Why Local Craft Brewing Is Important: The Atrocity that is Budweiser Select 55


Left to his or her own devices, your local craft brewer will come up with things like amber beer brewed with sweet potatoes, rye IPA that's meant to complement a pastrami sandwich, or a revival of the California Common beer.

Left to their own devices, Anheuser-Busch came up with… whatever that is in the picture above.
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I didn't buy this–a six-pack showed up at my house, probably as part of a dinner party. I don't know who brought it, and it frankly doesn't matter. The problem is this, though: I can't take it to a party or regift it because people will think I've lost my tastebuds, and I'm too cheap to pour beer, even beer barely worthy of the title, down the drain. So I drank it.

It was absolutely atrocious. It had almost no flavor; I'm trying to figure out what those 55 calories are made of, because they're certainly not made of anything resembling beer. It's the only beer in the world that tastes more insipid than the Grain Belt Primos I remember buying for 50 cents each in the taps of southern Minnesota. You couldn't even drink this ironically–PBR in a paper sack is a better choice for hipsters.

I'd call Select 55 beer-flavored soda, except that if someone were designing a soda to taste like beer, it would taste more like beer than Select 55. Hell, Miller High Life tastes more than beer than this. The most accurate description I could give this would be Perrier with a twist of beer.

Bad as it was, this did serve one important function–to make me grateful for the growler glasses lined up on the shelf in my kitchen, waiting to be filled with incomparably better beer.

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