yeah, number nine is very fruity. There's two that stand out, and they're number two and number nine. Can I get a report, my good man, of number three? All right, I have one clear favorite and then one, two, three tied for second place. Maybe I should say that there are no light beers. The no light beers. Oh man. That is severe failure in the part of a couple of years. That's a severe failure in the tasting. Why would you not put light beer in? Because I wanted to eat everything as apples to apples as possible. Oh. And there are two wild cards. Two wild cards. I think Greg advised me to put two. Don't sell me out like that. There's the bus. We had a plan and you colluded to f*** it up. No, but you had a plan, but you also put a nice big target on your back. No, that's true. I think number two is obviously one of your wild cards. Okay. Can we just say that number two has to be a local craft version, right? It's like pipe works or half acre or something like that. There's one import. I think two is the import. I disagree. I think two is the craft. I think two is something German or Czech. Two is Pilsner Akel. All right. Don't do reveals yet. Let's say which ones we like and which ones we don't. I'm not revealing. Then we'll do reveals. Jim can just laugh at us and maybe edit in how wrong we are. This is great. I think that Shannon's right. I think that number nine is an import. Number nine? Yeah. Modelo is the most drank beer on the golf course. I believe Modelo. I would also maybe believe Corona, but I think it's a little softer. Corona's water. Corona's water. Got to have a lime and a shot of teal in that. Yeah, it's just gross. All right. We haven't heard from Roger anything. Roger has been real contemplative this whole time. He's still went over there. What do you think, Roger? Roger's given a bunch of half points, making it fucking hard for Jim to tally this shit up. Yeah, he's got to tally? Yeah, he's got to tally. We got to score him first and then reveal. He's gone back to a 10-point scale if he's doing half points. Oh, God. I gave one half point. 2.67. Why are you going to take away half points from me? Listen, I understand it's one of those things that just makes you happy, so I'm going to let it slide, okay? Thank you. All right. So, Roger, what do you think? I'm being generous though. I'm not really crapping on her. We're comparing them against each other, not against, what was that awesome Omegang beer we had? Idle Days. Yeah. Yeah. We can't compare it against the best craft lager we've had in months. Was that the Megadeth one? No. It was the celebrity one. It was on the summer beers one. Omegang, Idle Days, Unfiltered Pilsner. Man, it was awesome. I listened to that. I thought about buying it, and then I remembered it was a Pilsner, so I didn't, but maybe I should. Yeah. You are such a stupids. I'll own it. I'll own it. You know what I did buy yesterday though? Thank you, Jim, for the tip. Thank you, Pat, for the recommendation. You almost called me fat. What's the Antica Vermouth? Carpano Classical. Dude, it's the best Carpano. With that Maker's Mark bottle that we got, that was a really good Manhattan. So I had to suck it. And I'm surprised you made it to work today. I actually drank two different madeiras last night. Yeah. I had a bottle of 15 year Enrique's and Enrique's Verdejo and then Verdejo. Verdejo. Verdejo. Verdejo. Verdejo. Verdejo. However you pronounce it. I know how to spell it. And then a friend brought over a single vintage Enrique's and Enrique's little 375 that he got at the Geneva store. That's like, I forget everything else about it, but it's like some single grape, single vineyard thing or something. It was amazing. It's kind of weird Pat's hanging out with the madeira set right now. It's coming up on Independence Day and Roger's going to talk about some historical relevance of madeira whether we like it or not. So, I figured I'd beat them to the punch. Oh yeah, this is our Fourth of July episode. Happy Fourth of July everybody. Hey. Light them fireworks. Yeah. There's nothing more American than nine out of these 10 beers. Yes. All right, you're ready for ranking. Let's just start by saying our favorite, like top three. And we'll react, and then we'll go back and give all the numbers. Okay. I'll go first. My favorite was easily number seven. It is everything I want in a light beer. It is balanced, light, crisp, refreshing, non-offensive. Most