Magic Hat #9

AFFORDABILITY: It came in a colorful 12-pack box with four different varieties of beer, three bottles apiece. It was on sale for like $3 off the regular price, which was probably a jacked up bullshit price to begin with. But the knock-off deal made it almost acceptable to my maxed-out, 327 credit rating ass. 3 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: The #9 destroys you up well enough, kicking the horror story, as my oldest called it. I take her to or from ballet on Monday and Friday nights, and sit outside the Crozet library stealing music from inside the internets on my demon laptop while class is in session. But she's almost 11, so we have heavy philosophical discussions about this or that, like Greek mythology, or how the Middle East wars stem from religious shit, and I school her on the difference between Shias and Shiites in Muslim philosophy, and how that came from Israel being created, which came from World War II, which came from World War I, etc. etc. Homeschool is awesome because everything is classtime. Anyways, we stopped off at the Harris Teeter after class for some beer for the evening on the way home, and back in the truck, after checking the dumpster for produce or bread for the pigs (blasted trash compacting ass grocery stores!), she says, "Why do grown ups like beer?" I explain that it makes your brain work a different way, makes things seem wonky, maybe funny when they're not, sort of makes your thoughts more plasticky, something along those lines. While saying it, it seemed like a terrible commercial for drinking beer and probably would be a great drinking and driving PSA, and after I'm done, she's like, "Sounds like a horror story to me!" And we laughed and laughed and created a story of a world where people willingly made their brains slightly stupid to make their terrible lives more enjoyable and never rise up against the evil overlords (I think they were "Romans") who kept them down. Then we started making fun of people's Christmas lights. So yeah, Magic Hat #9 has a healthy amount of horror story possibilities, and tastes not unpleasant enough to swallow them down at the necessary clip. 4 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: Magic Hat does has a hokey psychedelia but modernized style to it, and does that thing where they put cutesy little quips underneath their bottle caps. On one hand, I find that stupid as fuck as a business practice, tailor geared to my generation of Generation ADHD-X, but at the same time, I can't front, me and the ol' lady had a couple of them sitting on personal display in our cubby hole overtop the kitchen counter because the cutesy little quips actually applicated to our actual lives as they were spinning, partially out of control, lately. Fucking retard Zen Buddhist beer cap meditations. That's what I've been reduced to in life. And still, as always, conflict, because on one hand, I feel at age 36, I'm glad I still sport retard styles. But on the other hand, what the fuck, it makes me want to chop people up with swords sometimes. That could just be my personal frustration boiling over though. 4 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: It would help if I knew where the Magic Hat Brewing Company was, but the bottle I saved is outside beside the porch under two feet of snow, and the internet only connects in the other room where the tangle of phone wires is piled up by the homemade brooms in the corner. Is Magic Hat some hippie San Francisco shit, or an ode to Alice in Wonderland, or what? I guess I pre-judge by the psychedelic bottling caps and all that jazz, and I could go on forever with this vague, rambling nonsense, talking about lucha libre wrestling and Mexican wrestling masks, shifting into something about how Americans are lazy, me included, but we are stupid, and the bottle caps with goofy quips that Magic Hat does is so predictable blah blah blah, and get around to how, "They don't seem to be a ginormous corporation, but they're in every fucking store everywhere, so they're probably owned by some big company, so they must suck," and on and on in my normal bullshit. Let's just skip the standard protocols and I'll write them off mid-grade for the sake of moving through this as expediently as possible. I don't think anyone's here anyways. 3 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: The #9 Magic Hat is what it is - a goofy, good-beer tasting beer priced slightly below other stereotypical good beers, but well above the cheapo hipster doofus canned brands. Basically it is for the upwardly mobile, even if in thinking alone, hipster detritus type. I would probably be demographed as part of that financial clique, and guess what? Magic Hat doesn't bother me so much, mostly because I have rock solid peeps in real life who be loving this shit and always end up bringing it to my house when we have parties or pot lucks or get-togethers or whatever. So I guess, due to that environmental conditioning, Magic Hat #9 makes me feel festive, even as a I have to pay for it myself. Upstart beers should use that as a marketing tool, although people would see right through it and just drink up all the free beer until the hook-up was gone and never care about that brand again. 4 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 3 & 3/5 STARS!