Hop-Heavy: 450 North Brewing & The Breeders
The best of the Mid-West. 450 North Brewing Company and The Breeders. Image by Nick M.W.
An ice cold fruited kettle sour beer and a cannonball can soothe the searing heat of a midsummer day.
Brewery: 450 North Brewing Company (Columbus, IN)
Artist: The Breeders
Beer: “Slushy XL – Cotton Candy Shake” (7% ABV)
Song: “Cannonball”
It’s that time of year in the northern hemisphere when the heat stretches across this part of the world, like a stroke-inducing solar blanket. We need relief. Sure, an air conditioner will cool you off from the outside, if you’re lucky enough to have one in your domicile, but what about your internals? You can douse that fire with a fruited sour beer that is sure to chill you out and sink your body heat like a galleon that’s been smashed with a flurry of cannonballs.
450 North Brewing Company out of Columbus, Indiana, gifted us a weapon to fight off the heat and temper our thirst in the form of “Slushy XL—Cotton Candy Shake”. Fellow mid-westerners and early-90s alt-rock darlings, The Breeders, have also gifted us a weapon to fight off summertime doldrums in the form of their 31-year-old banger “Cannonball”. If you wield these two weapons together during the summer months, be it at a pool party or in a seaside bungalow, you will come out victorious over heat and listlessness.
“Cannonball” is contagious and has a high infection rate. All you need to do is catch the first bass lines, out of tune yet it’s an irresistible ear worm that will eat straight to your brain. Its loud/soft dynamic lulls you into a hypnotic shoelace gazing rhythm, with a slithering guitar riff, right before the chorus smashes that tranquility with two staples of 90s alt-rock: guitar feedback and vocal distortion. It sounds like Kim Deal, The Breeders frontwoman, brought something with her to this track from her time with The Pixies—the unsung heroes of alt-rock. Her lyrics for “Cannonball” leave plenty of room up for interpretation, but I like to think that she is the cannonball on her way to being reckless. In general, it seems like she is singing this way about someone. Perhaps it was someone she was once recklessly in love with.
“Slushy XL” can inspire a similar recklessness. Beer can do that to people, but there’s something about drinking a sour beer that tastes like Razzleberry pie and listening to a woman scream, “Want you. Cuckoo. Cannonball,” that makes me yearn for reckless love. The teenage kind where you through caution to the wind and condoms out the window. Laugh now. Cry later. The consequences of 7% ABV.
“Cannonball” is a classic alt-rock jam that defined a sound, a lot like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” did for the same genre. It’s about as played out as Nirvana’s smash hit, but it is also as timeless. “Slushy XL” is a solid beer that could stand as a singular representative of sour beers if it stuck the landing. On the nose, there’s no doubt of its sour and tart origins, but the finish lacks the same strong sense of flavor. I expected just a bit more of a berry blast. However, when these two gems from the Mid-West are paired with each other, The Breeders cover for what “Slushy XL” lacks, bringing a cool new groove to the summer BBQ and a certified cannonball into the pool.
