Spaten Optimator

AFFORDABILITY: Ahh... the Whole Foods in Short Pump, where they are so adamant about their fake suburban cityscapes that you can’t even cut over in front of the parking deck from Trader Joe’s to Whole Foods anymore, and you have to go all around ten different buildings, with giant brick intersections that nobody is actually walking on because who the fuck wants to live in a completely fabricated world like that? You know beer at Whole Foods ain’t cheap... shit, nothing is cheap at Whole Foods. I went one time late last year to get something for my wife, and the Whole Foods in Short Pump was completely empty of dairy and cooled produce. Their refrigeration system had broken down and it was all wasted. I got a big kick out of that. Sad thing is, I’m sure they pass that cost off onto me anyways (or already have), and it doesn’t matter to them. The store manager is probably like, “Fuck, we’re screwed this month,” but the regional manager knows that though that refrigeration system failure eats into their operating costs, they’re still making fists full of money in stupid fucking Short Pump. Anyways, when in Whole Foods, my beer buying mode is to scan for what’s on sale, hope it’s something I like, and then piece anything else together from there, staring at $8.50, which is their low end, and working up until my desire falls off the end of the cliff like that yodeling game on The Price is Right, of which Ric Flair should be the host and not Drew Carey. Don’t America’s unemployed deserve someone more exciting than boring ass Drew Carey? And there’s a ton of unemployed folks right now, with no cable, sitting around watching CBS all day long, waiting for the afternoon to go from The Price is Right showcase showdown to Wayne Brady and the new Let’s Make a Deal. Anyways, this trip to the Whole Foods, I grabbed a stray six-pack of Harpoon’s Winter Warmer they had left somehow, contemplated some gay ass Bison Honey Basil beer that my wife would’ve loved, but it was $10 for a four-pack, and then kept looking around. I saw this Spaten Optimator and knew I had to get it, simply because it was only $9 (low for Whole Foods) and the name sounded gangsta as fuck. Gangsta as fuck always wins in a soulless shithole like Short Pump’s shiny Whole Foods Market, to try and convince myself I’m not completely dead yet. 3 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: Man, when it comes to super destroying me, the Spaten Optimator was the most super destructive new beer I have ingested in a long ass while. I think it's like 8.2% alcohol or somewhere along those lines, and it has a nice thick touch of chocolate, and it dropkicked me. The night I drank it, I was on full tilt; and the next day at work, it was one of those struggles where you'd look at the clock and figure up the rest of the day's obligations to the minute, and then do it again seven minutes later. When I first saw the name "Spaten Optimator", I was in my head like, "Damn, that sounds like some Evil Cyborg Dale Earnhardt Von Raschke bullshit," and it did not fail to live up to that, as it put the Iron Claw on my damn cerebellum from the inside out. I like when my blood vessels and brain work together to fuck me up. 9 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: Spaten Optimator has a simple and scary label motif, nice solid colors and a pair of matching symbols that look like robotic spatulas. It is ominous yet not creepy, and invites you on in, like any good weird German thing would do, because you don't get to all the weird extremes they do by scaring people away at the gate. Because of this, I am afraid to drink Spaten Optimator regularly, one for the dropkick from inside it gave my brain, but secondly because it could be a trick. You can't trust German bullshit, ever since under Hitler they were in cahoots with the grey aliens to start using organic cyborg technology on earth. 3 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: I had done a bunch of wikipedia-ing on shit a while back, so this is working from hazy memory at best, but the Spaten company is from like the 1300s or some crazy shit, and they just had some new buyout or some shit... I don't know, I could look it up again if I really cared to be an informative and factual part of the internet, but the internet has far too much of that shit getting all pretentious and pretending it's making the world a better place by telling you 7000 things about an obscure beer that you'll most likely never even see in a beer store in your actual real life. So fuck it. I remember them being an old ass company in lineage, going back to the days of alchemy, but then corporate bullshit was going on, so most likely somebody just owns a claim to that older than old school old world lineage without any actual bloodline or sweatline connected to it. (Sweatline is a word I just made up because sometimes when there's a family business that's really awesome at a specialized fringe service, the dude only has one son and two other employees, and his son is a fuck-up and sleeps behind the boxes in the warehouse and looks at porn all day on the internet while of the other employees of roughly the same age has a hunger for perfection and a desire to learn the fringe service very deeply, so the old-timer owner knows that for his fringe service to have a better chance at survival, he has to pass his wealth of knowledge onto the non-blood guy, who will put his sweat into the thing at hand, and the owner must hope that his own son will eventually grow the fuck up. Then they all have to hope the old-timer doesn't die before the non-blood dude is bought into the company so that the son doesn't just run off the guy who actually knows what he's doing after the old dude dies, and then the fringe service gets run into the ground and disappears. And then they put a Wal-Mart there. Or a Target. Don't fool yourself, they're the same thing.) 4 out of 5 though, on the off chance my memory is hazy and there's some 23rd generation Kraut behind it all.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: My uncle Ray was a biker back in the day, and has lived a pretty hectic life, although a full and good one. He had kidney failure or liver failure or something failure like 90% and they said he only had like 3 months if he was lucky to live. That was a few years ago. At one point, his wife and him lived with two other couples, all related this way or that way, and one couple got kicked out, so the one dude from that couple comes back with a shotgun, kills the other guy, and hits my uncle with a shotgun blast from a few feet away to the point it melted his hand into his hip. They took it off and he lost two regular fingers and his thumb, so they took one of this big toes and made it his thumb on that hand (opposable thumbs being a classic touch to the Human Domination Effect, along with our warped minds), so he has a pinkie finger, a ring finger, knubs, and a toe on that hand. I so thoroughly enjoyed the Spaten Optimator beer that I give it two thumbs up, plus someone else’s thumb, and my Uncle Ray’s big toe thumb, all up. 5 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 4 & 4/5 STARS!