Yeunling was my go to cheap beer until the owner endorsed Trump in 2016, I haven’t had any since.
My favorite brewery these days is Heavy Seas out of Baltimore, but cheap it’s not.
That is objectively, obviously false. The most popular movies, music and books are disproportionately of high quality.
A list of the most popular movies of all time, inflation adjusted, is a list of largely excellent movies.
A list of the best selling recording artists of all time is a list of largely excellent music.
A list of the best-selling novels of all time is a list mostly made of enjoyable, classic books.
Around here it costs about as much as most mass produced, second tier beers. I hadn’t noticed it was really expensive but then I’m not one to thin slice a buck on a six pack. We pay a lot for booze in Canada, so a buck isn’t as big a difference as it is some places.
Hoegaarden is also perfectly fine. Alexander Keith’s is very tasty as well and in about the same price range. I’m relying on Krombacher right now, though, as I was sold one in a really nice restaurant and found it delicious; the only problem with it is that it is irritatingly only sold at the Beer Store, and not at grocery stores or LCBOs, and I hate the Beer Store.
Okay, generate such a list and we can judge.
I think that for maps like these, they want as much variety as possible, so when one region has already “claimed” an entry, other places must claim a different one, even if it is not the most popular. I’ve seen questionable results like this before for the most “popular” things in the various U.S. states like “popular Google search terms”: you’d think there would be a lot of overlap between the states, with at least some repeats, yet every state shows up with a unique entry.
Google is your friend, but here are the twenty most popular movies of all time, adjusting for inflation: Gone With the Wind, Star Wars, Sound of Music, E.T., Titanic, Avatar, The Ten Commandments, Jaws, Doctor Zhivago, The Exorcist, Snow White, The Force Awakens, The Empire Strikes Back, 101 Dalmatians (the original cartoon), Ben-Hur, Return of the Jedi, Jurassic Park, The Phantom Menace, the Lion King, and either The Sting or Raiders of the Lost Ark, depending what list you believe. Of those there is ONE bad movie, The Phantom Menace, and the rest all range from perfectly good to legitimate masterpieces.
Go ahead and do the same for music, but FYI the best selling artists of all time are the Beatles, who are probably the greatest popular music act there ever was.
Ok, using Google, I get the most popular book of all time:
Harry Potter
Movie:
Avatar
Song:
I Wanna Dance with You, Whitney Houston
and Beer:
Bud Light
All of that is absolute dreck designed to be appealing to the broadest mass of people and thus devoid of anything that even hints of being challenging. Bringing this back to beer, the less flavor, the more people who will consume it, the minute it has any kind of flavor, the more likely some people will dislike it.
Maybe prior to about 1980 there was some truth in this, but today it’s definitely false. Popular movies and music today is crap.
Again, you are equating “absolute dreck” with “stuff I don’t personally like.” Also, you’re engaging in blatant cherry-picking. RickJay specified the most popular films adjusted for inflation, and “Gone With the Wind” remains the highest on that basis. (And while Avatar may not be the most profound film of all time, calling it “complete dreck” is absurd.) A list of the 20 most popular albums of all time is dominated by the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and the Eagles. Lord of the Rings is the best selling book of all time, not Harry Potter, which is first only if you consider the whole series.
Generally, a list of “most popular” is a mix of quality and not so great works. But alleging that popular items are necessarily mediocre is demonstrably false.
And get off my lawn!
There’s two things I’d like to add to the thread…
First, I think the reason that most people here think that the cheap-assed European beer is better than the US beer is because they like hops more. Somewhere along the line, the notion that bitterness is bad in beer took hold in the US (think of the old Keystone “Bitter Beer Face!” commercials), and the big brewers have been consistently trying to only add as much as necessary to offset the sweetness of the grain, and the historically high adjunct percentage means that there’s less of that sweetness to offset (rice effectively leaves no flavor in the finished beer, for example, and corn doesn’t leave much).
Europeans haven’t ever really had that notion take off, so their beers are a little higher on the malt/hops scale, although not on the alcohol scale. They probably just use less adjuncts than the US brewers do.
