BEAST staffers are hearty creatures. They spend the majority of their lives in the most unhealthy conditions imaginable in the first world, yet somehow manage to keep going. Most of them have spent significant portions of their lives subsisting on ramen noodles and cheap beer, dwelling in dingy apartments with poor lighting and ventilation. They may be intellectuals but they’re working class, baby.

It seemed appropriate, then, that the BEAST should have a feature on the working class beer of Rochester, Genesee Cream Ale. The idea: pit Genny Cream against a selection of the cheapest available domestic beers. Remember those? The metallic tasting swill our fathers and uncles used to guzzle on Sundays during football games? Yeah we hated them then, and after last night we remember why.

The Local Heroes:

Genesee Cream Ale

Koch’s Golden Anniversary

The Challengers:

Old Milwaukee

Natural Ice

Prime Time

Miller High Life

Busch

Hurricane Malt Liquor

Preparations

The evening began with BEAST staffers combing the supermarkets and convenience stores of Rochester searching for a variety of cheap six packs. At Beers of the World, one staffer explained to a mildly amused clerk that he wanted shitty beer. “Don’t you have something cheap and nasty in anything smaller than a case?” The answer, sadly, was no. The clerk’s one recommendation: Prime Time Beer. We purchased it, suspecting it would likely be the best tasting thing we’d have access to over the course of the night. Visits to Tops, Wegman’s and a 7-11 completed our beer run and we returned to the official secret BEAST hideout to make preparations for the experiment.

The rules of the competition were fairly straightforward: Three BEAST staffers, supported by a revolving cast of friends and associates, would drink as much of the beer as possible. No one was allowed to drink the same beer twice until making a complete round of the contenders. Beers were evaluated based on the facial expression immediately following one’s first taste, along with initial comments regarding flavor. Vomiting would also factor negatively if a specific beer could be blamed for it.

The Bar Is Open

The entire evening was recorded (and the tapes saved for future blackmail). Pictures were taken of various beer-reactions. Hockey played on the television as official “beer drinking music” pumped out of the stereo. The beer began to flow, regrettably, at around 10 PM. General reactions began to emerge:

“My taste buds appear to have gone numb, because I can no longer taste this piss.”

“This sucks.”

“Why the hell are we doing this to ourselves again?”

People occasionally materialized to assist us in our mission, but they quickly disappeared once they realized what we were drinking and how truly awful it was. We only managed to lure one visitor into sticking around long enough to actually drink more than one sip of our beer. This was accomplished with a phone call assuring him that we had beer and women at our place. Well, we were only half lying about the beer part. After he calmed down about the choice of beer and lack of available females, the sick bastard actually claimed to enjoy the malt liquor. He was forcibly ejected. More phone calls were made in an attempt to entice more test subjects to our lair. We haven’t been hung up on this often since we stopped stalking our ex’s.

After several beers, staffers began to feel the sickly grip of inebriation. We got louder. We got meaner. We got sicker. Verbal barbs circulated like doobies at a drum circle, but none was more scathing than our appraisals of the sewage we drank. Both of our local beers were repeatedly compared to Kodak’s chemical discharges. This led us to wonder openly about the dubious origins of Genesee and Golden Anniversary. We made plans to contact a photographer to investigate the possibility of developing film in them.

Deterioration

As the evening wore on, the pace of our intake slowed. One can of vile fluid blended into another. Protestations grew louder as one panelist shouted “DRINK! DRINK!” in response to another’s avowed desire to give up and go to a bar. Belligerence rose. Sing-alongs ensued. BEAST panelists have terrible singing voices.

Two beers consistently scored low marks throughout the evening: Golden Anniversary and Natural Ice. A typical response to G.A. was, “Shit, I have to finish this?” A typical response to Natural Ice was an unprintable guttural sound. Eventually an agreement was reached that despite its putrid flavor, rancid bouquet and general lack of redeeming qualities, Genesee Cream Ale was actually the most palatable beer of the night. Our love affair with Prime Time had worn off at this point. Most of the beers were compared unfavorably to scrotal sweat.