importantly, not too sweet and corny. It probably has plenty of corn in it, but it doesn't taste like corn syrupy corny. And then tied for number two for me, I'm not splitting hairs. I mean, if I did half points like some kind of pathetic loser, maybe I could, you know, differentiate it more. But numbers four, eight, and nine were like all tied for me for second place. Boring. Nine was an outlier. Okay. Because it's so weird and different and actually has character, I would grab number two. And I really hope that it's not just an American macro logger because it's so different and I can't imagine that it would fit outside that wheelhouse. Maybe it's imported. I don't know. I like number seven, got to admit. And I kind of like number one. You got to admit number seven. That's right. Number seven. King. I'm going to go with... It might not be Hansel. We should see. Sorry. I'll shut up. You follow. If it's something new, then he's going to say like, High life. Every episode for the next 200 shows. I think as everyone could tell, I'm a big fan of number nine. So it's my number one choice. Just like the carbonation, very citrusy, well-balanced. Number two for me, it'd be number 10. So the last two came in top. Really? Number 10? Yeah. I just like those flowery, easy to drink. I could probably put about 10 to 15 of those back and not have a problem with that. Ten's not bad. Ten really isn't bad. Ten is a solid third place for me, I'd say. I didn't write the word lame on very many, but I did on number 10. Yeah. I hate to disagree as well. Ten was I did not care for at all, but again- Shannon, I got your back. Thanks. Thanks. I appreciate it. And then number three for me would be number one, like that fruity pebble on the nose. That was the other one. I wrote the word lame. Who wants their beer to taste like fruity pebbles besides craft brewers? It smells like it doesn't taste like it. Take that, Pastriarchy. Roger? Just to piss Pat off, number two is my favorite. Of course it's his favorite. It's head and shoulders, not just by a little bit. This is the most hoppy beer on the table by such an extraordinarily wide gap. By a order of magnitude. Of course it's your favorite one. By an order of magnitude. It's a very delicious beer. I'm also going to venture a guess to piece, Greg, here. I think it's probably Trumer Pils because it's super hoppy and it's maybe even a tiny bit skunky. All the green glass, Trumer Pils, pretty hoppy. That could make sense. A very close second would be seven, which was pretty good. We're all getting on the seven train. Yeah. I also liked nine a lot like Shannon did. Yeah, nine was pretty good. All right, next question. What was the highest score you actually gave? I gave five stars to seven. Really? Yeah. I gave a five to nine. Yeah, against each other, I think it was clearly the best for my taste. I stretched it, man. The highest score I gave was three. And I was trying. Well, you're d***. I gave a negative one. Whoa. I can't get negative. Stop, stop. No negative. You can give a zero, I guess. Which one was the negative one? Six. Yeah, that sucked. I'm actually going to up my- That got the word gross. No, I should not change my score at this point. I'll have to leave it as is. Okay. I was going to change my score on one beer, but you know what? I'll leave it. All right. Jim, you want to tally up scores here? Do you want to say what you're- Oh, yeah. Sorry. What was your least favorite? What was your highest score given? Four or five. You gave a 4.5. Yes. Can we hold up the sign? That's like an A minus. To number two. To number two, right? Yeah. Yeah. What's your most hated though? Most hated was six is a one. I also gave six a one. Six tied with three tied with eight. Yeah, three, six, and five. I gave one to all of those. I think pretty much three through seven for me. You gave three a one? I gave three a two. I did. That's outrageous. I think three might be Bud Heavy. I think it, yeah. Bud Heavy? I thought it was High Life. Let's go one beer at a time. Number one. 2.5. Two. Three. Three. Oh, then divide it by four. No, just total points. We should divide it by four. Why would we divide it by four? Give it total points. So it's within the five point scale as an average. All right. Parents are yelling again. Jim, you can punch this out in an Excel spreadsheet. No, because we're going to end up with a bunch of ties, and we can't have a clear winner if we