I typically refrain from eating LEGO bricks. Grey Poupon doesn’t even help.
In much the same way, my forever quivering lips remain fixed at a coordinate far, far removed from the class of purported potables known as flavored malt beverages (FMBs).
Why people even inflict this sort of damage on their precious flavor receptors mystifies me, and…
…wait, what’s that?…give ’em a definition of FMB so the fathomless rubes might understand what they’re actually ingesting?
Shrug. I suppose so, although only if you insist. Explanations like this never end well.
According to The Oxford Companion to Beer, a flavored malt beverage (FMB) is an alcoholic beverage made from an original base containing malt, not unlike beer (including hops, also not unlike beer) but then is stripped of extraneous malt (and accidental hop) character, and submitted to a laboratory for flavoring.
These drinks are also referred to as flavored alcohol beverages and colloquially called ‘alcopops’ or ‘malternatives,’ among numerous other names. Achieving the lowest rate of taxation for beverage alcohol, while retaining the greatest range of options for modifying it, are central tenets of the FMB concept.
FMBs originated in the 1990s when producers realized that a malt-based flavored beverage was taxed at the same rate as beer, whereas a spirit-based or wine-based flavored beverage was taxed at significantly higher rates.
In summary, you make a sort-of-beer solely to yield the alcohol, remove any flavor potentially associated with even the lightest beer, use the alcohol to conjure it something that tastes like something else that isn’t, wasn’t, and cannot ever be real, then waddle off to the bank, maniacally laughing all the way.
That’s America, down to the floorboards.
During the 1980s, when wine coolers rose from the great spritzy nothingness to captivate our nation for a month or two, wineries presumably had at last found a happy outlet for oceans of spare light, white vino; just add fruit flavoring, pump it full of carbonation, and repeat the aforementioned happy dance in the direction of the ever-accommodating Commerce Bank of Beverly Hills.
But when the Feds raised the excise tax on wine, it was back to the drawing board, which duly produced Zima and Smirnoff Ice — malt-based beverages that also enjoyed their five minutes in the blistering Death Valley sun.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to take a shower. Maybe 18 showers.
And there it is, roughly 300 words more than I’ve written previously (ever, combined) about this absolutely...Read more
