Spambino ale

I prefer my April Fool’s jokes to be something that actually fools people, or rather, me, but that can be pretty hard when you read everything on the day with a grain of salt. That said, some are better than others in trying to pull the wool over your eyes. Anyway, I wasn’t going to follow up my previous aside with anything when I wrote it, but after a night of drinking tonight, I feel the need. So, let me start with what I culled from the internets today, and believe me, I wasn’t looking real hard, or really, at all…

This morning, the Sandbox on FNX was playing Great White and I wondered why — I thought maybe it was part of “My Song Is Better Than Your Song” — but I figured it out when they followed it up with a Scorpion’s tune. Yeah, I got some “Dr. Feelgood” as my third sampling before getting out of the truck for the train.

However, the best awaited me later in the night when I hit up the Boston Beer Works on Canal St. Before I get to that, the setup is required, which, really… isn’t a setup at all. So, I headed out after work with a couple guy’s to do Tuesday night Team Triva at the Elephant & Castle. First time I have done that and it was fun. Especially fun since we took 4th place (lost 3rd on a tie-break question) out of a dozen+ teams and brought home Killian’s t-shirts (meh.) as victory schwag. I’m not so sure the team’s that beat us didn’t have their Crackberries and/or iPhones helping them on their way. As a team of geeks — our team name was “A Series of Tubes” — we actually didn’t leverage any technology to win our way into crappy parting gifts.

Anyway, the point of this digression was it was fun to head out and do trivia and I’m sure it will happen again. We headed over to BBW after trivia was over since I wanted the consultant/contractor we have been working with to check the place out, but when we got there, it was pretty dead, but we chowed on some apps and made the best of it amongst ourselves.

As far as the April Fools goes, the waitress shared with us the gag the brewer/manager/someone-in-charge played on them today. They were to try and up-sell a new beer: Spambino Ale. While it was an obvious play on their Bambino Ale and another gag that might get obvious pretty quickly if simply described, they backed it up with props. Yup, they had them tasting an ale with chunks of Spam in it… you know, Bluebeery Ale style. Our waitress admitted that she fell for it because she wasn’t remembering what day it was. Fair enough too because that’s half of what makes these gags work, people that aren’t necessarily skeptical when they awake in the morning… like me.

That said, she left me with a clip-out that I assume was part of the props to sell them the gag, so I am going to share it with you:

Spambino Ale

Light beer made and garnished with real Spam. Light aroma of malt and spicy salt-cured ham. Medium bodied with a light salty/smokiness. Finishes with a slick, almost fatty, fullness. Sell Spambino to customers who are looking for something truly adventurous. Recommend to anyone who enjoys Bimbleman’s Onion Lager (U.S.), Ridley’s Stilton Bitter (Britain), or Schludwiller’s Arsch-haar Dunkel (Germany). Brewer’s Factoid: Beer and meat have been a combination for millennia. The earliest record of a meat-beer was from the Vikings in 1040. The original (called “SlØØf Lirpa” in the native tongue) was also a favorite of William Wallace of “Braveheart” fame. The ale was ceremoniously drunk from the boiled skulls of their fallen enemies. Since some measure of flesh remained, the ability of one to consume mass quantities of fatty, rancid beer was a display of manhood. The “Serving of the Beer”, or “Beer-Serve” is the root of the modern English term “Berserk”.