2011 Beer Review #2: Union Export Brewery's Peter's Brand Classics Lager

Through the magic of Christmas, I recently came into a grab bag of international beers. Halfway into a 10-pack, I've already come to expect very little--after all, at less than $20 for 10 imported beers, there's only so much quality to be found. But if I've learned anything, it's that sampling beer is largely a risk-free endeavor: Good beer, after all, is good; and bad beer is at least beer, so you're usually going to come out on top no matter what. I'll make one exception for the jalapeno-flavored demon brew that Satan himself put in that international 10-pack, but it's still running at a nonfailure rate of 4 out of 5. I figure if that's enough to recommend gum, it's an acceptable rate for beer.

But the burning question now is, can Beer #6 out of my international 10-pack deliver the goods, or at the very least be inoffensive and not cause me to spit-take on an otherwise perfectly good game of Minecraft?

Starting off, we're not looking good. For one thing, everything about this can screams "generic". I'm not even sure I have the title right--I've read online that this comes to us from InBev, but the can claims to come from something called Union Export Brewery. In either case, all signs are pointing to mass-produced lager. But in the interest of science, I opened the can and poured the contents into the nearest pint glass.

You know how they say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover? They were wrong. Sometimes, it's perfectly fine and completely accurate to judge a book, or in this case a beer, by its cover. The color was indistinct from any mass-produced American ballpark beer. The aroma was nonexistant. Seriously, I pushed my face into the glass far enough to get foam up my nose and still smelled exactly nothing. And the taste? Exactly what I came to expect: Malty, with barely enough hops to justify calling it beer. It's not bad by any means, but it's definitely not a craft beer and not something I'm going to track down again.