give a total score. Because of Roger's.5 system, I don't think we'll end up with a tie. We're not going to. I think they'll be enough. See, has its merits. Also, if it's a tie, it's going to be a tie whether it's a multiplied by four or divided by four. It's still a tie. That's true. All right. Just to fucking divide them by four. I told you guys this was a math podcast. All right. Number two. 4.5. Two. Three. One. Oh. Oh, you're not friends with Roger anymore. Hard on one. He can have his leather shoe beer. I'll drink my other one. Leather shoe beer. Why I got a story about drinking beer out of a leather shoe? It's disgusting. It's a disgusting story. We don't need to record it. A shoey? What are you, a rugby fan? I was on a rugby team in college and you had to shoot the boot. Filthy animal. We're literally at the part where we just say numbers. I was totally wrong and we already have a tie. Yeah. Wow, number one and number two are tied? Yeah, that's not even, come on, who did that? Who scored number one really high? I gave it a three. Thanks for your one, Shannon, you torpedoed the ranking of number two. All right, number three. 3.5. One. One. Two. They're all going to be the same number. Yeah. That's great. Yeah, they're all going to be the same number. Well, they're all like the same sort of. Yeah, yeah, they are. This straw gold rainbow in front of us. Yep. Fizzy nothing. The last one is the palest one in comparison. Yes, it is. Well, number two is pretty damn pale too. Of course, my number two is mostly empty because I drank most of it. All right, number three. Number four. Oh, number four. Two. Three. Two. Two. Five. Three. One. One point five. Three. Wait, you're getting in the point five game now? That was the one that I gave half a point. Wow. I didn't want to dog it as bad as I hated number three. Okay. All right. Number six. One. One. One. One. Negative one, one like zero. I hope it's hamster. Screw you. I mean, it's not going to be. No, because hamster doesn't taste like a one-star beer. Yeah. All right. Number seven. Four. Five. Three. Two. Number eight. Two. Three. One. Four. Number nine. Three point five. Three. Two. Five. And finally, number 10. One point five. Two. One. Three. I drank two ounces times ten, and I have to pee. Jim, how long is the tallying? It's going to take a little bit. Great idea, Pat. Great one. The fact that none of these are light is amazing. Yes. It really is. I mean, some of these taste really light. I could have sworn the last one. Six, I thought for sure, was Bud Light. Yes. Really? Bud Light or Bud Light? Now, I'm thinking maybe I'm thinking Bush. Or like Natty, Natural. I don't know. I highly doubt Natural is available. Do you think Jim went to the trouble to track down regular Keystone? No, that's another problem. It's we basically have it. Yeah. And I could have swore another one would have been Keystone. So, boy, I hope that's not banquet. I bet it is. Which one do you think? Ten maybe. Ten? I don't think ten is banquet. It's got that tanginess that I always associate with Coors products. I didn't know you associated tanginess with Coors products. Yeah. For sure. Interesting. Five is brutal. Five is so bad. I mean, once they warm up, that is another thing worth mentioning and emphasizing. All these weird estery, like basically all of their flaws are only amplified. All the volatile stuff's blown off and it's just distilled all the gross into whatever you smell and taste left. Dude, five is so bad, Greg. I know I drank number one before, like a bunch. Yeah. I think one might be High Life. Yeah. Which I have always kind of liked. What do you think number three is? I thought three was High Life. I think three might be. It could be High Life. I wouldn't be surprised if it was High Life. I think it's probably Schlitz or maybe PBR. It's something with a little more flavor. The fact that PBR went from being in I think eight states to all 50, and was due in part to counterculture and hipsters and punk rockers wanting to put a middle finger to Bud and Miller drinkers, it's like, I get you, but sadly, it's made by Miller, All right, are we ready here for this big reveal? Yeah, let's see the scores here. Number one. Number one, Bud Heavy. 2.625. 