Never Question My Methods

Bohemia beer looks exactly like Negra Modelo, if you’re squinting at it, which is probably how I accidentally purchased it. But I will not be fooled again. You need only see the stern Aztec on the label to realize that you aren’t in Modelo country.

There is a kind of beer — I’m looking at you Rheingold — which tastes of sand, suds, and seltzer. There is nothing even slightly Bohemian about it, although I suppose if you wanted to acknowledge that artsy types drink the equally flavorless Pabst, you could go that route.

Bohemia is brewed by the Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma Brewery, which also brews Sol and Dos Eqis — which taste kind of similar, in that there is very little taste.

I am guessing that only the difference between these three beers is the amount of water which is added. But I would be at a loss to guess which one has the most, because they all taste like Poland Spring to me.

But, as it is with most things I care little about, people love this beer. I’ve read a few accounts of it being described as a favorite Mexican beer. Which is tragic.

Dear reader, could there be a form of “Beer Blindness” similar to color blindness — but more boozey? Science will tell us one day.

But then there’s this:

It is too short and too weird to be anything other than a truly fan-generated tribute, and causes me to actually reconsider my Death to Bohemia Beer stance for maybe just a fraction of a second. Maybe.

Good work, possibly amateur viral video campaign.

I discovered the international grocery store Food Bazaar on a blindly-navigated “how far does Wyckoff avenue go?” tour of my own neighborhood.

Food Bazaar is kind of like Trade Fair with a higher threshold for chaos. If this analogy doesn’t suffice, consider it the crazier sister of any major grocery chain. There is Jamaican food in the Latin American section; bread is near the bottled water; there is a tremendous quantity of humidifiers, medicine, and toys just past the cash registers; the meat aisle resembles a maze — a maze that makes you want to order a salad.

The whole experience is strange and likable; so likable that I thought I would buy something as a memento. And this is where things turn ugly.

OK. There’s a lot of detail in this picture, which I have stolen from KitchenKiki‘s Flckr page. What you’re looking at is Big Bamboo’s Jamaican Irish Moss (Carageenan) Peanut Drink, which is a black soda can ornamented with an illustration of peanuts and carrageenan, as well as some kind of unholy traffic jam of typefaces.

What’s so striking about the overall effect, is even though you’re looking at something as innocuous as peanuts and carrageenan: the soda genuinely looks a little dangerous.

After pacing the entire grocery store, this can was the only thing in my mind’s eye. So I purchased it. And carried it around for eight hours, wondering when I would feel safe enough to drink it.

I never did feel safe. But I did want to get it over with so I would have something to blog about.

So how did it taste?

It was not nearly as unpleasant as I imagined, but I would not do it again. Imagine a Reese’s peanut butter cup, without the chocolate, mixed with seltzer, in a 3 cup to 1 cup ratio. Maybe with a little chalk dust thrown in for consistency. Which poses the question: Why would anyone drink this?

The answer is ugly, and by that I mean that it is rooted in man’s quest for power. Or more specifically, potency.

I had assumed that Irish Moss was simply a brand name, but there are a number of recipes for Irish Moss drinks in the world, some with peanut butter, some without. So what is it? Well, another seller of this kind of  beverage, Magnum, provides this definition:

Irish moss is a red algae that grows in low-tide areas on rocky coasts of the Atlantic Ocean, also known as carrageenan, for the Irish town Carragheen. It is used as a gelling agent in cosmetics, a thickener in ice creams and soymilk, a cattle feed, as an anti-inflammatory medicine, a clarifier in beer brewing. In the Caribbean it is often mixed with sugar, milk, rum and nutmeg to make a quenching drink that is rumored to have aphrodisiac qualities.

(Italics and emphasis my own)

Presumably, in the interest of “aphrodisiac qualities” the beverage has chalkiness which the peanut butter can’t quite mask, and one can contains 3 grams of protein (Take that, RDA reccomended daily is 0.8 of protein).

[Hello! I make mistakes. Your average container of cottage cheese has four times the amount of protein that this particular Irish Moss beverage does. There's no excess of protein here. Let's move along now.]

I’m going to have to plead ignorance on whether or not said qualities are present in the beverage — feel free to launch your own investigation. But based on my experience, if you can drink the entire can, you already possess a potency, or more specifically, a fortitude, which I do not.

[Big Bamboo Irish Moss is also available as a vanilla-flabored beverage. Wyckoff avenue is a copyrighted and registered trademark of Never Question My Methods]