Inspired by the thread last week on the Budweiser of Europe.
What’s the cheap shitty beer that hipsters in Europe drink ironically?
Back in the 80’s, in Hessen, Germany, at least, before the wall came down, it was Warsteiner. I remember it was a popular brand further enhanced by the popularity of a concurrent counterculture comic. Unfortunately, I am unable to remember the name of this comic character, but his favorite beer was Warsteiner and the bottles featured prominently in the story line. It was a very popular German comic, total verfrunzt, perhaps someone here can refresh my memory?
Actually, I think I might be misremembering that, maybe the beer he drank was characterized by a “swing top” corked beer…
I’m not sure.
Ok, after further drunken googling, I started a fire under that lapse synapse, and discovered it was Bölkstoff Bier as popularized by Werner
I can’t say if it’s cheap or drank ironically but I’ve always been told by people in the business that Stella Artois is the “wife-beater beer” in much of Europe. Essentially comparing it to the crappy white trash lawn mower beers in the US like PBR, Old Style, MGD and Busch. This being notable since Stella has such a trendy following here and massive markup based solely on it’s status as a Belgian import.
Complicating things a bit are the weird cross-currents of marketing and importation. I will agree that Stella is nothing special in Europe AFAICT. Weirdly, unless I am reading London wrong, a massively gigantic marketing blitz has led to Budweiser (Budweiser) being perceived as a desirable, dare I say premium (maybe a bridge too far) beer in some of England at least.
I have not noticed this (about Bud) in London. In fact I don’t know anyone who would drink it through choice, and none of the pubs or bars I regularly go to sell it, as far as I’ve noticed lately. Very popular here at the moment are Central and Latin American beers and Eastern European beers, particularly Polish and Czech. In fact I was in easily the most painfully trendy bar I’ve been to for some time on Saturday, and the only Budweiser they had was the real one… Budvar. On tap, no less.
How is it possible to drink something “ironically”?
All over the UK and Ireland in fact, and this is not a recent phenomenon. Bud and a few other North American brands have been big sellers over here for maybe 15 years because of that marketing offensive. I don’t quite know how Teacake has managed to avoid pubs selling Bud, unless he/she means draft Bud, if there is such a thing. As far as bottled beers go, Bud is one of the most common brands available.
Thanks for confirming I hadn’t lost my mind – was trying to take my father for a proper pint when we were visiting a few years ago and had a surprisingly difficult time at the first couple of places, which were pushing Bud bottles bigtime. It’s of course far from impossible to get good English or European beer, but my dad still remembers his shock at the prevalence of (lousy) American beer. Teacake, kudos to you for moving in the right circles; I obviously wasn’t.
Related note, the truly horrific (well, beer-horrific) experience was my first trip to Bermuda. I’m thinking: British colony, surely there’ll be some good pubs, the Boddington’s will be flowing. Hamilton, it turns out, is a dump, and the montonic recital “Bud, Bud light, Heineken, Corona, Corona light, Michelob, Amstel light” at bar after bar became depressing. IIRC the only good beer we had was at one out of the way pub, and Kingfisher at a very good curry place . . . .
I don’t drink Pabst ironically.
Pabst is a very good example of American-Style lager. A few weeks ago my brother and I were listening to a baseball game on the radio while knocking back some PBR. The game was getting good and we decided to go to a local bar to watch the rest. At the bar we ordered draft Budwiser, I was surprised by how much difference I noticed. PBR is far better.
Try it sometime.
Ok, before they capitalized on the popularity of the Werner comics and marketed his very own label of Bölkstoff, it was understood that Werner was really drinking a Flensburger Bier (Pilsener). So for a while in the 80’s, Flensburger in the distinctive swing top bottle enjoyed a quirky and ironic surge in popularity due to it being the brand of the ne’er do well, slacker, biker/plumber’s apprentice Werner.
I drank some of the Flensburger back then (sstill have an empty bottle) and it was a pretty good German Bier, if not middling on the German scale at least, all things being relative.
Nor do I. Compared with BudMillCoors, it’s positively a delight.
