Southpaw Light

(click on the picture for higher resolution so you can clearly see the awesome kangaroos)

Southpaw Light

Drinking Southpaw Light conjures up memories of the summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college. I’d just started taking a liking to beer (yes, there was a time when Matt Johnson actually didn’t like beer all that much. Hard to fathom, I know) my freshman year of college and needed something cheap to drink when hanging out with my friends in the summer. I was working a miserable temp job at a bank where I had to wear a monkey suit and tie just to sit in a file room all day and rearrange some mortgage papers to occasionally look busy in between games of computer solitaire and listening to my new my Faith No More and Marcy Playground (shut up, you know you loved that Sex and Candy song too) cds all for the princely sum of $7.50 an hour. Southpaw Light fit that bill perfectly as it was only about $5 or so for a 12 pack and you could get a keg of it for about $30 or $35.

Southpaw Light pours out a nice golden brown. There’s a nice foamy head on it but it dissipates fairly quickly, not that it really matters. It goes down very easily with not much carbonation. The taste is pretty light but I wouldn’t call it watery. The surprising thing about the taste is that it’s 5% alcohol and most light beer is less than 4.5% or so.

I love Southpaw Light’s cans and bottles. Their mascots seem to be two kangaroos who enjoy playing and watching sports together. The bottles have them doing various activities while the logo on the cans all seem to have them sharing a couple of beers after boxing each other. I have to say as mascots go, that’s pretty badass. I can’t think of any other beer that uses a kangaroo as a mascot let alone boxing kangaroos. There’s really not much else special about the cans or bottles but I’m going to give Southpaw Light a solid 4 Kelly Bundys for can/bottle attractiveness based solely on their unique mascot.

All in all I highly recommend Southpaw Light. It’s fairly easy to find (although not here in Schwagville, USA aka Charlottesville, Va), goes down smooth and has a pretty high alcohol content for a light beer so you can get a nice buzz. I recently bought a 24 pack of Southpaw Light cans for about $12 in Charlotte, NC so the price is right. I’m going to give Southpaw Light 4 Bundy Faces. It was a welcome return to the cheap beers of the good old US of A after a month of drinking cheap beers that were likely laced with asbestos or Chinese coal factory run-off in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong Mega Post

I went on a cheap beer binge during my last weekend in Hong Kong. I figured I’d never get the chance to try most of these beers again so I bought a bunch of single cans of beer. Each of these were less than $4HK which translates into roughly $0.50US. Are there better beers to be had in Hong Kong? Perhaps. Are there cheaper beers to be had? Not in this humble reviewer’s opinion.

Bear Beer

This entry comes to us from Harboes brewery. Goes down very smooth. Nice bite at the beginning. No real after taste but that’s good b/c most beers that have after taste are gross. The can is a nice solid green and I love that their mascot is a polar bear. Very unique. I like the crown logo as well. 5% alcohol so you can get a fairly good buzz. Pours out with a nice head, golden brown color. About $3.50 for a can which works out to 45 cents US so a good value. I’m going to give Bear Beer 4 Bundy Faces.

Barrel 1850

Nothing stands out about this beer at all. It’s not good but it’s not terrible. It’s almost as if someone found a way to bump the alcohol content of water to 4.8%. People like to make fun of American light beer for being watery and looking like pee but this same criticism can be levied at Barrel 1850 and it’s not even a light beer. I’m also lukewarm on the can. It tries hard but the red, blue and gold color scheme doesn’t really work for me. Just seems like they were trying too hard to make their non-descript beer look different. Well it got me to buy a single can of it for $3HK (about 39 cent US) but that’s about the nicest thing I can say. I can’t give it more than 2 Bundy Faces.

Pearl River Lager

This beer was skunky going down. Very thin taste. The only thing that saves it from getting less than 1 Bundy Face is that the taste isn’t all that actively bad. It’s pretty terrible at the beginning and gets mediocre from there. Kind of like 95% of all songs made after 1996. Very watery. The can is nothing to write home about either, that is unless you live in a place like St. Olaf, Minnesota. Then again, St. Olaf can boast that it’s the birthplace of Rose Nylund , is home to the Butter Queen competition, the Milk Diving competition and The Day of Wheat festival. See, this beer is so boring that the most interesting thing in this rant is the fictional hometown of one of the Golden Girls. I have to rate it 1.5 Bundy Faces.

Classic 110

Another entry from Harboes. Disappointing compared to Bear Beer. Pours out very dark and with a bigger head than a guy with hydrocephalus. It has a malty aftertaste that borders on skunky. The initial taste isn’t very good and the can isn’t anything special either. I have professed a love of understated designs in the past but there’s absolutely nothing that makes this can stand out. It’s dark green and says Classic 110 on it and that’s about it. I can only give it 1 Bundy Face in good conscience.

San Miguel Light

I was excited to finally find a light beer in Hong Kong but to say that it did not live up to expectations is a severe understatement. This beer was skunkier than Pepe LePew after getting sprayed by another skunk. As far as the aftertaste, if you ever put one of your action figures in your mouth as a kid and remember the taste, that’s what San Mig tastes like; cheap plastic. The can sucks as well. They couldn’t even be bothered to write the whole name of the beer on the can (I know Bud Light does this but they can get away with it as they're a fairly iconic brand) and it has ugly diagonal stripes on the can. The crest is supposed to be a lion but looks like some sort of walrus instead. The picture on the can is of a bottle of San Mig Light. How stupid is that? About the only cool thing on the can is that on the side, it says, “The only beer that nourishes true friendship.” Pretty good slogan although it’s a complete lie. If someone offered me a San Mig Light, I’d be more likely to punch them in the face than shake their hand. I’d rather drink the milk from a mother mole. This beer gets 0 Bundy Faces and likes it. As a matter of fact, I'm going to give this one a Smoking Peg.