Second, this is what sells. It’s not the product of incompetent brewmasters; quite the opposite. Brewing extremely light and mild lagers is technically HARD. There’s nowhere to hide with such light and mild flavors, and any flaw is extremely obvious, which is not always the case with more intensely flavored and colored beers.
That’s nonsense. Look, saying “things I don’t like suck” is just ridiculous, and mixed with “and I don’t like popular things” it’s a sad, vulgar kind of elitism.
Since I have proven beyond any reasonable argument to the contrary that most of the most popular movies of all time are very good, is it true all of today’s most popular movies are crap? It clearly is not. Last year’s top grossing movies included Black Panther, Infinity War, Ant Man and the Wasp, Incredibles 2, and Bohemian Rhapsody, all critically acclaimed films. A Star is Born, which was terrific, made ten times its production budget telling a story that had been told three times already (at least!) You might not necessarily like superhero films or whatever - I’m tired of them myself - but those are not BAD films, and even the ones on the list I’m least fond of (like the latest Fantastic Beasts movie) are certainly not bad movies; they’re competently done films with good actors and coherent stories.
Since 1980, you say? Here are the most popular movies of all time by domestic (US and Canada) box office take, adjusted for inflation, but eliminating anything released before 1980:
- E.T.
- Titanic
- The Force Awakens
- The Empire Strikes Back
- Avatar
- Return of the Jedi
- Jurassic Park
- The Phantom Menace
- The Lion King
- Raiders of the Lost Ark
- Jurassic World
- Forrest Gump
- The Avengers
- Black Panther
- The Dark Knight
- Avengers: Infinity War
- Ghostbusters (original version)
- Shrek 2
- Spider-Man (the first one, with Tobey Maguire)
- Independence Day
Those aren’t bad movies. There is ONE bad movie there, Phantom Menace, and Jurassic World and Independence Day are fine movies if pretty silly. But most of those movies are outstanding - some are timeless classics. Genuine crap isn’t that popular.
Of course some great movies do not make a fortune; I maintain “Moonlight,” not a huge hit, was one of the ten greatest movies in the history of American cinema, while Transformers movies all make big coin and are quite stupid. But to say all, or even most, or hell, even close to half of popular movies are crap is just obviously, really-easily-shown-to-be not true. It’s so obviously not true that I find it mystifying anyone would think to say it, unless your definition of “Crap” as applied to movies includes a hell of a lot of really first rate movies.
And what popular music is dreck? Sure, there’s always some, I guess, one hit wonders will always be with us, but today’s most popular acts include Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, Ed Sheeran, Beyonce, The Weeknd, Drake, Bruno Mars, Imagine Dragons, and the list goes on. You might not find those artists to be your cup of tea, but anyone who says they are all “crap” or “dreck” and are not extremely skilled musicians producing high quality music simply does not have an opinion on music that should be taken seriously.
To pull this back to the subject of beer, inasmuch as we were ever off that subject, this “popular stuff sucks” sentiment, which is wrong in every area I can think of off the top of my head, is just a variation of the “y u no like what I like” sentiment, like a fan of a TV show freaking out when you say you don’t watch that show. Not everyone has to like the beer than I like, or the food that I like, or the TV shows, music, and movies that I like. Nor do I have to like what they like - but that does NOT mean what I don’t like is shit. I am, full disclosure, not really a fan of the Beatles; I guess it was before my time. But it would be immensely stupid of me to simply assume the Beatles sucked and their music was dreck because I don’t like them and they’re really popular. It is objectively apparent to me, based on all the available evidence, that their music was quite outstanding; it’s just not my cup of tea, and I hope I have the humility and self-awareness to know what my preferences do not map to objective facts about quality.
Negra Modelo is my go-to, unless they have a Cerveza Leon around, or it’s a hot, sunny, day, where Modelo Especial (de bote) is the best compromise between water (which I should drink) and beer (which I want to drink).
