HUNTER S. THOMPSON WAS WEAK, AND SO IS THIS BEER

I'm going to be honest with you - Hunter S. Thompson's writing's got to be the most overrated pile of pablum this side of William Burroughs, and this sad, wastoid of a man coasted on his lunatic reputation for maybe 40 years after the one interesting thing he ever put together, "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail". So when he expired last year or whenever it was, and the usual suspects hauled out all their grandeloquent tributes, it was all I could do to keep from crying out loud about our poor, poor gullible and constantly-fooled civilization. Folks whose peak years of brainpower were high school and college, and who retained the same level of literary inquisitiveness in the years thereafter. Ugh. But who am I to judge, right? We're all the same in the Lord's eyes, am I right?

Now I find out this brewery in Denver called FLYING DOG BREWING has decided to whip up a porter in honor of "the great man". Well I saw it on the shelf and it couldn't help but catch my eye, and I said what the hey, let bygones be bygones and let's give this bad boy a try. GONZO IMPERIAL PORTER started promising - an incredible, "Old Faithful"-sized head of beautiful foam when I poured it into my glass, so much so that I had to tilt the glass just so to get some beer to dribble out. Kinda cool, you know? But the euphoria wore off quickly. This beer unfortunately had 9.5% alcohol mixed with 89.5% weird-ass bitterness, a real funky combination of chocolate (year-old Hershey's kisses, not NEUHAUS), toffee (Tofifay, not that British stuff), amonia and Liquid Plummer. Every now and again I'd take a gulp, adjust my neck a few degrees, swirl it around, and think "hmm - maybe this is OK". Then I'd take another drink, and all bets were off. At the end of the day this porter was truly as meglomaniacally deranged as its inspiration, and I had to award it a mere 5/10 just to get it off my back. E for Effort I guess, but that's about it.