You’ll never forget Brador🍺

With that gold foil wrapped around the bottle cap and a 6.2%abv, there was everything to like about Brador. Like the ad says you’ll never forget the times you’ve had. Well most of those times I do forget and the ones I remember I want to forget! This will be the hardest post, from a personal level, we all have our low points right? Molson Brador was the first malt liquor that I had ever tried. In the 80’s  most beers were rated around the 5% mark, Brador was a beer to be reckoned with. With Brador being fairly high in the alcohol by volume department, it felt like we needed less beers to get us buzzed so in turn it saved us a bit of money. My buddy Nick & I latched on to Brador pretty quick, it seemed like everyone was catching the Brador buzz! 

There wasn’t a day after that I wished there wasn’t a day before!  Like any malt liquor its a high octane bottle of what the f**k just happened! There’s a couple of differences between beer and malt liquor. Primarily malt liquors are high alcohol content whereas beer is basically in the 5% range. Remember this is mid eighties and macro Brewers didn’t offer many high alcohol content brews and there was no craftbeer scene to speak of. Malt liquor is strictly bottom fermented(yeast that settles to the bottom) where as beer can be fermented by both top and bottom yeast. Malt liquors do seem to carry a stigma about them, like the yeast that sits at the bottom that’s how you feel drinking malt liquor. To provide more fermentable sugars malt liquors use a lot more corn and rice which in the craft world is considered taboo.

Back in those days I’d usually be carrying my radio with me. Heck ya I once owned a JVC RCM70 but to carry that monster of a radio around was ridiculous. I sure wasn’t a hulking body builder. I was a rocker & the RCM70 was becoming the break dancers machine of choice so I opted for  a decent arm sized Pioneer radio instead, heck I still own that same radio!
Yes this Pioneer  radio blasted Back in Black, Crazy train and Run to the Hills loud and often🤘  As we sat around the park, Warden Woods or the golf course, the music was the soundtrack to our youth being played out as we blacked out. I really don’t have a lot of recall about the times we spent drinking Brador. Mostly I was lucky to get home in one piece. Jack and I would do some pretty stupid stuff like running basses in a wet muddy field, sliding into home plate in the dark then sit in the rain toasting to the home run. There were times we’d  be so hammered that we have to walk each other home! Imagine a neighbour over hearing that conversation “thanks for walking me home dude I’ll walk you back to your place”.

The final straw came when I received a call from my buddy telling me he was in the hospital from having a seizure. I was with him the night before and we drank more than usual. I was scared, stunned and confused. Was this because of the Brador, he wasn’t like me and couldn’t handle his booze on most nights but the other night he was bottle for bottle and appeared to be in some stable fashion. We chatted a bit and he assured me he was fine but the doctors had said they found LSD in his blood. Impossible I said to him cause we didn’t do anything like that; wait a sec we did run into a guy we knew from the neighbourhood. Could he have slipped something in his bottle when wen were gabbing?

My buddy’s older brother was on the hunt for answers and the questioning was going to start with me. The brother was tall and pissed but thank goodness he knew me well enough. He found me hanging out at our local Mickey D’s and cornered me into my booth. After a lengthy discussion of what’ll happen to this guy if he finds him, I left McPukes in hopes of getting some answers myself. What the hell did I get us into? Having a few beers with your buds isn’t supposed to be like this! Drinking  beers is about laughs and good times, music and friends. I never intended to be a drunk or drunkard & I’ve never been a mean drunk nor a violent drunk, frig I twice almost lost a friend to alcohol.

That’s what I remember about Brador, it wasn’t a fun brew nor was it an exciting brew. It was stupidness at its best, consumption of alcohol for alcohol percentage sake. I knew we were responsible enough, we simply wanted to share our hopes passions and dreams. I was sure there wasn’t a need to be scrapping the bottom of the barrel and getting stupid ass blotted anymore, beer has to be positive in my life. I can’t possibly go back to the way things were , so where do you go from that point?

One day as I walked into the liquor store to buy us beer I notice this light blue can….Lowenbrau!

I can’t say that was the last of macro styled beers for me, that would be a lie, but it’s the start of not so many macro styled beers and the start of tasting beer from around the world. Becoming a more refined beer drinker. Learning to enjoy beer for its aroma and mouthfeel, to appreciate the process in which it is brewed. Before a time when craftbeer ruled the world, as an alternate to low quality high output beer manufacturers there was a couple of options to choose from. Home brewing was  one option, that always sounded like there was just too much cleaning involved for my liking, and there was option number two…

U-Brew it? I think I will🍺