The Wednesday before Thanksgiving has become a sort of pseudo-holiday, with all the college students coming home and going out to bars to drink and catch up with hometown friends. I hate nights like this — you can include New Years Eve, St. Patrick's Day, and Arbor Day as well. They are nights for amateurs. The bars raise the price of the drinks, increase cover charges, and just get too crowded. Real drinkers can't enjoy this. We are working at drinking 365 days a year to keep the liquor economy going. Maybe instead of affecting us by raising prices, the bars should punish the college students by serving the beer they are used to drinking. You know, get some taps of Busch or Milwaukee's Best and see how things go. Anyway, that's what got me thinking down the dark path of college beers, and led me to go back and relive my college days.

In college, I would go to the Rite Aid to pick up a 12-pack of Schlitz Light for $2.57. This was my warm-up beer, and I couldn't buy more than that because, like a wino, I might actually drink it all. I think I liked the Schlitz Light because no one would ever take them out of my mini-fridge. I do not know what damage that beer did to my body, but you can't buy it anymore to run tests on it and find out.

After the warm-up, it was out to the parties. At Western Maryland College, the beer of choice for parties was Milwaukee's Best — "The Beast." Sure, sometimes we ran across the Pennsylvania border for American or Red White and Blue beer, both of which had somehow perfected a rusty taste. You could not have kegs on our campus, only bottles or cans (yes, very environmentally sound). So our dorm rooms and hallways were always full of empty cans. We would occasionally have off-campus parties at a local farm that would allow us to us to use a field for parties. It was called Ghouls Farm — Ghouls was the farmer's name. There, we could have kegs of Beast and something called Straws, which was a mixture of creek water, Hi-C powdered mix, and grain alcohol consumed though a lacrosse stick. Maybe it wasn't the Schlitz that did me damage…

On to the tasting:

My panel consisted of people from a range of colleges, but not ages. It was definitely a group of people over the age of 30 (some well over that age). All the college students and recent grads I invited seemed to have something better to do. Better than drinking free beer? They were probably out overspending on Red Bull drinks. My wife Michele and I both attended Western Maryland College (which unfortunately changed its name to McDaniel College not too long ago). Jason is a University of Vermont grad, Jennifer went to UCLA, and another Jen went to the University of Delaware. Walt is a Rutgers man and Dave went to Brigham Young University. Yes, I wanted to cover all bases so I brought in a taster from a good Mormon school.

For the tasting, beers were poured from their cans into glass pitchers in order to disguise them. I did not want our tasters' preconceived notions to come into play. We used new plastic cups for each in order to keep that college keg-party feel. Even with a plastic cup, Jason still sniffed the first beer and complained that its nose smelled "god-awful." This caused someone else to suggest, philosophically, "That's what makes Coors Light better. It doesn’t smell like ass." All of this caused Walt to yell, "Stop with the smelling! It is not wine! It cost $10 a thirty-pack! The only time you should be smelling Milwaukee’s Best is if you accidentally drool it on your shirt late night while chugging it." Sadly for me, the other time that I had to smell it was when I was cleaning it off the beer pong table the next day. (Yes, the 30-something adults at this tasting ended up playing beer pong.)

Milwaukee's Best Light ("The Beast")

My college roommate Alex was from Nicaragua and said that, for a short time, the Beast was being sold as a premium import in Managua. Clearly, the producers thought fooling Nicaraguans was an effective way to sell more of a beer that is not good. I offered this to people as they arrived for the panel because I didn't want to prejudice their tastebuds with a better beer. I also wanted to get rid of it because the only way I could find to buy it was in 30-packs of cans. Michele said Milwaukee's Best was like an old friend, adding, "If you want a beer, this is beer, and I like beer." I really enjoyed it; so much so that I was worried we would run out of it before the tasting started. Walt said that chewing his gum along with drinking the Beast made it "nice." Classy!

Keystone Light

Keystone has been a college favorite since 1989 — which means that several members of the panel were actually in college when the beer was introduced in its so-called "glass-lined cans." We all found that Keystone Light had almost no carbonation. Perhaps this was caused by the glass lining? The nose was better than the Beast, but the taste not so much. Jason thought it was sour and horrible. Jen liked it, announcing, "I'd chug this." Michele thought the first sip had a bad aftertaste, then added, cryptically, "If it isn’t broken, it still works." Jennifer's written notes read, "Bad, bad flavor."

