The Most Interesting Man In The World

A distinguished older man with a gray beard sits surrounded by admirers, gazing into the middle distance like he's seen things you wouldn't believe. The format is fill-in-the-blank: "I don't always X, but when I do, Y." The setup is some mundane or specific activity, and the payoff is a humblebrag, a flex, or an absurd escalation. "I don't always test my code, but when I do, I do it in production."

The whole joke is the cadence and his impossibly suave delivery making a dumb statement sound like worldly wisdom. It got attached to the guy because the actual ads were a parade of ridiculous boasts ("his blood smells like cologne"), so the meme just kept the engine running. For a couple of years around 2010-2012 this was everywhere — one of the default reaction formats of early-2010s internet, right alongside Forever Alone and Success Kid.

Then it got run completely into the ground, and Dos Equis recast the character in 2016 with a younger actor nobody cared about, which killed whatever was left. It's a fossil now. You'll see the "I don't always" cadence survive in text form, but the actual image is pure 2011 nostalgia and basically nobody posts it straight anymore.