2.625. That's almost half. That's half. That's a 50% plus. Come on. This is why it should be a total. Number two. Number two, Alarmist Crispy Boy. Wow. 2.625 also. Tied with Budweiser. Okay, I definitely said number two was a craft, and you guys kept insisting it was an import. I was right. It does taste very green bodily. Bam, bam, bam. Yeah, no. I know. I've had number one before. Good job for not guessing what it was, but guessing where it's from. Good job. You know what? It's the one thing about the beer, is that it's not an American macro lager. Come on. He's just salty. All that aside, nice job, Alarmist. Yeah, nice job. Yeah. Number three. Number three, Schlitz. I called it. 1.875. You did call it and that's pretty low. 1.875, wow. Yeah, three sucked. What did you give three as a score, Roger? Three, five. He does claim that he loves Schlitz. Yeah. All right, number four. Number four, Miller High Life, 2.25. I gave it three stars. That's surprising. It was tied for second place. Interesting. Alicia, jump on that mic and tell him what a dummy he is. Five was so bad. This is the greatest day in recent memory. The champion of hams, trashes. This is old, stale hams. That's the problem. He had that excuse lined up in his pocket. Even early on, he said it was tied with his lowest one, and I was like, I'm desperately trying to keep a straight face. Oh, no. Well, we know loud enough that Alicia came from the other side of the building. Let's see what was going on. Number six. Wait, you can't really just... Don't try to move on from this. You have to slinger for a little bit. Can you play We Are The Champions for a little while? This is why I insisted it tastes best out of a 16-ounce can. This was clearly an old 12-ounce can of hams. I agree with that, but still. Yeah, you agree with it. We kept it in the furnace room for six months. Yeah, see, you guys screwed me. Wow, what is number seven? Our new favorite beer number six is MGD. Number one, that was the worst. That was last year. It was solid one. Everyone said one on that one. Wow, yeah. If anything, Shannon gave it a minus one, so it's in the twenty. Number seven, PBR. Wow. There we go. 3.5. PBR coming out, 3.5. Wow, I always associate so much more sweetness with PBR. Okay, number eight, Old Style, 2.5. Yeah, I've always hated Old Pile, so that tracks. Old Pile. I had some Old Style cans last night. All right, number nine is the other outlier. Number nine is Modelo Especial. She even said Modelo. Yeah, she did. What was the score? 3.375. That's got to be close to second place, right? That is, yes, that's second place. Wow. Number 10, Coors Banquet, Roger, you nailed that one. 1.875. I knew it was a Coors. I thought it was Coors Light, though. Yeah, me too. PBR is my new favorite beer? No. Hey, Pat, you want to go get sleeve tattoos with me? Yeah. We have to shave our beards and stop shaving our mustaches. See, the only time I ever drink PBR, it's accompanied with a shot of Jaeger Meister. It's PBR and Jaeger. Without that, I don't know how to drink it. Man, we like PBR that much, huh? Yeah. Wow. I had one last night. I couldn't pick it out of the lineup. I had a PBR two nights ago. Yeah, it didn't taste like, I don't know. I thought it tasted sweet then. This does taste sweet. This has a lingering sweetness to it. Well, okay. Now, you're retconning yourself into believing something different. No, it's true. You always say that blind tasting is when you're the most honest. Give me the hams. No, it's the most honest thing. I'm going to start calling you Frank Booth. Bring out the hams and the PBR. It is. He's checking the date right now. Pep's Blue Ribbon. This hams is a month away from its Best Buy day. Here's the PBR. Here comes the train of excuses. Well, I'm glad that I've been supporting PBR this whole pandemic with wearing a PBR face mask. Shut up, Roger. Yeah, that's why you added dress code. We have to talk about that. Side by side, this five has objectively more notes. The power of knowing which one is your favorite. You're right. Now that I know, five smells better and seven smells dusty. Seven doesn't smell anything at all. Like seven is just. No, I still like it. It smells more corny. They taste the same to me at this point. They taste the same, too. Yeah. Wow. weird. Brophy's having trouble because he can't get past the bitterness of defeat. Wow. Yeah. Grand slam, Roger. Grand slam. I hate you, Roger. Listen about Hamm's every **** damn episode. Made me hate a beer I've always loved. Oh, man. Hey, you know what we're not out of? PBR. Yeah. There's no PBR shortage. PBR is six bucks a six-pack. No, man. It's