Nice patented bottle label backing, but your beer still sucks.

I ask this question constantly, but never seem to receive a plausible response.

Why is it necessary for America’s megabrewers to devise television advertisements that depict their target audience in such an unflattering light?

Put another way, the people shown consuming megabrews almost always are utter boobs. Neither is it particularly funny, nor is it flattering to imagine that those being slandered are compelled to run (drive) out and pump money into the coffers of the companies involved.

In one current Coors Light commercial, a typical 20-something dunderhead criminally ignores his beautiful girlfriend, all the while passionately cooing sweet nothings -- not to his beer, which wouldn’t be all that unusual, but to the unseen can liner that keeps the wet Rocky Mountain air fresh.

In another blurb, again by Coors, it is revealed that the label on throwaway bottles now has a special backing that keeps the warmth of the drinker’s hand from permeating the cheap glass, thus keeping the tasteless swill colder for longer.

Geez, that’s stupid.

From Miller’s sophomoric “Man Law” to the Michelob Ultra Amber touch football game, you’d confidently expect to encounter Dick Cheney studying the Koran before you ever might view a beer commercial that lets treats customers with respect or somehow lets slip pertinent information about beer.

Whenever a half-hearted attempt at beer education is made, it is fallaciously conducted by wannabe wunderkinds like August Busch IV, who if advertisements are to be believed, has successfully operated more disparate divisions of Anheuser-Busch than Elena Ceausescu did government agencies in communist Romania.

Perhaps you remember what happened to Elena and hubby.

I know, I know … it’s been this way for a long, long time, although it seems to me that as the mainstream carbonated urine manufacturers face ever smaller sales figures to divide amongst themselves, the marketing irrelevance begins to take on a hue of befuddled desperation.

Meanwhile, craft beer sales are growing strongly, and while sales smoke and marketing mirrors play a role in the world of good beer, too, their influence is immeasurably less than on the megabrewers's aesthetically bankrupt side of the fence.

In my world, it really is about the beer.