The bottle labels for Cerveza de los Muertos identify it as a product of Cerveceria Mexicana, which is in Tecate, about 30 miles east of Tijuana in Baja California. It’s the third largest brewery in Mexico, and it does a fair amount of contract brewing—though best known for Mexicali, it also makes the Ed Hardy beers, the Trader Jose Mexican lagers, and the legendarily nasty Cave Creek Chili Beer, among others. Does it have the market muscle to pull off a U.S. launch on its own? Maybe yes, maybe no. If you’ve followed my logic this far, though, it won’t surprise you to hear that Cerveceria Mexicana has connections to Coors.
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The only current information I could track down, unfortunately, comes from a blog post by intellectual-property lawyer Robert Iussa. Commenting on a May 2013 Los Angeles Times piece on Disney’s failed bid to trademark “Dia de los Muertos,” he pointed out that no similar outrage had erupted over a trademark application for a “Dia de los Muertos” beer filed on May 9, 2013. According to his research at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office website, that application “appears to originate with” Molson Coors. (MillerCoors is a joint venture between Molson Coors and SABMiller, operating in the United States. You may remember them as producers of the only other beer I’ve reviewed that had a twist-off cap: Redd’s Apple Ale.) I can’t find any record of that application myself, but I don’t know if that proves anything one way or the other.
Death Rides a Pale Horse Blonde Ale: My picture makes this look relatively flat, but that’s just because the head dissipated while I struggled to get a shot in focus. “Medium body, mild caramel sweetness and a soft pleasant bitterness,” says the PR. In keeping with that thinner description, there’s not a lot going on here. I definitely smell caramel, plus something like cereal (maybe corn flakes?) and a little jasmine. The taste combines honey, butterscotch, and nonspecific grains, with a very faint peppery bitterness in the finish. The beer is insubstantial but entirely inoffensive. (ABV 5.6 percent)
I doubt it’s necessary at this point to make the disclaimer that I’m a horrible beer nerd, or to say that I’m holding Cerveza de los Muertos to the same high standards I apply to everything I review for this column. Beers that are obviously mass-produced don’t get extra points for not being terrible, because I don’t approach them assuming they’ll be terrible just because they’re mass-produced.