Panelists began trying to lay blame at one another’s feet for this story idea. Only two were able to make it through an entire round of the selected beers. Moods worsened. Enthusiasm waned. Laughter became more subdued. Staffers began expressing a desire for violence. The joke wasn’t funny anymore. When the hell would it end? Panelists left. One dropped out and observed. Finally, mercifully, the experiment was declared complete. The survivors repaired to Lux in a vain attempt to wash the taste of piss from their mouths with good beer.

The Aftermath

The visit to Lux was short-lived. Staffers muddled their way through their drinks and then called it a night. Bad sentiments continued to surface. One staffer expressed a desire to start a fistfight and then urinated in the middle of the street. He later returned home and spent the remainder of the evening in a foul mood, only to pass out in his clothes. The next morning he awoke contorted and hung over. He would later report, “I feel like my head is a large, empty metal container being repeatedly beaten by a grinning five-year-old with a hammer.”

The violent, antisocial moods were troubling. One editor pondered a connection between the regular consumption of cheap swill and domestic violence. Remarkably, though, nobody vomited. Our only explanation for this being that the beer was so utterly unpalatable that no one could actually stand to drink enough of it to get sick. Our refrigerator is still filled with beer that nobody will drink. Guess we’re not the alcoholics we thought we were.

Conclusion

Rochester has welcomed the BEAST. It welcomed us with shitty beer that we could barely stand to drink. Some were slightly better and some were significantly worse. To say that any one of these beers was “better” than another is a study in negative relativism, like the way getting kicked in the balls is preferable to being anally raped. We have rated the beers from best to worst. Really though, they all suck. The experience has damaged us permanently.

The High Falls Brewing Company, makers of Genesee and other slightly more palatable beers, is one of the few business success stories in Rochester. As the Genesee Brewing Company, it almost died. Drinking their trademark beer, we understand why. It remains a mystery to us how, as High Falls they’ve managed to turn it around. The beer hasn’t changed. It’s as bad now as it ever was. It may have won the competition, but dear God at what cost?

Evaluations of the beers follow, from ‘best’ to ‘worst’:

1.      Genesee Cream Ale: The first recorded reaction to this beer was “Balls!” Not in a good way, either. Goes down about as smooth as a can of razor blades. Unanimously agreed to be the best.

2.      Prime Time Beer: The dark horse in the running. Nearly disqualified for tasting too          good. Elicited statements of praise, including “It does not make me want to gag and die,” and “Almost an enjoyable beer.” These opinions were qualified by one panelist, who declared it worse than drinking from his own toilet.

3.      Miller High Life: One staffer complained that it tasted like liquid bread. All things considered, we suppose that’s all it really is.

4.      Old Milwaukee: “It sucks.”

5.      Busch: Someone claimed that this tasted like cherries. Another panelist declared, “One taste of this shit would make me want to head for the mountains, to hide from this shitty beer.” Best comment: “It’s like drinking water, except I like drinking water.”

6.      Hurricane Malt Liquor: Despite one participant’s glowing praise for this wretched bile, it was deemed unfit for consumption and dumped down the nearest drain. Described as a “crucible of hurt.” This spurious piss was labeled with a “Born On” date. Our sample’s birthday? September 11^th.

7.      Koch’s Golden Anniversary: Rochester’s OTHER beer and Genesee’s bastard cousin. Favorite of high school kids everywhere, because it’s the only beer one can afford to buy with milk money. Tastes like the can it came in. Winner of the “Great American Beer Festival,” which is to be studiously avoided, since it must be populated exclusively by tongueless chromosomal aberrations.

8.      Natural Ice: Universally loathed. One panelist commented “from first to last, this may be the worst shit I’ve ever drank.” Another spit it out in horror on his first sip. Upon tasting it, the staffer who purchased it declared, “I knew it would taste like your grandfather’s balls the moment I bought it.”