Is Predators one of the greatest movie of all time? Yes

Where in the hell did this movie come from? I was watching TV last week and saw a preview for Predators, a movie dripping with awesome, that I had never heard of and was due out this week. How in the fuck did I miss this? My first thought was: it's probably low budget. But I quickly learned that it starred Adrien Brody and Laurence Fishburne, so it's at least got a decent sized budget. My next and final guess was that it must be awful. Also wrong, because after watching it yesterday I learned that it's fucking awesome. In addition to Brody and Fishburne it stars Eric Foreman from That's 70's Show, some hot Brazilian chick, Boyd Crowder from Justified and Danny Trejo. That's an A+ cast, considering that the movie is set on another planet, and there are zero other humans (actually there is a nameless Chinese guy, African guy and Russian guy, but you can guess what happens to them).

My blood got pumping during the opening credits actually, when I saw that the film was produced by Robert Rodriguez and Trouble Maker studios, the studio that has brought us such legendary films as From Dusk to Dawn, The Faculty, Sin City and Machete. There was actually a Machete Preview before the movie, and holy shit that looks awesome as well. The general premise of Predators is that the predators kidnap soldiers, hit men, mercenaries and psychos from earth, transport them to some alien planet and hunt them for sport. Just typing that made me tear up. So a bunch of loner whack jobs must team up against predators, their creepy alien dogs and booby traps set by other now dead humans in order to stay alive. That's it. No big "twists", love themed subplots or boring dialog. A day after watching Predators, I still can't think of one thing about it that isn't awesome.

Knight Lager

Now most of you reading this know that I’m currently in Hong Kong for work for a month. Now Hong Kong has lots of things but cheap beer isn’t one of them…or so I thought. Most beer here are imported from other countries and lots of them are “fancy man” beers. Also when you buy beer here, you’re either buying 4 packs or 640ml individual bottles. However, when I went up to Victoria Peak to do some sightseeing, I ran across a grocery store that had 12 packs. My curiosity was piqued so I browsed their beer aisle. There were the usual suspects but I ran across a 12 pack that I couldn’t pass up. Knight Lager. It was 28HKD which is roughly $3.50 or so in USD. I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to try Hong Kong’s version of cheap beer even if it meant that I had to lug the 12 pack onto the tram back down the mountain.

First off, I’m going to use Bushey’s extended Bundy Scale which includes Kelly Bundy and Steve Rhodes heads. Since I basically had to go to a grocery store on the top of a mountain in Hong Kong to find Knight Lager, I’m going to give it 5 Steve Rhodes heads. The can says it was brewed by the San Miguel Brewery in New Territories, Hong Kong but I prefer to think that instead of being the beer that the San Miguel company scrapes out of the bottom of the barrel after they finish brewing and bottling their main product, that it was brewed by enlightened monks who came up with the recipe for the beer after an intense round of meditation. Unfortunately, the former is far more likely.

Now for can attractiveness. I have to give Knight 5 Kelly Bundys. I like the logo and can design a lot. The dark blue can and regal design conjures up memories of my favorite beer of all-time, Strohs. I also like the vague claims that Knight Lager is “Export Quality” and “Special Lager”. What exactly constitutes a beer that is “Export Quality”? I have no clue but I like the fact that they’re bold enough to say that their beer is awesome enough that other countries should buy it. Also, on the side of the can, it says, “Knight Lager is brewed from the finest ingredients, delivering the full rich taste of a truly special beer.” Now, what those ingredients are is never stated. I learned from Leon Gillespie, a friend of mine here and the boyfriend of my co-worker Emily,that cheap beer here in Hong Kong is likely to be rife with chemicals so those special ingredients most likely include paint thinner or anti-freeze so it’s probably best you don’t know what’s in Knight Lager.

Well, now that we’ve covered scarcity and attractiveness, we need to cover the main thing, the taste. To say I’m disappointed is an understatement. For a beer that comes in such a cool can and that you can only find in a random grocery store on top of a mountain the taste just isn’t there. The first one I drank actually was kind of bad. Went down kind of harsh and had a skunky aftertaste. I guess maybe I got the one terrible one in the batch (probably went a little heavy on the anti-freeze in that one) b/c the subsequent ones I’ve had haven’t tasted like much. I’ve had 5 of them in the days since the initial one I drank and while they’ve gone down smooth, the taste just isn’t there. It’s a light lager but that doesn’t mean that the taste should be non-existent. However, it clocks in at 4.5% so you probably get a pretty good buzz without having to drink a whole lot of them. Which is a good thing b/c according to Leon, a Knight Lager hangover is not something you want to experience. He’s also used Knight Lager to play a game called “Hermit” with his friends. Hermit involves you and your friends each getting a 12 pack or a set amount of beer. You each go into a separate room with no lights, no tv, no cell phone, no outside stimuli of any kind and you can’t leave without finishing all of your beer. Whoever is the first one to finish wins. What you win I don’t know but I’m sure winning a game of Hermit is something you can put on your resume. In any case, I’m only going to give Knight Lager 2.5 Bundy Heads overall. The taste isn’t offensive or anything but it’s just not memorable. It gets an extra .5 Bundy Heads because of the extremely cheap price.