Everyone drinks Heineken. From James Bond on the run, to dads at barbeques and my depressed a** at the Nugget. It’s trash but it’s trash that’s universally enjoyed. This stanky lager is worth pontificating about for that exact reason.
In reality, I didn’t have time to seek out an inaccessible beer last weekend because taking four classes, producing a radio show and writing vampirically sucks my time, so why not go with one that maintains an understated eccentricity and is widely consumed?
Part of that uniqueness is the beer’s bottling, which is all wrong but so right.
Have you ever noticed that Heineken out of a can doesn’t taste quite the same as its bottled counterpart? The reason for that is light altering the taste of the bottled beer.
So most beer is bottled in amber glass bottles to block out UV rays that alter the taste of the beer. Heineken, Corona and other clear or light green bottled beers allow the light to change the taste and as a result, have a pseudo-gone-bad note to them. To me, that’s their appeal.
If you’ve somehow never drank this massively available beer, the main flavor note is off-tasting water.
Canned Heineken is as basic as avocado toast, Jesus Christ and pumpkin spice lattes. Bottled Heineken is as punk as rusty studded belts, stale Newport cigarettes and mosh pits at a Misfits concert.
It’s off lager in a can versus beautifully vile shit out of a green bottle.
Like every other beer I’ve written about thus far, Heineken has deep personal roots in either youthful delinquency, homosexual experimentation or gloriously both.
Heineken isn’t just another garbage lager to me, it’s attached to experiences both beautiful and melancholic. Both coping with long-faded conversation and celebratory lit hangouts.
Heineken is my liquid memoirs.