Tailgate Crap Beer Challenge

After the Colts regular season kickoff against the Raiders yesterday, I wanted to provide some knowledge for this season's future tailgates.

We all prefer craft beer, but sometimes you end up with a domestic lager, and sometimes you end up with a crappy light domestic lager. It happens. College parties, dive bars, and of course one of the biggest spots for light lagers are Colts tailgates. You can bring anything canned, from Sun King to Two Brothers, but your friends probably will end up bringing a cooler full of one of these.

To try and help all of our wonderful readers, we took it upon ourselves to do a blind taste test of some of the most common and readily available domestic lagers. There was a time before I started drinking craft beer that these brews were commonplace in my fridge, coolers and hands. Hopefully you can learn and grow through our suffering and make an educated decision when you say yes to a beer while waiting for the Colts to kickoff.

We picked up five full bodied lagers and five light lagers. The full boddied brews were: Miller Genuine Draft, Budweisser aka Bud Heavy, Coors Banquet Beer, Old Milwalki's Best, and Pabts Blue Ribbon aka PBR. The light brews were, Miller Lite, Bud Light, Coors Light, Busch Light, and Natural Light.

The Little Lady blindfolded Me, O-Dawg and the Professor. We knew what brews were avialable and we knew if it was a full bodied lager or a light lager. Once we were blindfolded the Little Lady put them in front of us and we gave it a rating of 1 - 10 (we decided that more detail was needed than we get in our standard 1-5 scale). 

Probably not surprising since I grew up in a Miller family, I was able to pick out the Miller Light and give it the best possible score. When it comes to the bigger beers, I was pretty surprised that I picked Coors. O-Dawg found NatiLight (you can take the boy out of the frat, but sometimes you can't take the frat out of the boy) and Coors Banquet Beer to be the least offensive, while the Professor was happiest with Coors and Coors Light. No one was shocked about the Prof's score, because it is rare that there isn't a sixer of Coors Light siting in his fridge.

Overall the best rated brews were Coors in the full bodied category and Coors Light in the Light category. None of us really think that these are amazingly flavorful beers, but we did decided almost unanimously that they were the least offensive, and if you are going to be grabbing a beer that you don't like, that may be your best option. 

When trying to maximize your tailgate enjoyment, make sure you are drinking these brews as cold as possible. The stupid mountain indicator on a Coors can is pretty helpful, because as these brews warm they really, really don't improve. Warm Busch may be the most upsetting thing I have ever put in my mouth.