@ooa09 - My Top Ten Beers

A Mr Olusola Adebusuyi tweeted me the other day asking me about what my favourite beers were, first the top three, then after I protested that was impossible, the top ten. I didn't respond at the time, because I couldn't properly formulate an answer, and a few days later, I still can't get close to starting a list.

How hard can it be to have a list of your favourite beers to hand? Why am I struggling with this apparently simple task? Surely you just start with whatever beer is your current obsession (for me, Magic Rock High Wire, on cask for preference) and work backwards from there? There is obviously going to be a of a primacy effect - whatever you've drunk most recently will be fresh in your mind, so maybe Moor Amoor (formerly Peat Porter) would make the list, not only for being a great beer, but also for defying my expectations of it - I'd foolishly been looking at the bottle for a month, worrying that a sub-5%abv porter wouldn't deliver the sort of flavour hit I was looking for, but it did, admirably. But was it better than Anchor Porter, or did I like it more? I simply can't tell you. It's just different. Why do I have to choose?

Maybe if I started scoring beers, I'd be able to formulate a list eventually. But to do this would be to sacrifice the multi-dimensional map that each beer creates in my head with its aroma, flavour and aftertaste. There's no real way of recording those sensations, other than with recourse to detailed and florid prose, or an elaborate contemporary dance. I would find that the dance routines elicited by Hook Norton's Old Hooky and Sierra Nevada's Ruthless Rye IPA are pretty similar, but one would be a more energetic version of the other. Both of these beers are about balance, and each mouthful conjures a little vignette about the balance between malt and hops with each mouthful, albeit in different accents. But do I prefer one over the other? No. And do I like them more or less than the singular hop character of Mikkeller's Single Hop Simcoe IPA? I'm not entirely sure, now I think about it.

Poking around in the cellar, looking for a nightcap, I see the iconic red and white label of a bottle of Duvel. My heart leaps momentarily, only to sink when I find that it's an empty bottle that has found its way back onto the shelf. The distance between that peak of excitement and the trough of disappointment is an unusual index of how much I like that beer, both the beer itself, and that bottle in particular.

And of course, scoring beers creates an illusion of objectivity. If, for example, I was asked to generate a numerical score for Cantillon St Lamvinus, the numbers that come out at the end would be pretty large, but it  wouldn't convey the fact that I don't like any of Cantillon's beers very much. I can't score the beer down simply because I don't like it, but neither can I feel comfortable about giving a high mark to a beer that I just don't like - my ego prevents that, I guess. I like plenty of other wild/spontaneously fermented beers - Oude Beersel, Girardin, Russian River, obvs - but like these beers, I want to be able to feel the complexity in the beer and express that in a way that impossible with number.

Beer is a personal thing. It's subjective, and most importantly, it's a continuum, from volume-produced beers at one end, to impossibly rare one-off batches at the other. Everywhere on this continuum has good and bad examples of what is on offer, and your opinion of what is good and bad is different to mine. Part of the fun of what we do - we beer drinkers, we beer writers, we beer bloggers, we brewers, we homebrewers - is to dip into the different points on that continuum. For me, it's about that journey - I'm not trying to find the ten best beers, I'm just loving the endless variety that the journey offers me.

In Praise of Ordinary Brown Beer

I've been drinking quite a bit of ordinary brown beer over the last couple of months. It started with a trawl of my local supermarket (Morrisons), with the vague idea of trying to buy beer like a "normal" person does. Morrisons has been doing a "4 for £5.50" promotion on a good chunk of their range for a few months, and I was just curious to see what you could get for your money.

Overall, the standard of ordinary brown beer on the supermarket shelf is pretty good. Nothing I tasted was technically faulty - nothing was skunked, oxidised or infected, it was all good clean fun. There was also plenty of differentiation between these lookalike beers - they might look similar, but they all taste different, and in fact, some of them taste really good. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that there are some classics you can up on the supermarket shelf for very little money.

Bateman's, Hook Norton and Greene King all had distinctive flavour profiles that really set my memory synapses whirring, not in a Proustian sense (there you go, Adrian), but in a way that made me think "God, this ordinary brown beer is not only distinctive and classically English, but actually really tasty".

I quite like ordinary brown beer, made with ordinary malt and hops. I don't think there's any disconnect between liking a pint of ordinary brown beer and liking a glass of concentrated West Coast hop ejaculate (for the avoidance of doubt, I'm using that word as a noun, and also using it as a form of praise). I like mashed potato, and I like really spicy Thai food - they are totally different tastes and textures, but I can still tell the difference between good and bad examples of both. Actually, I'm a sucker for all Thai food, good or bad, but I can definitely make some of the best mashed potato you've ever eaten.

There's a place for everything in the omnivorous drinker's fridge, and actually, liking one can sometimes help you understand why you like the other. Try it - you might like it too.


(TRANSPARENCY STATEMENT: I visited Greene King last year, and they showed me around the brewery, and arranged a tasting of their entire output, including Old 5X and BPA (the constituents of Strong Suffolk Vintage), plus some soon-to-be-released new beers. They sent me away with a couple of dozen freebies, some of which fuelled this post)