Three cheers for beer

Say what you want about beer – it kills brain cells, causes hangovers, destroys lives – but there are few industries that allow you to put a drawing of Santa Claus’ bare butt on the label.

Lest you think this a flight of fancy, be assured that I’m talking about a real label on a real beer, appropriately named Santa’s Butt Winter Porter. It’s an English concoction from the Ridgeway microbrewery in Oxfordshire, which is now on my official list of Top Ten Places to Visit Before I’m Committed to an Insane Asylum. (Also on the list: Paris, and that amusement park where they filmed part of “Zombieland.”)

From what I see in the beer aisles of various supermarkets and convenience stores, those butt-loving Brits are hardly the only brewmasters who name and label their beers with tongues firmly in cheek. In fact, they’re not the only ones to use the word “butt.” The Big Horn brewery, with locations smattered throughout the northwest, showed impressive boldness when they invented Buttface Amber Ale, the only beer I’ve come across that incorporates an actual insult I used when I was 9. Aside from ticking my inner adolescent, who still inwardly titters when he hears words like “booger” (and “titter”), this Buttface product has also allowed me to say “butt” six times in three paragraphs, which I believe is a personal record. Make that seven: butt.

Perhaps surprisingly, I am not currently drinking these products. Actually, I hardly drink at all, outside of holidays and Wednesdays. But when I do, it’s usually some microbrew with bench-pressing minotaurs or toga-clad Greek gods on the bottles, which are often saddled with ridiculous monikers, like Polygamy Porter or Spleen Cleaver. Both real, by the way.

The silly imagery and testosterone-drenched titles of these crazy creations are only possible because, contained within their glass or tin confines, is a liquid that makes one’s brain feel like a hall of mirrors in a mid-level amusement park. You just don’t see that kind of wacky (or immature) freedom in other industries. You don’t buy Spleen Cleaver running shoes, or book a seat on Buttface Airlines.

Earlier this year, while on vacation, a friend of mine decided that the best way for me to experience local culture in her little North Carolina town was to try as many ales, porters, and lagers as I could find. I’m pretty sure she wanted me dead. There are more craft brews in the western mountains than there are people to drink them, and while I didn’t find any that had the word “butt” in the title, there were plenty that somehow managed to incorporate ninjas, or 17th Century French kings. At one brewpub in particular, my “friend” ordered me what’s called a “flight,” which is basically a sampler of a half-dozen beers from the restaurant’s barrels. It’s the kind of thing you drink when you’re tired of remembering your own phone number, or you feel like obliterating cherished childhood memories. With a veritable cornucopia of different beers to taste, the goofy names were assaulting me almost as violently as the crippling alcohol buzz – names like Sir Ryan the Pounder, Freak Double IPA, and Uncle Rick’s Pilsner. I have no idea who Uncle Rick is. All I know is that Uncle Rick knocked me flat on my butt.

That’s 10 “butt” references. I think I win some kind of prize or something.

Some of these beers, for all their silliness, are pretty tasty, which is actually a little surprising. The label for Polygamy Porter, for instance, features a small army of fleshy, naked fun-seekers with arms conveniently placed over controversial body parts, illustrated in the style of an oil painting from one of the lustier Renaissance masters. Usually you have to pay gobs of money for a hotel’s pay-per-view service to gain access to that kind of content, and so the jiggle-riffic motif doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the quality of the product. But lo and behold, the beer smacks of hops and spices and goodness – the kind of drink that pulls off that rare double-trick of satisfying taste buds whilst growing the hair on one’s chest. Heck, since the waxed and buffed lovers on the box seem to lack hair anywhere south of their necks, maybe they should start drinking Polygamy Porter.

The nice thing about these beers – aside from the nude women and the butts with faces drawn on them – is that they’re oftentimes a better alternative to the stodgy, boringly-named beers that dominate at keg parties and in Super Bowl ads. Budweiser, for instance, tastes like the distilled armpit sweat from an unwashed rugby player. And just what the hell is a Budweiser, anyway? A German outhouse? Please. Pour me a Sir Ryan the Pounder any day of the week. 

These tiny little microbrews may limit their own marketing potential with these strange and incongruous titles, but sometimes quality is found at the fringes. Do a little hunting, and you’ll find that perfect beer waiting for you, and chances are good it’s saddled with some kind of oil painting of sword-wielding gladiators kicking the butts of two-headed lions. 

And that, my friends, is one dozen butts. Does that constitute some kind of world record? 

Quick, someone call Guinness.

No, the other Guinness.