Busch Light

This beer seemed to have no flavor. "It just tastes…cold," Jason said. Dave felt that it smelled like canned vomit. Michele thought, with her second taste, that she'd found the flavor, but it was not good: "Maybe a pee flavor?" (How does she know what that tastes like?) Walt liked it enough to announce that this would be his "beer pong beer." On that note, Jason decided to test its "chuggability." "Pretty smooth," he said. Jen chugged hers as well and was moved to say, "To hell with your mountains — show me your Busch." Both seemed very sad when I told them both it was a Busch beer. I guess they've had Busch hangovers before.

 

Old Milwakuee ("Old Squawky")

I have to admit that I loved this beer in high school, often going out of my way to get it even if there were better beers to be had. What was I thinking? Though it had more flavor than the most of the other beers, I am not sure it was a good flavor. Jen and Jason thought it was good, though they said it may have been out of nostalgia. Dave said, "This is flat, yet flavorful; wait, no it isn't; yes it is. It tastes like Cheap Trick." Michele thought it smelled like a college stairwell two days after a party.

National Bohemian ("Natty Boh")

This beer used to be made in Baltimore, which is why it was always cheap at my college. I drove down to Baltimore a couple of weeks ago to be sure we had it for the tasting and found out it’s now brewed in Milwaukee and shipped to Baltimore alone. Sad. I actually find this to be a good-drinking beer. It has an old-school taste and over 100 years of history. A beer beer. And it has more flavor than most of the light beers we tasted. Most of the other tasters, however, did not like it, giving comments that ranged from "skunked" to "assy." Walt felt it was the first with an aftertaste, "though not a bad aftertaste." Jason felt it was giving him "bad beer face." I think he was referring to Keystone's late 1980s ad campaign to "get rid of bitter beer face." Anyway, I guess he didn't like it. Jennifer noted it was "acidy or tangy and citrusy," and that it tasted like "bad Coors Light."

Natural Light ("Natty Light")

Top choice of the eight. Creamy, with light flavor, Natural Light had no off-putting smells or tastes. "This is surprisingly not bad," Jason said. Jennifer added that it was smooth and had tiny bubbles. "Yummy!" Michele chimed in. Most felt that they would choose this over, say, a more expensive light beer like Coors Light. Walt felt that I should start keeping it on tap. Of course, all this praise might just be the fact that we were about six beers into the tasting at that point. Jen launched into a story about one time when she was drinking Natural Light in college and ended up in a COPS episode for public urination. Don't ask me what that had to do with the tasting, but I am looking into getting a tape of that episode.

Coors Light

This is a little more expensive than what's typically considered college beer, but since it's become the standard shorthand for flavorless suds, I brought this out at the same time as the Natty Boh to see how people would react. Jennifer, who had described Natty Boh as "bad Coors Light" now described Coors Light as "watery and not good." In fact, she uttered, "I hate it." Michele said "Yum" and a couple others half-heartedly said they liked it. Jason, however, said he "would definitely opt for Natural Light" over it. Walt thought he would even opt for Natty Boh over it. We all agreed that in this category of college beers, a couple more bucks definitely wouldn't buy you a better beer. We agreed to this, however, before the next morning's hangovers…

Schmidt

I saved the worst for last. This beer — "The Brew that Grew with the Great Northwest" — is different from Schmidt's, the old Philadelphia favorite. I guess they left the "s" off for shitty beer. "Quite possibly the worst beer ever created," Jason said. Walt agreed it was the worst of the bunch, "but I'd still drink it." Jen said it was OK, but "smelled like death." (I do not think that this was a metaphor because Jen is a funeral director and has smelled death enough.) Walt finally broke down and bent over to sniff this beer, but kept his hands behind his back. "Why are you doing that?" someone asked. He said he didn't want the hoagie scent that might've been on his hands to interfere with the smell of the beer. Several others thought the bad smell maybe went with the picture of the wet bear on the can. That anyone would ship this beer all the way from the Northwest to the East Coast is very strange. Maybe people end up buying it once, and it’s so bad that they never buy it again. Maybe Schmidt needs to keep finding new markets? If that’s the case, Nicaraguans should be on the lookout for a new premium export.

Tyler Wilson drinks beer. Email him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Photographs by Mike Bucher, "The Brew" photograph from Flickmor via Flickr (Creative Commons), "Bottle" photograph from istockphoto.com.