Let's go back a step. I was in New World Centre City looking for the elusive Tuatara. Not the fucking NZ lizard thing with the weird schlong, the even more obscure Wellingtron craft beer
which had been given a big writeup in the Air NZ inflight rag - I'm a jetsetter me - and looked worth chasing up. I was sure I'd seen it in New World's ranks before. I was wrong. Plenty of NZ craft beer but no sign of any Tuatara. Bastard memory playing tricks again. So I was already off-guard when the blonde offered me a taste of what she had to offer. Her soul. Or, for those whose hearing wasn't irrevocably fucked by AC/DC at the Sydney Ent Cent in January 2001, her Sol."No thanks," I replied. "I already know what it tastes like."
Sol's not a particularly good beer. It's one of those clear-etched-glass-bottle, chunk-of-citrus, pretense-over-substance Mexican lagers which get sold in buckets of ice for over-the-odds pesos in beer barns all over the world, from Cancun to Christchurch. And it's not even the best one - double-blind test Sol against its mate Corona and it's usually a decisive win for the Crown, which ain't much of a beer but it's more of a beer than Sol is. Any beer than actively needs adultering with lime or lemon to make it more palatable, to make up for deficiencies in the hop usage of the brewers in the first place, has got problems.
However, it is a fairly decent summer beer. And it was summer. It'd been high sun and high twenties all week, which in un-airconditioned Dunedin is akin to Christmas in Cairns. A hard earned thirst needs a big cold beer, and the best hot weather beer is...
Well at $17 a dozen, it's Sol, apparently.
"Good man," the promo girl smiled, as I sauntered back past nonchalantly with a dozen under my arm. And went on to invent several new swearwords at the price of limes imported from the Land of Seppo. $28 a kilo. Ah, so this is where the profit margin got moved to. I grabbed two lemons ($5 a kilo) and made for the checkout, where another pretty young thing (you can tell when the students are back) scurried off to get my 'free gift'. Free gift? Steak knives to cut the lemons up? Nope. Another litre of Sol. So that'd be the equivalent of 15 stubbies of Sol for $17 then. That would go in the column marked 'Win'.
But this is how it should be, yeah? Because at the end of the day, Mexican lagers like Corona and Sol are supposed to be peasant beers. They cost fuck all to make, they're made using dirt-cheap ingredients, and in their home countries they're the VB and Lion Red of the marketplace. Yet some astonishingly arsey marketing puts a dozen Coronas up in the same pricing echelon as the International Lagers from Becks, Heineken and Stella. Which, for cheap nasty shit you need to throw citrus at to make drinkable, is fairly unreasonable market practice. The days of $20 buckets (sixers) of Coronas at the Surfers Beergarden, or $3 bottles during happy hour at the Adrenalin Bar (usually in the pre-game to big rugby tests) seem long gone. And most heinous of all is the advent of the 'Fusion' beer, which purports to be Mexican style lager but is really just generic shit from Miller or Carlton with fake lime flavouring skimmed off the bilge tanks of the Cottees factory, means a whole lot of people are drinking nasty fucking lemon-lime shandies under the misapprehension that they're on the Cutting Edge of Trendite Faaahhhshun.
Still, a fridge full of Sol for Tasman Bitter money ain't such a bad arrangement. Particularly when the most significant issue you have to account for becomes where the fuck do you find a stubbie holder that'll fit a fucking ludicrously oversized novelty bottle of beer.
Darwin might be a good place to look.
The Doctor is OUT.
