Kid Rock knows beer

Oh, Kid Rock. When he’s not mashing up Lynyrd Skynyrd with Warren Zevon to produce a massive hit ("All Summer Long"), pimping babes decked out in decidedly non-P.C. Confederate flag bikinis for said song's video or enticing young men to think about joining the National Guard, the self-proclaimed “Son of Detroit” is trying his hand at creating the next great American beer.

“It’s going to be called ‘Bad Ass Beer,’ '' Rock boasted to Rolling Stone magazine recently from his suburban Detroit studio, where he’s hard at work recording the follow-up to his multi-platinum 2007 release, “Rock N Roll Jesus.”

“It just tastes like good American light beer…an everyday beer,” he raves, extolling the fact that his brew will be an all-American endeavor, right down to the hops. “It’s creating jobs in Michigan at the brewing company. We know people are hurting here so we’re trying to take that whole approach.”

While we wait to see if Bad Ass Beer will come to usurp the likes of Natural Light and Coors as the beer of the American working man, what’s even more intriguing to us is the series of competitor-mocking advertisements Rock is working on to promote his new golden dew.

“There’s one where it looks like the Budweiser horses, and they’re all up in the air, just freaked out, like they went haywire, and whatever they ride on is smashed up, and it just has my beer sitting in the front. It says, ‘Bad Ass. And ‘…and the horses they rode in on,’ ” Rock tells the rock mag. “There’s another one where we [mess] with Corona. We have an old rusty truck with no tires on it and it’s sitting on the Bad Ass beer, and it says, 'The only way you’ll ever see a lemon on it.' "

But for Rock, it all boils down to flavor: “It’s good, and there’s no aftertaste,” which sounds like as good a tagline as any -- definitely better than meaningless marketing boasts such as "triple-hops brewed" or "beachwood aged."

Expect Bad Ass to hit shelves in time for Labor Day festivities. Beer run, anyone?

(Originally published in the L.A. Times)