Schlitz High Gravity V.S.L.

Baby's begged me not to go
So many times before
She said love and happiness
Can't live behind those swinging doors
Now she's gone and I'm to blame
Too late, I finally see
What's Made Milwaukee Famous
Has made a fool out of me.

-Jerry Lee Lewis

See, not even sad-sack country musicians like Schlitz. And those are the kinds of people that do songs about PBR. Well, them and the worst people on earth.

I hope you both catch the fucking T-Virus.

I had to deliberate a little while over which brand of big can of terrible Schlitz to review for you people. By which I mean that I had to look until i saw this one was 8.5% alcohol. Then it's not really a contest.

LOOK

Has anyone ever seen Schlitz? Has there ever been one person who's had it not out of an aluminum can? If I went to some bar in Wisconsin where they were dueling by riding cows across the field and swinging lawnmower blades and said "hey barkeep, can I have a nice frosty mug of Schlitz?" do you think I'd actually get one? No. Because I would probably be latched to the back of one of the cows when I walked into the bar. So I'm not going to find out. They don't take kindly to my kind there.

I don't mean gays. I mean the fact that I literally live in an ivory tower and I read for fun.

Pictured: your author. With Harry Potter. That was a fun time.

So I'm going to assume it doesn't look like black jelly or a can of slug paste or cabbage blood or unicorn jism or anything like that. Let's just assume it looks yellow and watery.

NOSE

Wait...it smells like unicorn jism. If that unicorn was made out of watery beer. Like, some sort of aquatic unicorn that lived in beer. Bad beer. Also, that would be a hippocamp. A Milwaukee hippocamp.

Yeah, yeah, like that, but with a cheesehead hat.

 Actually, I gotta hand it to Schlitz. Out of all the insanely cheap beers that are terrible, it has the most actually beery smell. It's not great, but at least it didn't smell like potato water like Olde English did. There is a bit of a celery tinge to it though. Ohh, that's not gonna be good.

TASTE

Okay, confession time. Friday night me and some of the Gutrottin' club wanted to get drunk and watch Army of Darkness, so I drank an entire bottle of Cobra. Then we wanted to get drunker and watch Slither, so I drank about a third of a bottle of Thunderbird. Then we wanted to get drunkest and get pamcakes, so I moved on to the Gallo vermouth from last time.

Mmmm...pamcakes. And cheap booze.

I think at some point over the pancake dinner I recited Yeats. But anyway, the confession boils down to-- none of that was for journalism. That was for fun. I think I'm actually starting to acclimate to cheeeeeeap beer and bumwine.

Because this is actually kind of almost tolerable and not poison-tasting. It still is though. It's really bitter and not in a "pint of bitters luv" way or a guiness-y way. And the aftertaste really is something fairly not-good. There's a really vegetative flavor to it and a sort of wormwood bitterness, plus it just makes your mouth feel gross. Like your tongue needs a bath or something.

Problem(s) solved!

Plus, after a while, the aftertaste becomes strong and pervasive enough that you don't taste the beer anymore when you drink it. It's like a less pure-horror version of the Four Loko taste. In the end, though, it's tolerable, int he same way Cobra was. I guess if you wanna get your swerve on and spend a buck fifty doing do you could do worse. As long as you don't mind feeling sad and drunk and midwestern.

Man, even I as a 17-year-old could rock the Neil Young haircut better than Conor Oberst. Dude looks like a West Virginia van killer.