James Coarse is a member of WHIP APPEAL. He’s always drinking shitty beers around fires, and he recently played an amazing holiday set (with a broken leg) in the front window of the Friendly Toast in Cambridge. – DS

Top 10 Beers-That-Come-in-30-Packs of 2015

by James Coarse

2015 is a fast times year. Rock n Roll proliferated. Gangs become bands & bands become gangs–between shows & throws & all sorts of noise. This year I became 2 steps more cyborg & 1,000,000x more “life-like.” In the midst of all these changes (sitting is the new smoking) we’re grounded by the things that remain the same: fingernails grow, everyone else sucks at driving, socks get lost, people use the term “dog” to describe the smell of a dog and “wet dog” to describe the smell of a wet dog which is one of those things that almost doesn’t make sense it’s so basic it seems like you’re saying nothing at all (maybe that’s what people in college used to call a tautology) yet at the same time the simplicity of the whole thing, I mean calling something what it is and feeling fulfilled in that description, is so beautiful when I stop to think about it it’s like this anti-poetic poetry devoid of simile or metaphor or comparison or example it’s like a wet dog (or the smell of a wet dog which as I’m saying is pretty much the closest to being the same thing as you can get when you got one thing that is a thing and one thing that is a smell) is unlike something like love which artists & regular people have been trying to figure out how to talk about forever in 1,000,000 different ways & with 1,000,000 subtle twists and turns of tongue like maybe if I sang this song just a little bit different then people listening would finally realize what I mean and you’d hear me clearly, finally, after all these long talks about what we want and how we feel both as friends and lovers and partners and two parts of a whole interacting in this nebulous space somewhere between us while we stand in this space but also outside of it as individual folk with our own shit going down and our own private experiences, when I say I love you which is pretty much the opposite of a wet dog. And then there’s this certain kinda beer that’s like that, seeming to hold a similar sort of reliability. It was there before we could drink; it stuck around; they serve it in the bars we love & in bars that make us uncomfortable; we don’t find ourselves saying things like “I don’t know anything about beer” while drinking these beers (like we find drinking wine sometimes); and they’re so easy to share.

Beers that come in 30 packs. This year was a great one for those. I started drinking Busch Light in a big way this year when it would show up in 6-packs carefully smuggled into 2 Peabody where I lived and mostly drank bourbon. Busch Light is like cookies for breakfast & I don’t mean reecees puffs cereal or cookie crisp or any of that shit cause that’s cereal cleverly disguised as candy or maybe I mean candy cleverly disguised as cereal but either way you put it in a bowl and pour milk on it & you can sit there & really pretend to be a part of something bigger, part of a balanced breakfast – which is unlike real cookies for breakfast, acceptably familially reserved for christmas or when nobody is home or just your housemate or cousin who only eats shit like cookies & inhuman amounts of mac n cheese & so certainly isn’t gonna be judgmental when it comes to Busch Light for breakfast. Less important here is health goals than the satisfaction of a job well done, with grace & taste & economy, with vision.

I’m upset with Rolling Rock for ditching the painted labels in favor of tried (but not necessarily true) stickers, but still I’m in full admiration of the lengthy Latrobe pledge “from the glass lined tanks, &c., &c.,” plus my father drank this beer so I will always love it.

Budweiser tall boys at Charlie’s Kitchen for $3. A good choice for everyone’s second favorite beer.

Here’s a quick tip: During winter months, outside is one big cooler. BEWARE: If you leave your beers in the back seat overnight a cold one can quickly become a frozen, frothy, overflowing one so make sure to open it out the window in case it runs over. Better tip: keep a cup with you & pour immediately upon opening which will save your super cool beer from turning icy. I’m not entirely sure why this works but it’s certainly not gonna make things worse so give it a try.

Last night I drank Miller High Life, great from a bottle or a can. Maybe this year you did a whole bunch of kick ass things & yet still feel like shit and I said maybe those things don’t make you happy but what the hell, aren’t those some of exactly the life-time-movie & also real rock n roll goals? For sure they are and what is maybe just as important is: would I feel worse if I hadn’t done anything at all?

Space Ghost brought over some Natural Light & as we drank them tried to remember a rough count of how many Natural Lights he’s drank in his life counting 4 years of college and on average 14 Natural Lights per weekend plus 4 during the week for the first two years of college & add 4 to each of those for the third & add 7 to that senior year which at 52 weeks per year that’s a lot of Natural Lights & is a whole new level as compared to Busch Light, even for breakfast, you can really put ’em down I mean PUSH them into your body at what turns out to be an incredibly alarming rate.

Here are some other beers I recommend: PBR; Coors (which produces it’s starship, the banquet beer, in distinctive shape container – that is, both as can (similar to the ‘stone can) and as bottle which is often though not always in a squat likable to the red stripe bottle.

It may be relevant to you in your choice-making-moments to know the spotty history of Coors corporate. In west Texas we drank Coors (along with Lone Star which is a notable mention, but officially disregarded in this list because, as far as I know from personal experience, it is not available other than as a specialty within any reasonable distance from my fireplace. Another beer that sits here is Tecate. If anyone knows where I can buy either of these beers in 30 packs in Boston, hmu.) because Rusty drank it because his father, an officer of the law, would drive out of state to pick up cases of this beer & transport them home in the back seat of his cruiser. Coors, unpasteurized, was outlawed at the time in Texas which meant that it was certainly one of the only beers worth drinking and one would certainly be damned – especially a proud Texan – if anyone other than the one drinking the beer was gonna have a say in what beer said person was fucking drinking & fuck you anyway. The state of pasteurization was nominally the reason for the ban, although the “spotty history” I referenced earlier is noted on wikipedia as the underlying cause.

Genesee; Narragansett.