Beer for those who don't like beer

I'm pretty finicky about my beer. To start with I have never liked beer from tins -- for whatever reason, it tastes flat compared to bottled beer. But then I don't like much draft beer either, for the same reason. For thirty years, I made my own beer and could make it taste the way I thought beer should taste. Sadly, I rely on bought beer nowadays.

(And, by the way, if you're finicky about your beer terminology, in my vocabulary "beer" is the generic term including all others, like ales and stouts and lagers and so on.)

In the past twenty or thirty years, our local beer market has had a lot of imported items from other markets; some of them strike me as beer for people who don't like beer. That concept of course makes perfect marketing sense: if you are a beer manufacturer and you think all the current beer drinkers have already decided what kind of beer they like, but you still want to extend your sales, you need to open new markets for beer. That extension necessarily is among people who don't currently like beer. So you make beer for people who don't like beer.

The prime form of beer for people who don't like beer is the fizzy-water sort that people in Canada always used to call "American beer." That term is unfair since many good beers are made in the USA, but the biggest sellers in that country, and the prime imports from there too, to my mind certainly fall into the category of beer for people who don't like beer.

When "lite" beer started to be a popular item, manufactured locally as well as at distance, it also fell into that category in my mind. And then beers started appearing that had interesting names but which were insipid fizzy-water types too. Sigh.

Mill Street, when I first started buying its beers a decade or more ago, made delicious bottled beer. (And they still produce some very good beer, though lately it's become hard to get them in bottles! ) Mill Street has always had a few products of insipid nearly-beer beers. I saw a box of this interestingly named Stock Ale at the store a couple of months ago (when I was still allowed to shop inside the liquor stores) and bought the box on spec. Small box, just six tins.

It looks very nice. Good colour. Good head. Sparkles nicely on the tongue. Not bad in that regard for a tinned beer.

But it is beer for people who don't like beer.

And, after two months, I've only drunk three tins. But maybe it's an acquired taste. . .