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I finally understand the appeal of this beer: Its a Homeopathic version of a beer. Apparently Miller just took a regular beer and diluted it with soda water, then diluted again, diluted again, until there's just the barest minimal taste of beer. The drinker's body is fooled into thinking it's just had a beer, the same way homeopathic medicines "work."
Can anybody say I'm wrong?
*Someone had broken up a case of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, a much superior brew; so I got two bottles of those for under a buck each, along with four megabrews that I will try once, then probably never again.
I tried out a kit beer with 5 gallons of pre-hopped wort, so instead of elaborately describing what I put into it, I put something more interesting on the bottle. Actually, the kit came with dried ale yeast, so I used actual lager yeast instead and cleared a space in my beer fridge to properly lager the brew at 42°F. I also slipped half a cup of molasses in to boost the gravity just a little bit.After my near-entanglement with the KI<><> Army of Litigants, I decided not to just swipe some possibly copyrighted art or photo. Finally, those art classes in college paid off! I drew this myself during the one class when we actually had a model. So this art is all ©Mark McDermott (and the model probably has grandkids by now). Brewed December, 2002, bottle-conditioned and designed February, 2003.
Sorry if this may be seen as inappropriate, but I figure you see a lot worse than this decaled to the rear windows of pickup trucks, like those smirky Calvin & Hobbes rip-offs with pants down, peeing on logos for other trucks.
Why “Kraputnik?” Because so many things just went Kraput. While in my airlocked primary fermentation bucket, it kicked up such a head that pieces of hop leaves got caught in the airlock, causing the lid to blow off (a not uncommon occurrence in homebrewing). A few days after I managed to successfully tame the froth-over, the sewer drain in my basement brewery backed up, leaving a 3-ft. wide pool of fragrant gray water. I quickly moved my fermenter upstairs. The rest of the procedure was incident-free, except that when bottling, I broke a bottle for the first time. Then in July, while letting it age, the beer “swelled up” in the heat and one bottle exploded.The label was designed in imitation of the poster art of the Soviet Union, with great care taken to match those drab poster colors, complete with an aged paper background (if I could only have gotten that old coated paper with the sulfury smell). Verbiage was courtesy of the Translation feature of Sherlock in Macintosh OS X! Odd thing: when I submitted the phrase “Drinkers of the World, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your sobriety!”, it couldn’t provide a Russian word for “sobriety.” Here’s a .txt file of the recipe.
This label design was an “Editor’s Choice” in BYO Magazine’ 2003 Homebrew Label Contest.
Red: States I’ve not yet "sampled."
Blue: Number of beers from that state reflected in %age of blue.
Yellow: Breweries/Brewpubs I’ve Visited:
Arizona
