Iron City Beer

AFFORDABILITY: You know, the Harris Teeters locally carry Iron City sometimes for some reason. Me and Boogie Brown drank a case of it hanging out in a weird 1970s hotel outside of Pittsburgh at some point a few years back. It was the nicest hotel ever, you walked through an interior sort of hallway that was kind of open too, and they had an inside waterpark (which we didn't do), plus a bar that looked like Archie Bunker, Mike Ditka, and Killer Kowalski would all be hanging out at. Plus the Chief from that Nell Carter show, but off duty, so he didn't give a fuck how drunk you were so long as you didn't kill anybody on the ride home. I remember Iron City being a Yuengling style beer in that it wasn't dirt cheap but it wasn't expensive either. Well apparently that doesn't trickle down to Virginia from Pennsylvania, as it was like $6 for a six-pack. And it was just regular bottles, not those wacky aluminum bottles Iron City was known for well before Miller Lite started doing it. But I will average my travel Iron City drinking with my localized Iron city drinking. 3 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: In Pennsylvania, it got us drunk. In Virginia, I didn't have enough of it to get truly topped off on the B.A.C. tip, but it had a thick enough feel inside my blood stream that I knew if I could get more of it for cheaper, it would do a proper good job. Western Pennsylvania people seem like the most solid non-Southern people around, so I would expect nothing less. In fact, you could probably slice off the northern half of Virginia, as well as Maryland obviously, and trade it to the north for West Virginia and the western half of Pennsylvania. Those people are all hillbillies, and we assimilate well together, making ugly children and getting into hilariously retold fights with each other. God bless us. Seriously, please, if you are god and you exist and you can see everything then you’re reading my blog. Bless us, because a lot of motherfuckers look down on people like us. I don’t mean look down like you do from your microscope at Four Seasons Heaven, but look down like they be thinking they better all the time. You should’ve, when you were putting crazy stories in the heads of the prophets to write down for people to worry about forever, thrown something in there about people not being such assholes. If you did already, my bad. Maybe you should shoot them words into somebody new’s head so as to make it a little easier for us nowadays to understand. As a people, we’re not much for having to decipher shit, and when you throw in the whole “believe this or you’re fucked” aspect, it makes deciphering it even harder to get right. Personally, I like Jack Van Impe’s stage presence, and Reverend Gene Scott’s style, and it’s hard to argue with what Jack Chick’s done with his life, though he could probably tone it down a little on the hellfire aspect. More flies with sugar than shit, am I right god? 4 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: The Iron City label is an old-fashioned, simple label, like your grandpa would be looking at all night before he came home to deal with your crazy grandmother's bullshit, sleeping on a pull-out sofa bed with flannel sheets and a ratty afghan blanket. One thing that 9/11 changed forever is people don't think the same about afghan blankets. In fact, few old people even make them like they used to. Acrylic yarn is part of the problem, but 9/11 is more the culprit. I miss afghans. My legs are kinda cold right now and I wish I had one to spread across my lap with a warm cup of hazelnut coffee, watching me some Andy Griffith until the news comes on. 5 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: The Iron City Brewing Company story is the type that makes you proud of shitty America and what it should be - a younger country with hard work success stories. Some German dude immigrates to the U.S., ends up in Pittsburgh, and starts making beer to be selling. This ends up being the Iron City Brewing Company, which is successful enough that it moved into a four-story brick building in a corner of Pittsburgh proper, where it sat and operated and made beer for decades and decades, becoming a large part of the neighborhood, a small part of the city, and something motherfuckers involved with it could be proud of. It wasn't a parasite, didn't suck away the neighborhood's beauty, and didn't pretend to be something it wasn't. It was responsible capitalism, something of which we are sorely lacking today. Now granted, last year, the company relocated to the old Rolling Rock facilities in Latrobe, so the beer bailed on Pittsburgh, sort of, though it still prominently claims the city its home. And if they are starting to reach down to Virginia with their swill, who can fault them for wanting to upgrade to a giant facility to mass produce more beer? And by upgrading, they move into a place that Rolling Rock abandoned, probably because it is on a more megacorporate bent and is brewed under license along with nine other beers at some megabrewery facility. Again, responsible capitalism, and a success story to boot. It's the type of thing that doesn't make me sick to my stomach, and it's not like you're going to read about Iron City Brewing Company's Super Bowl commercial campaigns costing $42 million or any bullshit like that. I just made a new batch of kimchi this past weekend, to be ready in time for my birthday, with a healthier than usual amount of red cabbage, because on birthdays in our house, you choose your birthday meal. And last year, we got a bunch of fancy sausages from the fancy butcher in town, and ate it up on buns with sauerkraut. I figured the upgrade to kimchi was necessary, but we'll repeat the fancy sausage butcher shop visit, and to honor that German dude immigrant's spirit, I might as well buy a six-pack of Iron City again as well. It seems appropriate, far more appropriate than drinking some wealthy hobbyist's high dollar microbrew attempt to launder his inherited wealth into a semi-successful return on the initial investment. 8 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: I can tell you with a pure heart that the Iron City, though it doesn't taste as fanciful as my fauntleroy ass has become accustomed to, makes me feel good to my bone marrow. Methinks a trip back up to western Pennsylvania this summer, to see the dirt tracks that bloom in abundance in that part of the world, to catch up with some folks like Necro Butcher or Shirley Doe, to eat one of those giant sandwiches with the fries on it like my wife ate when she visited her sister but I didn't go, to look in butcher shops run by people with eastern European written all over their facial hair with display counters full of sausages that I'd love to have available to me on the regular basis, this is a thing that must happen. And since Pennsylvania has wacky alcohol laws, I guess I will have to find some dank, display-less beer store and buy the Iron City by the case, and hopefully stay again in that indoor water park hotel somewhere southeast of Pittsburgh, and hopefully pass Dusty Roads Trailer Park again. 5 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 5 STARS!