September 29, 2006:
There's something about beer teaming with Halloween that's always felt...right. I guess because of spiked sales due to costume parties, beer companies have long skewed their October-lived promotions with a Halloween edge, and even when I was too young to drink beer or even find drinking beer attractive, I loved its partnership with the holy holiday. The way I break it down, Halloween and beer have three major bonding points that give the duo such notoriety...
Halloween/Beer Success #1: Supermarket Displays
When you go the supermarket, there will be beer. That's a year-round fact. But during the Halloween season, beer gets to be arranged by professional window dressers and adorned with more Halloween decorations than any family in the supermarket's neighborhood would dare try to stuff their front lawns with. The decorations range from cardboard standees to giant inflatable beer cans with devil horns, and every year without fail, Halloween and beer co-conspire to put something in the supermarket worth breaking out your shitty cell phone camera for.
Sometimes the displays are really inspired -- on a good year, they may even include blinking lights and fog as special effects. Best of all, since every major beer company thinks they're destined to become synonymous with Halloween, you'll often get competing displays, with celebrity spokespeople for different beer companies arguing about who represented the better beer, right there un the grocery store. It could get pretty heated.
HEY, YOU, WHAT'S THAT SOUND?
EVERYONE KNOWS WHAT'S GOING DOWN!
Down your GULLET, I mean! It's Coors Light -- the official beer of Hallowheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeen!
I liked Death Becomes Her, for two reasons. One, it's a movie with the word death in it, and WHEEEEEEEE! Two, it had that great line, and I think it applies to what's on my platter.
"Drink it. You have to!"
Wait up, straight up, hold up, Elvy Booby! What "everyone knows" is that Budweiser and its variants are the true beers of the Halloween season.
And everyone knows something else, too.
Bitch you a skanky hosebag.
NOBODY
CALLS ME
A skanky hosebag.
I'm appalled. Clearly I represent the most Halloweeny of the Halloween beers.
Wrong. Bud is better. Bud rhymes with blood. Bud is made by Anheuser-Busch. See that logo above me? That's Anheuser-Busch's logo. They make these awesome pretzels in that shape; they're usually inside the mini-bars in Vegas hotel rooms. YOUR BEER HAS NO LOGO PRETZELS! JOIN me for a cold one!
Well I'm just going to stand here looking appalled all night.
As an adult, you learn the way the world really works, and you don't get as excited about stuff. Things are different for kids, and I spent my early years thinking that Halloween parties mixed with beer were the most magical things. I'd seen enough Halloween parties on television and in movies to know that they provided those special nights where all romances were forged, where everyone loved each other and where people who were afraid to dance overcame their fears by wearing identity-hiding masks. All the other events of the year looked to Halloween parties when they needed to know how high the bar'd been set. Adding beer to the mix -- beer, which as I understood it was something that took people to their utmost levels of hilarity, agility and good lookingness -- seemed like it'd be the straw that broke the camel's back and turned all of the blood that spilled from the its wounds into wine or gold or a little of both.
Supermarket displays were nice, but beer needed more successes to become the Halloween liquid prince it is today.
Halloween/Beer Success #2: TV Commercials
I love Halloween TV specials as much as the next guy, but we just can't count on them. They run, but they don't run with guaranteed frequency. They run, but they only run once a year, and we watch too much television for them to be anything but lost in a sea of reality shows and surprise Howie Mandel comeback trails. I much prefer relying on Halloween TV commercials. There's no surefire bet that any particular season will deliver a "big" batch of Halloween commercials, but the ones it does give us are certain to air 40,000 times throughout the season. There's a comfort in that. There's a comfort in seeing Frankenstein's Monster say, "our automobile deals are so good they're spooky" enough times to be able to call the exact moment just before "spooky" that Frank's eyebrows will move up three inches.
There have been more Halloween + Beer commercials than all of the other Halloween + Anything Else commercials combined. It's basically a prerequisite. If a beer company decides to carve pumpkins, nobody will take them seriously unless they broadcast the pumpkin gutting to America at large. Just works like that.
Halloween beer commercials didn't often have much to say. They generally existed as Halloween video tributes featuring creatures and ghouls who just happened to be drinking beer. Total slice of life kind of things. Despite the lack of huge messaging, or perhaps because of it, Halloween beer commercials were the best the season offered. These ads were for adults, technically, and within that, they could look a lot creepier than, say, Ronald McDonald wearing a red cape, calling himself Knight Ronald and prancing down the yellow brick road with a pumpkin-shaped candy basket.
Sometimes, the ads would even feature celebrities -- weird celebrities. The kind of celebrities low enough on the pole to have to vie for the same gigs that Spuds MacKenzie was getting.
I don't do this for the money. I do this because I reaallllly believe that Coors is the official beer of Halloween!
No YOU do it because you're a yucky frogdouche.
Supermarket displays and commercials are enough to make the Halloween/Beer joint venture worth every penny, but there's more. Sometimes, the beer itself gets Halloweenified. Yes, this is less frequent. The big boys like Bud and Coors want you to associate them with the Halloween season, but not at the risk of people thinking that they need to physically "theme" their beers to do it. They're supposed to be more powerful than that. Other brands have no issues at all with swapping their label art for something devilish and adding orange food dye to the mechanically separated beer hops.
Halloween/Beer Success #3: Halloween-Flavored Beer
Take this, for example. Yeah, Samuel Adams' "Octoberfest" is more of a fall beer than a Halloween beer, but you try telling me that when I'm grasping at straws. I don't even like the stuff, but I'll still make it my exclusive beer until November 1st, because it is my duty. I think there are a lot of people like this -- people who'll go for the "holiday edition" of something even if it's not as good as the "regular edition" of something else. Maybe we're so blinded by the thought of losing these things once the holiday seasons pass that we can't see the forest for the beer that isn't as good as other beer.
I can't believe I'm trying to classify "Octoberfest" beer as a Halloween drink. I know I'm going to get shit for this.
With an alleged hint of caramel flavor (my tongue needs more obvious hints, apparently) and a rich, autumnish hue, this is just one of a great many beers that've historically given recovering alcoholics the opportunity to cave and blame it on trying to get with the spirit of things.
I grew up looking at Halloween and beer as a coupling just as awesome as Macho Man and Miss Elizabeth. I didn't quite understand it, but I didn't really need to -- not understanding it gave it all the more mystique. Today, we salute this tandem of terror and pray that it doesn't come for us, next.
Don't need no nose to smell victory! Budweiser is the KING of Halloween beers!
Puh-leeze, Bud is cheese. You're wearing the proof, handsome.
Explain, harpyface.
My "asshole sensor" zeroes in on your left suspender.
