BEER REVIEW REBELLION: Pabst Blue Ribbon, which is perfect

We are the premier Ole Miss food and booze blog on the internet. We deliver only the most premium gustatory takes this side of the Mississippi River and we apologize for nothing. We speak to alums and current students. We offer this service because we care deeply about you and your diseased livers.

That’s why we’re here to argue for PBR — ahem, Pabst Blue Ribbon — as the greatest national treasure this country has invented. Did you know that in Italy the country’s national go-to Budweiser-type choice is called Nastro Azzuro? NASTRO AZZURO LITERALLY MEANS “BLUE RIBBON” IN ITALIAN. THEY DRINK PBR. IT’S FANTASTIC AND EVERYONE DRINKS NASTRO AZZURO, WHICH IS A VERY GOOD BEER.

Cheap beer maintains an important spot within American drinking culture. After all, college students need to booze. So this conundrum then presents American bars and breweries and alcoholics with a real project. How to construct the perfect, baseline beer that everyone in the damn bar will buy? That beer is Pabst Blue Ribbon. It tastes enough like beer, unlike Budweiser or any of the Lite fraternity, and for that reason it’s the perfect sud for just drowning and ripping with your mates. It’s pretty good, and that’s in the end all you need in this life.

PBR won a beer medal or something back in the day and just ran with it, as they should have. They earned a blue ribbon, and they put it on their can, because they’re the RCR of beer cans. We kick fucking ass. We’re Red Cup Rebellion, but we have a blue damn ribbon.

Pabst Blue Ribbon is actually the perfect beer for any occasion. It’s completely inoffensive. It’s crisp and cold enough to sting the palette enough to register as legitimate beer. PBR as a beer is the car that you put over 200,000 miles on. It just sits there with you and holds on for some goddamn reason. PBR holds none of the complications of an IPA or a stout or a cider or whatever. It’s just fucking beer. American lager. Drink this thing until you decide that jumping over the bonfire is a good idea. It goes down easy enough to last all day and night, and it doesn’t ruin the stomach like some of those more involved elixirs. It certainly makes for the best Boilermaker.

Pabst Blue Ribbon comes in two, but really one, varieties. 12 oz. cans and a 16 oz. tall boy. I’m very proud to live just around the corner from the singular best American bar that sells the most 12 oz. cans of PBR in the country annually. The Recovery Room saved me from Hurricane Irma and I love them. To drink PBR out of a bottle feels sacrilegious, honestly, because the aluminum can is the only vessel for ingesting this delicious urine. But it’s highly drinkable urine. That is a sentence I just wrote.

We should pause here as a food blog to point out that, while you’re grilling, dumping a splash of PBR on your burgers or chicken or ribs or pork loin or whatever supremely improves your meal. Just take a swig of cheap beer then pour one out over that pork chop. You’ll thank us later.

Have a great weekend, y’all, we’re probably not getting the COI decision until after the Egg Bowl, because apparently there are Leo Lewis safety concerns. We’re not gonna write about it because it’s stupid as all hell.