Beer Review: Simpler Times Beer — for when men were men, women were women, and beer was room-temperature

For Halloween this year at the office, a few of us got together and did the old Saturday Night Live skit “Da Bears”, except we were “Da Chargers”.  You remember, the big fat stereotypical Chicago bears fans with mustaches and oversize sunglasses.  This gave us the great excuse to drink beer out of giant mugs during work hours.  One of my fellow Chargers Superfans brought in “Simpler Times Beer”, a canned brew from Trader Joe’s that probably fit the bill of being 1) cheap, and 2) cheap.  It’s purpose was primarily to be a prop in a costume rather than to be enjoyed for beer as such, and it served its purpose mightily.  I can barely remember it having much of a taste at all, no mean feet considering we drank it lukewarm (as, of course, proper refrigeration took backseat to prepping the costumes).  It literally went down with nary a comment, neither being good enough to say “hey, this ain’t bad”, nor being bad enough to even warrant jokes.  To this moment I couldn’t tell you a distinguishing feature aside from the name, the central interest of which is guessing whether the nostalgic theme is intentional or some hip subtle ironicness that I’m now too old to get.  So a thoroughly generic beer, devoid of any positives or negatives in any way.

By the way, the costumes went over pretty well, although I think we didn’t exactly pick an audience who would fully appreciate the humor.  Here’s what it’s like working at a science-tech company — after all four of us come in wearing charger’s gear, pillows for guts, fake mustaches, aviator sunglasses, and hoisting beers, one of our coworkers asked, “did you guys coordinate this?”  Next time, we’ve got to paint our jokes with somewhat broader strokes…