September 1, 2023 | FEATURE | By Izzy Roe and Tia Peterson
In this never-before-seen summer edition of Beer for Babes, we will be doing what we do best: low-quality beer reviews and low-quality drawings. Would this drawing be better if we weren’t hammered? Absolutely not. Alas, we are not artists or even writers, just college students who each get paid $7.50 per article for drinking beer. Without further ado, welcome back, we hope you enjoy it.
The beer of choice is Polished Pilsner of Return Brewing. Hailing from Hudson, N.Y., it is served on tap at a restaurant our own Tia Peterson visited. She was told by, who we can only presume to be a seasoned Beer Babe – a man in his 50s – that he preferred this beer because it wasn’t as hoppy and IPA-like the rest of them. According to him, IPAs have taken over the market due to the rise of microbreweries. So, if you’re a middle-aged white guy, please choose a different mid-life crisis.
We’d all appreciate it – moving on.
Per usual, we start by rating the beer by the can design. Despite trying this beer for the first time on draft, as the young and cunning women we are, we took to the world wide web and looked up where to buy cans. And wow, are we glad we did. This can is gorgeous, so much color and detail. We are obviously “judge a beer by its cover” type of girls, so this was very exciting. Unfortunately for us, this posed a great challenge for our drunken drawing. All in all, we’d rate the design a 9/10, with one point subtracted for difficulty.
Next on the list is taste. And you know what? The old geezer was right. This beer is not hoppy or IPA-like. It goes down smooth and comes up delish. Earlier this year, we toured a brewery in Colorado where we got to meet with the owner to talk about his beer. That is where we learned that burping while drinking beer isn’t only disgusting, but part of the tasting experience. Apparently, burping and re-tasting the beer is a good thing. Anyway, this beer has a nice floral taste and a soft finish: the perfect summer refreshment. At 5.2% alc/vol, this beer features German Lager yeast and low bitterness content.
On to how drunk this beer made us. These were 16-ounce cans, and we planned on drinking three of them. However, after a long and hot day, we decided two would do just fine. It was a good thing we did because after the first one we were already tipsy. After the second one, we were ready to go to bed. Per usual, we would not recommend chugging this beer. In fact, we would strongly advise against it. Enjoy it, sip it, do anything but chug it.
Time for final comments. We thoroughly enjoyed this beer and would rate it a four-and-a-half-out-of-five on our very accurate and academic beer scale. It was easy to drink, light, and tasty. If you’ve read this far, thank you, and stay tuned for more ill-informed beer recommendations.
