What is your favourite beer?

Burial. wrote: »

Cider is not beer.

No it's not but you can drink it with a lager top. A bit more lager and it can be called Snakebite. (for a reason!).

Another tip for Guinness drinkers.
Have a half of cider before your pint of Guinness. A whole new experience.
Try it, you'll thank me.

Cider is not beer. I did not vote for it for that reason.

Lager is my poison of choice when I'm on the beer, I especially like German beers, such as the brews sold in Munich. Tastes light, but hits you like a freight train.

I used to drink all the different types of craft beer that I could get my hands on. I'd try to never order the same beer twice in a row, this went on for a good long while.

Then, eventually, I had to acknowledge that 95% of all craft beers have nothing wild or unusual going for them in the taste department: some are hoppy, some aren't; some are treacly and heavy, some aren't - but after a while it all gets very similar. There's a chronic disparity between the high falutin' nonsense that's claimed on behalf of the majority of the craft beers out there, and what that all really amounts to in the real world in terms of taste. There's templates there that can't be deviated from all that much.

That's not to say that I think craft beers suck, but there's a lot of smoke, mirrors, and baloney wrapped up in it - most give you a version of something you've had before and will get again, under a different name. And the teeny minority of beers that do genuinely offer something different are, generally, not the ones to stick to for the long haul.

So I just went back to the regular stuff. Not Carlsberg, Heineken, or Budweiser though: those three are genuinely awful beers. Budweiser, in particular, is truly revolting: how can something that is essentially tasteless, still end up tasting so bad? How people continue to drink it is a mystery to me. Seriously.

I think Peroni is very drinkable. Nothing crazy or, let's face it, even mildly exciting in taste terms, but it doesn't taste bad and it has a bit of a crispness to it that helps a lot.

Smithwicks has at least got some taste going for it and it's available everywhere and - most importantly - I can drink a lot of it without falling down.

I met a fair few hardened beer snobs over the years that were always ready to denigrate Guinness in favour of some black forest gataeux stout or black pudding Porter or some such crap that they thought was immaculate. Guinness!, they'd shout, Chemicals, muck, yadda, yadda, yadda... To be honest, I don't care if Guinness is 99% toxic waste: a good Guinness is the real deal. And those idiots didn't have a clue what they were talking about.