like $4.99. No, no, no, no. I know it's not. I think it's $5.99. But you can get a 24 for $1.99, so take that to the Dome. Okay. I didn't admit it earlier, but the last PBR I had was from a 24-pack can. But I split it. I poured half of it out. You can get PBR in bottles, which is nice. You can get a 12-pack for $8.99, or you can take home a cube for $14.99. That's a buck higher than Ham's. Oh, man. Where do we go from here? I feel like- I feel like a dollar more is worth it for something you scored so much higher. So much higher. So much higher. I did. Wow. Is this a serious finale of Barrel to Bottle? I don't know where we go from here. We have no credibility anymore. We just did our 200th episode with the bar draft. Yeah. Right. Well, let's not have any more episodes. We have to apologize to each other after. I mean, I've done this before where you taste like, specifically, I've done all the Paps products since I always thought it was funny that Miller just brews all of them for them. Right. I mean, it really is like trying to split hairs. I mean, it can get difficult how similar these beers are. I mean, they're. So what are one, two, and three? Let's see here. The top beer is PBR. And then the second is Modelo Especial. And number three is. It's Bud Heavy Tied With Alarmist. Dang. Yes. Thank God you insisted he go to the bathroom so that you could backtrack and then further on your cake. Further on your cake. Totally dumped all over it. Wait, so why did you wait for me to leave to do that? I didn't know. We're killing time. Thank you, Jim, for pulling all these beers and barring them all. No problem. Yeah. It was fun. I like this part of the episode where we go, I learned something today. Tasting hams and PBR side by side, I think I'm going to keep drinking hams though. That's like the QAnon of beers. Who do you present them with facts, and you're just believing counter to the facts. PBR is not my beer. Such an assault on your personhood itself. Oh, man. I'm going to feel better about buying that six pack of PBR for slightly more. Well, I'd rather drink something good. I think with Lees beers, the preferred package is a 30 rack, and we're talking about a dollar difference here. Well, where do we go from here? Everybody enjoys season two coming up next week. It's a hard reset where we install start off as fresh faced, innocent sponges of knowledge where we can approach everything. We're going to have to work PBR into everything. So now. Yeah. Let's have a PBR horn instead of the hams horn. The hams horn. All right. Well, hey, thank you for sticking through this experience with us. I'm glad we had a fun one and happy 4th of July everybody. birth of a Nation. Go back and listen to Roger talking about a stone fence from our 4th of July episode like three years ago. It's a good one. 4th of July. My favorite holiday and in part because I get to do things like make you talk and drink madeira. Yeah. Stone fences. By the way, if you listen to that episode, spoiler alert, actually it's not a spoiler. It's not in the episode, but to bring closure to that episode, Roger totally found a wrought iron poker to make the other drink with. Oh, yeah. He got a food grade wrought iron poker. It was, well, I didn't end up getting the poker. I got this little teeny mini cast iron skillet. Oh. I heated that up. Never mind. And used that. But yeah, it worked. It did the same thing. It was going to boil the drink with the poker. Yeah, and it did. It worked. It boiled it. It turned the pot all sorts of gross. You have to re-season it now. Yeah, I do. Yeah. Pat, you brought us in. You want to take us out? You've been listening to another episode of Barrel to Bottle where I eat total s***. I mean, not total s***. Not total s***. Now, listen, I've been drinking these two beers, number five and number seven here side by side. I can make a lot of excuses for why I still prefer five, but I'm not going to because Jim's just going to edit it out or make fun of me. Yeah. So, this has been fun. I'd like to say it's been enlightening, but really it's been anger-inducing. Hamm still has easily the best beer merchandise out there. I'll put it that way. Until next week, I'm Pat. I'm Greg. I'm Shannon. I'm Jim. From the land of sky blue water, I'm Roger. Keep tasting. Blind. Alisha is already texting the group of us, me holding up a hams in front of one of my hams sign, asking if I need help taking the sign down.