My Favourite Beers in the World

“What’s your favourite beer?” It’s the question I get asked more than any other, and I’ve never felt able to give a proper answer. Until now. So, to celebrate International Beer Day, for the first time ever, here are my five favourite beers of all time.

5. The first beer after Dry January.

You haven’t tasted beer for a month. Desire has been building for weeks. But more importantly than that, your palate is reset. 

You know how chewing gum loses its taste, then, if you take it out for a bit and put it back in your mouth later, there’s a brief flare of minty flavour? Or how you get used to the smell in a room and it fades from your consciousness, then if you leave and come back in, it’s there again? 

This is the same. That beer you used to love, but you’ve started to suspect they’ve dumbed it down because it’s not as hoppy as it used to be? That was you. Not the beer. Taste it again after not drinking for a month, and it’s just like the first time all over again. 

4. The best beer in a day’s judging the World Beer Awards

People laugh when I say judging beer is hard work. Until they try it themselves. 

As Chair of Judges of the World Beer Awards this year, not only did I judge 70 beers a day for three days running like all our other brilliant judges; I also had to go back again, and again, to finish off the late entrants and the stragglers. We must have done 450 beers in total. Maybe one in ten were awful – not a bad strike rate at all. Most were OK. Maybe one in five was very good. Out of 450, there were about five or six to which I gave top marks. 

Your senses are heightened. You’re focusing with all your concentration on analysing what’s going on with this beer. And in that state, when these five or six beers hit you, they flood your whole being with flavour. You get a rush of sheer euphoria and everything just fits. Relief. Delight. Giddiness. Gratitude at being able to taste and appreciate perfection.

3. The first beer after flying to Spain for a week’s holiday.

You had to get up at 3am. You didn’t really sleep because you never do when you have an insanely early alarm. You drag yourself to the airport and endure the queuing, the rudeness, the clueless people in front of you holding everything up. Then two or three hours aloft in a cramped metal tube full of viruses and germs and frustration, your mouth dry, your head aching. After passport control, baggage collection and car hire, you’ve been up for eight hours, and you’ve endured all this for the promise of what comes next. 

Half an hour later, you’re in a market that smells of ripe oranges and oregano and cheese and sweet ham, and there’s a tapas stall with a handful of stools at the counter of which two are free. There’s a single beer font on the counter for a brand you’ve never heard of, and as the aroma of your recently ordered cuttlefish frying in garlic, butter and lemon juice hits your nose, so the crisp bite of the ice-cold lager hits the back of your parched throat. And, finally, you are on holiday, and it never tasted so good.

2. The first beer with a best mate you haven’t seen for six months. 

You’ve known each the since you were nine. But you’ve lived in different cities for most of your adult lives. You always say you’re going to make more of an effort to keep in touch, but work gets in the way, and shit, how is it August already? 

But they’re coming to stay for a few days and you’ve got the spare room ready and a nice meal planned, but the pub seems like a more appropriate space to meet, a level playing field where you can settle in for a couple of hours without the guest/host dynamic getting in the way. You get there first. Check the selection. You know the cask is good here. You get them in, just as your mate arrives. All you have to do is clink glasses, take a deep swig each, and grin at each other like you did when you were kids. And the time since you last saw each other dissolves into the foamy head. 

1. The beer you earn through physical labour.

I drink too much beer. I drink it almost every day. Almost every beer is accompanied by a quiet pang of guilt. Again? Starting early? That’s going down a bit quickly. Another one? But you were going to… Oh sod it.

Since moving house, we have a big garden. There’s a lawn that needs mowing every couple of weeks. The last occupants left behind a thirty-year-old mower. It’s heavy and loud and bad-tempered. Mowing the lawn is a battle between us. There’s more preparation and clearing and emptying and cleaning and manoeuvring than there is actual lawn-mowing. And of course, it needs to be done on the hottest day of the year so far. I’m slaked with sweat, my hair plastered to my forehead. Liz offers me a beer when I’m half way through. No, I say, not until I’m finished. And I carry on, until the cuttings are raked and cleared and the cables are coiled and the machine is back in its cage. 

And then, and only then, I sit at the garden table, and that first beer, half a pint in couple of gulps, entirely guilt-free because I have earned this, is my new favourite beer in the world. 

Those are my favourite beers. What are yours?