Beer Review: Landshark Island Style Lager — not as good as Chevy Chase

[A young woman hears a knock at her apartment door…]

Woman:  “Who is it?”

Voice at door:  “Candygram!”

Woman:  “You’re not that sneaky land shark, are you?”

Voice at door, after a pause:   “No ma’am, I’m just a beer that tastes like Corona.”

Woman:  “Well, all right…    AAAGHHH!      You do taste just like Corona!”

I’m not sure why, in my little scene, the woman has to scream at the end, it just seemed appropriate.  Must be those 12 years of improv classes I have under my belt (and don’t forget 3 years of tap).  Perhaps I’ve grown accustomed to wandering around the limits of what beer flavors a human can withstand, ranging from horrible malt liquors to novelty beers with 18% alcohol content to … shudder … Budweiser and Clamato, but I found this LandShark brew to be pretty much a bland easy-to-chug party beer, with absolutely nothing making it stand out.  Which means the brewers pretty much got it exactly the way they want it, as this beer is part of the Jimmy Buffett Empire and is some sort of promotional tie-in with the Miami Dolphins.  I’m not sure if the Dolphin’s stadium being renamed “Land Shark Stadium” came first, this beer came first, or both are named for some other facet of the Buffett Fiefdom, because the work it would take to find out sounds an awful lot like Research, and that kind of effort just seems against the whole Jimmy Buffet Vibe.

Speaking of Buffett, his concerts would routinely sell out multiple nights in Cincinnati back when I lived there.  Cincinnati?  A beach/island/sun-kissed/laid-back vibe in Cincinnati?  Where you can get bacon-wrapped dental floss?  Never made sense to me — food and beverages in my hometown just don’t fit well with limes.  Then again, Buffett still does look like a doughy uptight suburban midwesterner at a beach-themed barbecue, trying and failing to pull off the Hawaiian shirt, despite all the years of laid-back partying.  Even after decades of Margaritaville, he still would look more appropriate doing accounting in the next cubicle over than playing slide guitar with a beer bottle neck.  Which, come to think of it, is a fairly apt description of this beer — if we could somehow eavesdrop on the various styles of beers conversing with each other, they’d describe that Land Shark dude as the same old doughy suburbanite dressed up in some half-arsed party garb.  This is a beer trying to wear a Hawaiian shirt tucked into his pleated khaki dockers.  Not bad, but I’ve met a million of ’em before.