Not that it really changes the conversation much, but I kind of question the reality of that map. Bud is not what I see ordered a lot in bars and at least in Ontario, it’s third behind Coors light and Molson Canadian in Beer Store sales. So the “popularity” may be distorted by maybe large venues that give little choice, like going to a hockey game and the only choices are Bud for the cheapskates and an extra $3 for a Stella.
I just want to signal my appreciation of Colibri’s post at #54, thus jeopardizing my ranking as SDMB’s Biggest Insufferable Snob Asshole.
Most of my beer intake occurs at mealtime; I find beer more palatable than wine with about 75% of the food I like to cook and eat. And I don’t want a Belgian Trappist Rasperry Ale or a grapefruit-and-coriander-drenched local craft beer dominating the meal.
I like a good smooth Pilsener, stout, or ale. Luckily for me, the God of Beer has seen fit to provide endless supplies of Bitburger, one of Germany’s most popular brews, to my location for about $1.25 a pint.
It’s as refreshing and easy to drink as any crap commercial US beer, but it…tastes like beer.
You may like many of these movies, but none of them are very complex or challenging. Many of them are in fact children’s moves and that proves my point. This is entertainment at the lowest common denominator; the minute art or beer (remember this is a thread about beer?) gets complex, some people are going to like it and some people are not going to like it. Of course the most popular beer is going to be flavorless and unchallenging, just like the most popular movies are going to be good guys in tights beating up bad guys in tights; they are simple by design.
Thanks you. Coming from you it means a lot.
Full disclosure: One of my current jobs is to promote coffee snobbery. I am working on a “Museum of Coffee” in Panama City’s Old Quarter. Panama doesn’t produce a lot of coffee, but it does produce the most expensive in the world. A pound of select Geisha coffee from Panama’s highlands recently went for $800 a pound at auction. The Museum will promote Panama’s coffee as being the best in the world (which arguably some is, according to taste competitions by professional tasters).
Specialty coffee is probably where microbrews were 15 years ago, and where wine was a couple of centuries ago. It used to be that all the coffee from an area was just thrown together for processing and roasting, so any local differences in taste were eliminated in the mix. Now specialty coffee is being harvested in very small lots, and separated according to variety, details of microclimate (slope, sunlight, altitude, rainfall), processing (dried with or without the fruit removed, fermented in different ways), roast, and grind. These actually do produce considerable variability in taste.
Eventually it won’t be enough for coffee snobs to order Jamaican Blue Mountain or Hawaiian Kona. Soon you’ll have to order a Panama Finca Esmeralda Special Select Geisha from a north facing slope at 2000 meters with natural processing in order not to be considered and ignorant Philistine. At least, if I have anything to do with it.
(In truth, I really like coffee, but a lot of the fine distinctions I can’t really taste. For my breakfast coffee I drink one of Panama’s more popular highland brands, although I may go for something fancier on the weekends.)
One person’s “flavorless and unchallenging” is another’s crispy, clean, and refreshing. As I said above, when I’m just having a burger or a pizza I don’t really want to be “challenged” by my friggin beer. Really, you’re just back to things I like are good, and things other people like are bad.
For those wondering what’s ‘special’ about it, I think it was Viz comic reckoned a can of it has never been drunk inside a legally occupied residence. We sold it where I used to work- well, I say we sold it, the stock on the shelf constantly went down, but I don’t recall many people actually paying for it…
I also question that map- what on earth’s going on with some of those red dots at the end of the lines? They’re just randomly hanging out in the middle of nowhere, rather than in the countries. Were the creators doing an extended taste comparison while making it?
Yes, Pacifico is my brew of choice on a hot day. Mind you, it’s not for it’s great taste, but it’s refreshing when Ice cold and does have taste.
Many beer connoisseurs loooooove IPAs, which I hate. Or micro-brews, which by definition can never become the “most popular beer”.
I do like a nice dark, like Guiness. But I maybe drink one of those, and i can do a couple- three Pacificos.
Of those, only Titanic and Avatar are imho bad, and both are beautifully filmed. Ben Hur is dated, sure. And of course the prequels are controversial, but I thought they were Ok.