[A Beer a Day] Harvest Pumpkin Ale | "Blue Moon Brewing" (lulz, whatevs, Coors) | Golden, CO

[We are back to celebrate the great beer month of October, a period of 31 days fondly indexed inside my malt-addled brain as the Beer Advent -- an anthology of festivities ranging from the beer-Carnivál known as Oktoberfest, to the SXSW-like, Beer-di-Gras of GABF -- then mercifully ending with the fraudiest-of-children's-holidays distorted to be a massive carousal of adult excess and dumbfuckery.  Typically, that involves feasting on trial-sized Kit Kats and reveling in bombers of chocolate stout while passing out the shittiest of leftovers from my bowl.

[AA] will commemorate The Great Beer Month by discussing Pumpkin Ales -- a polarizing style in the world of craft, undone by the carelessness of particulates handled in bulk by the Big Brewers and their chicanery.

So, welcome to [AA]'s multi-part series called Pumps in a Bump: Ignis Fatuus Drinkus]

PUMPS IN A BUMP:
PART I: Dogfish Head Punkin.
PART II: Cigar City Good Gourd.
PART IIa: Avery Rumpkin (Re-post).

PART III.

It is said that the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.

And in the context of this site, the same deceptive practices can be said regarding The Big 3, convincing the American beer-consuming public that they don't exist.

Each of the Big 3 -- that is, Miller, Budweiser, and Coors -- has devoted a long arm of their installation to mimicking the culture of craft beer and microbrewing, going as far as to erase their powerful and omnipresent names from their respective bottle packaging altogether, in an attempt to disguise the actions of mass-production behind a small-sounding brewing alias.  This is their way of calling their consumer base 'fucking idiots', by attempting to mislead and misrepresent their reputation for bad beer with something as deluded as The Blue Moon Brewery, wink wink.

And Coors is perhaps the guiltiest of them all, prolonging its charade of Belgian witbier since the mid-1990s, when everyone was agog about an exciting new start-up called Pete's Wicked Ales -- one of the pioneer companies of small-brewing -- until Coors was finally able to overtake and absorb Pete's market at the expense of their irrelevancy.  But that was first Craft War.  The rebel craft alliance appears to have redoubled their efforts, and is much, much stronger now in Craft War 2.

Blue Moon O.G. was probably every 14-year-old girl's foray into the illicit world of father-rebelling irresponsibility -- and I guess my junior-high-self salutes the folks in Golden for that -- but the era of Eddie Donkeylips Gelfen, Silk's Freak Me, and pleated jeans is when this fucking crap should have died.

Yet, it didn't.  And what is more, is that almost 20 years later, the people at Coors are offering us variations of THE SAME EXACT FLAVOR AS BLUE MOON, except in different-colored packaging and exciting contrasts like honey, lime peel, and the ubiquitous seasonal offering, pumpkin.

Consuming Coors' Blue Moon lineup is the beer equivalent of drinking Nickelback's musical catalog.

I read an awesome description of Blue Moon the other day from a dude who has the same regard towards this beer as I do -- and he describes its flavor as being somehow synthetic, as if added by photoshop.  I couldn't have come to a better conclusion myself.

It has the thinnest mouthfeel for something intending to be full-bodied -- like, taking off its bra after a long wrestle with the clasp and discovering that there was some false advertising going on.  I mean, this junk was like an imitation of some kind of skin freshener you would find in that heavily-mirrored section of CVS that has all those fucking nail supplements and foot baths, but with far less aroma and comically bad solvent dilution.  There was very obviously no actual pumpkin that went into this beer -- either in juice or puree format.  I don't think any thought went into this beer for that matter.  Spice?  Nope.  Malt?  Nope.  Grain bill?  Nope.

Hope for humanity?  Never.

ABV: 5.7%
Acquired: HEB (crappy Burnet location, not that it matters.  This stuff is pretty much everywhere.)
Musical Pairing: The Killers | Day & Age (2008)
★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