I also think this sort of stereotypical hipster irony died in the late 90s/early 00s, for the most part. From my observation, today’s hipster is post-ironic in an age of neo-sincerity. I’m only being partly tongue-in-cheek. I’m pretty sure, though, most of the kids drinking PBR are doing so because it’s cheap and palatable. If they wanted to be drinking ironically, Busch Light or Milwaukee’s Best would be the way to go. That stuff is pure crap.
Thanks to Monty Python, I had always wanted to try Watneys Red Barrel.
It made PBR seem like a leet micro brew…
There isn’t an equivalent, if I’m reading the threads on PBR right. Hipsters/bohemians in the UK are likely to drink anything, there isn’t a single drink that’s fashionable amongst them, from what I’ve seen.
Real ale’s having a bit of a renaissance, lately, from what I’ve seen, and Polish lagers are also now quite popular (Tyskie, Zdesk (?) etc.), but these are drunk because they actually taste good (and the Polish stuff is usually cheap, catering to Polish immigrants).
OK, after some further research (purely for all of your benefit, you understand!), I have established that the bar and pub I most regularly go to do actually have Bud in the fridge. I just never see anyone drink it! Years ago, on the other hand, I used to drink Bud, as did everyone I knew. It was indeed considered cool to do so, though I used to drink it because I’d been to St Louis and taken the tour! (In my defence for thinking that was a good reason to drink something, I was still at school at the time.)
There seems to be a bit of a trend for the art school retro-hippy girls of South London to drink Guinness at the moment, pulling little moues of distaste at every sip. This annoys me, because it’s a waste of good Guinness and it makes me feel uncomfortable ordering it in case someone thinks I’m trying to be young and hip.
It probably says a lot about me that to me “PBR” is “Professional Bull Riding.” I was very interested to open this thread and find out what the European version of PBR was, but I guess that will have to remain a mystery.
I like American lagers and expect that, as long as the globe keeps warming but before the shutting down of the Gulf Stream plunges Europe into the next Ice Age, Yurpeens will begin to appreciate an ice-cold Pabst’s after mowing the lawn.
Some hipstery people around here will drink cheapo beer a la PBR, such as Bavaria or Dutch Gold but in my experience at least it is far more common for this cohort to drink things like Budvar, which isn’t all that cheap.
Exactly. The reason I drank it at a local “bohemian” bar several years ago was because it was their cheapest beer at a dollar a can special. Normally. I would drink draft, but they had me priced out with nearly all of their taps being devoted to trendy microbrews.
I hadn’t had one in years, and the first thing that I forgot about Pabst was how sweet it was- It’s definitely a “sweeter” brew. I enjoy the creamy head however, and PBR is best poured into a glass, and this is one of those old fashioned beers that best benefits from a shake of salt… I did rememebr a lot of old timers salting it when I was younger, perhaps due to its sweetness. I like it, but prefer a dryer beer, normally. That’s another reason why it seems like a parallel to German Flensburger to me, its distinctive taste… Flensburger is characterized by a distinctive bitterness, perhaps from the mineral water and hops.
I didn’t follow the thread on ‘European Bud’, but I’ll just go ahead and say that this question is essentially unanswerable since there is nothing remotely close to a European beer culture. Sure, there are beers from one place that people will drink elsewhere but it what it ‘means’, anthropologically speaking, if you will (essentially you’re after an anthropology of beer, which I think is neat ;)) to drink a beer can vary widely from place to place. Drinking Heineken can mean you’re hip and wealthy in one place, it can mean you’re a hip and wealthy tourist in other places, it can mean you’re from Amsterdam and not from another part of the Netherlands, and it can also mean you just want a beer and the local beers all suck (if you’re in Italy, for instance). Also, it can mean you don’t really like beer and you want something that tasts as bland as possible. I’m always surprised how crap beer from the Netherlands somehow does get exported, and gets branded as hip. The Bavaria brand that An Gadaí mentioned, for instance, is not from Bavaria but from the south of the Netherlands, and in most of the Netherlands it is not typically considered top notch. Nor is Heineken, actually. Or Amstel.