Good afternoon! We are nine days from the inauguration of Donald Trump, who spent this morning giving his first press conference as president-elect, in which he casually acknowledged that Russian hackers had played a role in his victory, laid out his plans to continue attracting conflicts of interest by flatly refusing to divest himself from his business, shrugged off calls to release his tax returns, compared America’s own intelligence community to Nazi Germany, and—in a first for a presidential press conference—railed openly against the assembled reporters, including deeming Buzzfeed a “failing pile of garbage” and declaring that it would soon “suffer the consequences,” as well as refusing to take a question from a CNN reporter because the network is—along with all the other media outlets who publish negative stories about him—“fake news,” then threatening to kick him out if he ever tries asking questions again. All told, it was a reckless, terrifying display of mendacity and open combativeness toward the freedom of the press—along with myriad other American ideals and institutions—that portends our nation’s descent into the sort of mistrustful, ignorant chaos that welcomes authoritarian rule, and it all ended with a catchphrase from The Apprentice. So thank fuck, someone invented a better shower beer!
Yes, for too long we’ve all struggled with finishing an entire 12 ounces of beer while we’re in the shower, slowly sipping away in a near-catatonic fugue state over the bureaucratically banal creep of evil into every aspect of our lives. “The idea for a Shower Beer is a universal thing, I think,” says Frederik Tunedal, founder of the PangPang brewery in Sweden, a nation that’s also been the victim of Russian misinformation campaigns and where the alarming rise of white nationalism threatens this once-proud beacon of progressivism, and thus it really understands the need to drink a beer in the shower. “Looking through the hashtag #showerbeer it’s easy to see that people all over the world love that feeling of a hot shower and an ice cold beer,” Tunedal adds of our collective misery.
But of course, you can only linger beneath the spray for so long, nursing a regular-sized beer while morosely reflecting on the impossible logistics of actually moving your entire family somewhere, until you realize that your once-hot shower turned icy cold at least 10 minutes ago. That’s why PangPang, in conjunction with the marketing agency Snask, created the aptly named “Shower Beer,” a smaller, 6-oz. bottle of pale ale that’s “meant to gulp in three sips while standing in the shower getting ready for the night,” or right after you make the mistake of looking at Twitter. And if that doesn’t sound like enough beer, rest assured that the Shower Beer is “sweet but strong” and contains a whopping 10 percent alcohol in its tiny package, and that you can always drink more of them. After all, there are also the confirmation hearings for Trump’s appointees to think about.
“The beer is heavily hopped with Citra [hops], and has a citrusy, soapy, and somewhat herbal profile,” adds Tunedal, and holy Christ, Trump wants noted vaccines-cause-autism conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to chair a committee on “vaccine safety,” presumably because Jenny McCarthy is busy.
According to Tunedal, that “soapy” quality isn’t just a subtle flavor you’ll be too numb from prolonged, sublimated fear and copious alcohol consumption to discern, but also a hint of the Shower Beer’s other utilitarian function: “I designed the recipe so that it can also be used as a conditioner, so if you are into looking good rather than feeling good, I’ve thought of you too!” Tunedal says, cheerily encouraging you to go on and dump your Shower Beer directly on your head, letting the suds sting the corners of your red-rimmed eyes while your hair relaxes, becoming as supple and malleable as America’s standards for “normal.” At least your hair looks good, you can tell yourself. And you still have control over your hair, at least until President Trump declares its luxuriousness a personal insult.
(One note of warning: The Shower Beer is bottled in glass, which could lead to it slipping and breaking, causing you to step in the shards and feel something again.)
As Vice reports, the initial run of the Shower Beer proved so popular in its Swedish homeland that it’s currently considering becoming a permanent offering—though not yet in America, where we could use a goddamn shower beer or three right now.