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Schadenfreude Wednesdays: The King Can Taste Test, Classic Edition

Bye week is #Booze Week. Christian and Gumbercules return to review and discuss the best horse poison that you can buy..for $1.49. It's the King Can Taste Test, Part III.

By Christian D'Andrea
Your roadmap to terrible decisions.
Your roadmap to terrible decisions.
It's been a while since we sat down and drank 24 ounce cans of horse poison for our faithful readership. However, the bye week is upon us, and that means #BoozeWeek is in full swing. To celebrate, I sat down with AoG photoshop guru Gumbercules to trundle through 96 more ounces of high gravity slop to bring you the best in malt liquor journalism. That's right - it's the King Can Taste Test.

At Anchor of Gold, we want nothing but the best for our readers. That's why we spared you the trouble of dealing with your local supermarket clerk's judgmental eyes and drank four of the finest King Cans out there to help celebrate the bye. Today, we've got a fresh set of reviews for you - and later this week, our community of writers will have four more.

Let's kick this off with a local Wisconsin brew sent here to tarnish the good name of the Badger State:


1. Lost Lake Naturally Brewed Pilsner Beer

Alcohol by volume: 4.2%
Cost: $1.19

Christian: All I taste is sweet corn and bananas. Like a safari through deepest, darkest Iowa.

Gumbercules: Your dog just jumped up here, smelled it, and ran away.

C: And he loves beer, too! In his defense, he DID spend all afternoon eating deer turds in the backyard. I guess he has a pretty refined palate.

G: It reminds me almost exactly of Old Style, except no one is threatening to punch me for being a Pirates fan while I drink it.

C: Why is there a picture of the lake on the can if it's lost? Clearly they know where it is. They photographed it.

G: Maybe it's like a milk carton. Have you seen this lake?

C: This lake was a product of divorce and now its father has taken it to live upstate after hearing about its dreams to become a waterfall.

G: They found used needles under the lake's bed and now it has to live on the streets until it gets clean again.

C: 4.2 percent alcohol. I feel like your standard hobo wouldn’t even drink this with breakfast.

G: They didn’t even put it on the label, which is unusual because everything else written on this can is in a size 24 font.

C: Ingredients: Water, Compost, Fish Bits, Shame.

G: I can see why they would be proud of that.


Rating: A runaway train, tearing up the track.

***


2. Twisted Tea Frosted Cherry

ABV: 5%
Cost: $1.59

C: Oooooh, seasonal!
G: Was there no Pumpkin Spice Twisted Tea?
C: I saw a little blonde girl wearing a denim skirt, Uggs, and black tights carrying out the last case when I walked in.
G: This smells like candy.
C: It tastes like cough syrup. Expired cough syrup.
G: This is the adult equivalent of being a child and getting every soda at the fountain in one glass, including that unsweetened Nestea.
C: The only thing this is missing is an animatronic rat orchestra to wish me a happy birthday.
G: It doesn't taste like alcohol.
C: My throat is starting to close up just from sipping this.
G: Twisted Tea: The taste of strep throat.

C: To their credit, they really did make this look like iced tea.
G: Which is just sludgewater drained through plant waste in the first place.
C: Yeah, it's less impressive when you put it that way.
G: What I never understood is why Twisted Tea is so popular in the northeast when real iced tea is such a southern thing.
C: Because southern people know what iced tea actually tastes like.

Rating: Medicinal, like the strange brew an Inuit woman gives you after finding you lost in the Yukon plain after crashing your dog sled.

***


3. Steel Reserve Alloy Series: Spiked Punch

ABV: 8%
Cost: $1.49

G: Who in marketing thought "alloy" was an acceptable name for a beverage?
C: The original flavor of Steel Reserve is cirrhosis.
G: My god, the colors.
C: Pink and gray. Like a depressing Lingerie Football League uniform.
G: This beer was too athletic to be a stripper, yet was too stripper-ish to be a linebacker.
C: This beer is the culmination of several years of shame crumpling in upon themselves.
G: It looks just like Hawaiian Punch. If you want to have a child's birthday party that ends with your house looking like Detroit circa 2043, just put this in the punchbowl. The kids won't notice until after they've starting digging through your vents looking for "candy."

C: It's so sweet, but it immediately transitions to burning once it gets to the back of my throat.
G: I can still taste the metal.
C: That smell just lingers in you nostrils. Like, it's festering in my throat and rising back into my nose. I regret everything.
G: I will say this. I don't have a headache and we're three beers in. Last time we did this, I got meningitis halfway through the first can.
C: That's because we drank lower ABV beers to start. We're simultaneously smart and disappointing, all at once.
G: This tastes terrible.
C: Yeah, being much drunker really would have helped with that.

Rating: The summer sun, shining on a homeless man's passed-out face.

***


4. Icehouse EDGE

ABV: 8%
Cost: $1.49

G: The Plank Road Brewery! That's like Mordor for alcoholics!
C: I'm picking up heavy notes of sadness from the initial pour.
G: It seems irresponsible to name your beer "Edge" when you're clearly marketing to hopeless alcoholics who want nothing more than to throw themselves off of one.

C: I feel like it's eating away at my facial hair.
G: It's not as terrible as I wanted it to be. After the Steel Reserve, nothing really tastes like anything.
C: I can't tell if the redness on my tongue is from the fruit punch food coloring or if my throat is bleeding from the Twisted Tea.

C: Frankly, I'm disappointed. With the Icehouse branding and the high alcohol content, I expected this to be aggressively bad. Instead it's just passably terrible.
G: This is the beer your 21-year-old cousin buys when he realizes he can get single cans at gas stations.
C: This is just the John Mayer of high gravity beers. I mean, sure, it's there. But why?
G: What we needed tonight was the Enrique Iglesias of high gravity beers.
C: Yeah, we failed on that one.

Rating: Xanax-inspired soft rock.

***

You can find previous editions of our King Can Taste Tests here:

The King Can Taste Test (Part I?)

The King Can Taste Test, Watermelon Edition

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