No other style manifests the distinction better than malt liquor.
Outside of a few curiosities produced by craft brewers, not a single malt liquor earns better than a low-average grade from reviewers at BeerAdvocate.com. Most are tagged with epithets worthy of terrorist baby-killers. Even those who are fond of the stuff offer little praise for any quality beyond its cheap facility for denting one's cerebral cortex.
Notably, even those who decry the neo-Prohibitionists of the Nanny State rarely raise a peep when Bible-thumpers lobby for laws to prevent the sale of "liquid crack" in inner-city neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, no beer style is so crassly adored as malt liquor.
The Irish might've written odes to their beloved black stout, and Germany has made lager a religion. But in America, malt liquor - even as it is inevitably packaged in a brown paper bag - is an instantly identifiable cultural icon.
Back in the '80s, kids mimicked Billy Dee Williams' smooth Colt 45 slogan: " . . . works every time!" The Ramones joined in with a one-chord ode ("Gimme, gimme, gimme my Steel Reserve") and Sublime followed with its debut album, "40oz. to Freedom."
Comics have leaned on it as a punch line in everything from "The Simpsons" to the Wayans brothers' parody "Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood." A while back, Conan O'Brien mocked up spoof bottles of SpongeBob SquarePants Malt Liquor.
More recently, have you noticed that some hipsters have given up their beloved Pabst Blue Ribbon in favor of 40-ounce bottles of Mickey's?
Curiously, and despite its dismissal as a serious beer, malt liquor is judged every year at the Great American Beer Festival in a category euphemistically called "American-style specialty lager." Yes, the same awards ceremony that has honored something so delicately esoteric as Hennepin Farmhouse Saison has also handed out medals to the chug-a-lug likes of Hurricane, Red Bull and OE 800.
