Tribute beer no masterpiece or disaster
The Disaster Artist is a well-done tribute to a remarkably bad movie and its director. The brew that bears its name is an unremarkable tribute to one of North America’s pioneering craft beers.
The pale golden, hazy beer from Toronto’s Northern Maverick has a grassy aroma, a thin body and a bitter, dry finish. Unlike Anchor Steam, the beer that inspired it, there’s not much malty sweetness at all; nor are there any of the gentle fruity aromas found in the original.
Anchor Steam is one of the beers that helped launch the North American craft beer scene and is the flagship brew of San Francisco’s Anchor Brewery, a once-floundering business rescued by washing machine heir Fritz Maytag in 1965.
Maytag had the wacky idea that maybe, just maybe, locals wanted to drink good beer, and that he could turn Steam Beer, a lager-ale hybrid common in the California frontier days, into something popular. He did. So much so that there have been many imitators, some more successful than others. (He was also fiercely protective of the Steam Beer name, trademarking it so imitators have subsequently called their brews California Common).
While Northern Maverick’s version isn’t a disaster like director Tommy Wiseau and his spectacularly bad flick The Room, nor is it a dramatic success like The Disaster Artist, the movie about the movie. In the end, it’s unmemorably so-so.