Saranac Irish Stout

AFFORDABILITY: I does not remember where I got it, maybe the Harris Teeter in Crozet while wilding away the hours of my daughter’s ballet class, but it wasn’t that bad. Saranac tends to come in cheaper than most beers, which makes me suspect it’s owned by Coors. But I was still on my Russian Stout kick, and you can’t get thick dark beers like that in regular people America, so I went for what looked like it might be dark (it wore black on it’s label because black was how it felt inside) and cross-referenced that with how much I felt like enabling myself with stupid purchases of alcohol horror stories, and ended up going with this. In that sense, and in the spirit of capitalistic competition, it is a pure winner. 4 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: I have an unfinished giant hurricane-strength shelf system in the hallway, and it stays cold in the wintertime in our hallway because our upstairs has baseboard heat and our main house part has woodstove heat, but the hall just sits there, no sunshine, no heat, dank and coolish. So I stashed the Irish Stout in there on a shelf, and when I'd want one, I'd have to go in the hallway and get one. I noticed as I got further into the back part of the six-pack, the floor in the hallway had a little more slant to it. I put a marble on the floor but it rolled the wrong way of what my slant had expected. Fermented drinks. 4 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: It's at the bottom of the recycling bin at this point, but I remember it had one of those intertwining line designs that look like really stupid tattoos but really good garden layouts. I am into the idea of keyhole gardens where everything wraps around a bulbous design, although it has occurred to me that this is basically a cul-de-sac for plants. Luckily for me plants don't have cars and children and the need to go somewhere to buy shiny new plant things, so it'll probably work in the yard better than it does in the sprawling death of our modern society. I do remember drinking the Saranac and thinking they should do an acid label that was basically the same thing but really darker black and day-glo green, so that it looked like it vibrated if you were in the right mindstate. And companies have money to waste to make sure their labels do certain things in certain demographics, like make dicks hard or gay women happy or appeal to Asian men from age 23 to 37 and shit like that. So I'm sure they can make sure the day-glo green could glow under a black light. 3 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: In my brain, which doesn’t necessarily always coordinate with reality, Saranac is some non-Babylonian Homeland of the UN New York state type shit. I could be wrong, but that’s what my brain thinks. And for as long as we’ve lived on this road, up the road towards town, there’s been another old farmhouse like our’s that this longhaired dude lives at. He had a beat-up pick-up truck, nice but wrecked, and then a Volvo sedan, and a basketball goal, and he would ride his 10-speed the 8 miles to the IGA to buy 12-packs of Miller High Life in the bottle, and he reminded me of my homeboy from growing up who lived down the road named Eric who loved Rush and dirt bikes. I’ve never really talked to this dude, though we do the “What’s up” finger waves in passing, but I’ve built him up as a lounger in my head, though I didn’t know dude. Some chick who was friends with my wife said she knew the dude and he had cheated on his wife and that’s why he lived alone or some shit, but that same chick had beef with someone else we knew, another melodramatic chick, and in a battle of the beefs between two melodramatic chicks, it’s best to remember they are both melodramatic, so be cool with both of them, because they can help not their natural craziness. Anyways, I bumped into that dude up the road at the store the other weekend when me and the baby were buying baking powder and bananas and more beer, so I introduced myself to the dude. He talked funny, like a northerner, and he seemed to lack work, which is no different than he has the whole time he’s lived here, so obviously he comes from money. So I assume he’s heir to the Saranac throne. It kinda bums me out, because I buy three or four dollars worth of lottery tickets every week, hoping to financially bankroll a leisurely lifestyle where I can concentrate on writing and rambling words into coherent statements instead of struggling upstream against the shitflow of my life all the goddamned time. Fucking Saranac ass dude, building a shed with scrap wood that he said he wanted to keep snakes and bugs out of. Who the fuck is worried about snakes and bugsin the goddamned country? The dude up the road, that’s who. The northerner Saranac Volvo sedan dude. He better not come round my house when I’m not around, trying to talk at my wife, or I’m gonna get all Billy Gibbons on his ass. 1 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: I don't know, it was a beer, with fake Irish themes, and I was anxious for warm weather so I could wear my alternate Celtics Paul Pierce jersey, black with a shamrock stitched on the front, that I got for $4 from a Goodwill in Shithole, Virginia. It is a beer that I will probably not ever buy again, and in fact, Saranac seems stupid to me. Even the word is annoying. 0 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 2 & 2/5 STARS!