Beer for the Super Bowl

The American football spectacular known as the “Super Bowl” is a marketing paradise. In the beginning, when there was an American Football League and the National Football League and the Super Bowl actually meant something, brewing companies were the major advertisers.

Television commercial advertising was as much a part of the spectacle as the actual sporting event. I seem to remember Miller “Lite” and Budweiser both featuring advertisements for their respective beers.

Watching one of the first few Super Bowl games inspired me to explore the tasty treat known as Super Bowl dip. It consisted of melting a bar of Velveeta cheese in a bowl, adding a jar of tomato salsa and mixing the two until it was of putty-like consistency. The use of toasted corn chips conveyed this mixture from the bowl to the mouth. This was immediately followed by the consumption of at least three six ounce gulps of ice cold malt flavored fizzy straw-colored beverage. (Or Coca-Cola or Dr. Pepper if you are from the South.) The entire concept was “beer mandatory”.

The upstart A.F.L. versus the tradition bound N.F.L. would soon merge and later become a financial megalopolis. However, during that first decade the “Super Bowl” was quite simply a good excuse to party.

As the preponderance of viewers were male, beer consumption was considered mandatory, and hot spiced foods, fatty salty creations from every ethnic culinary source, found a day to be celebrated. Buffalo wings, pizza, every kind of chilly in existence, and peppers of every kind prepared in every way were always the fodder fed to the football fanatics from the very first.

What kind of beer goes with this feed?

Popular priced mass-produced American beer!

This multi-hour extravaganza has gone from the honest enthusiasm of Frank Gifford, Howard Cosell and “Dandy” Don Meredith served up at a time when the country was engaged in an unpopular armed conflict in Southeast Asia, to an orchestrated multimedia cotillion of corporate overindulgence and marketing extravaganza, served up with a side of financial slippage.

What kind of beer is called for?

This is not a beer tasting event. This is the time for mass consumption for effect not flavor. Purely for sentimental reasons my nomination goes to Pabst Blue Ribbon beer from the can. That’s the beer I’m going to have with my buffalo wings… enjoy the game!