This is the fourth installment of On Tap the Yale Herald’s beer column, written by Reviews Editors Theo Kubovy-Weiss and Thea Robertson. On Tap covers everything from Natty Lights to home-brewed stouts, aiming to expand Yale students’ tastes when it comes to the country’s most popular alcoholic beverage.
Bananas are the fruit of comedy. Slip and fall on one, and your physical pain becomes slapstick gold. Hold one to your ear, and you’ve got the most ridiculous telephone since Nokia stopped manufacturing the 7280. Put one in your mouth, and the fruit’s phallic appearance will prompt at least a few teenage boys to let out a snort.
The beer industry is no stranger to the banana flavor, and it has emulated the fruit’s starchy tang for decades. It provides a pleasant sweetness to round out the wheat’s bite, and is a relatively common flavor to encounter in lighter beers.
But no amount of prevalence in beer will make the banana flavor not funny. It can’t escape its reputation as the grocery store’s most phallic (and yet also childlike) item, even with bold, authoritative marketing on the beer’s outer sleeve. So while the beer tastes good, its unavoidable banana-ey-ness makes it hard to see it as anything other than a bit of a gimmick, and for that, a bit too unserious to be my dinnertime go-to.
Overall: 6/10
