Tuesday, July 12, 2011

The 50 best beers?

Pete Brown has produced a list of the 50 Best British Beers for the Morning Advertiser. As with all such lists, it will inevitably provoke much discussion and a few raised eyebrows. “Draught Guinness! What’s that doing there?”

I counted them up and reckoned that over the years I had drunk about half the beers he lists. It’s perhaps disappointing that there’s nothing on the list from either family brewers or micros in Greater Manchester and Cheshire, not even Robinson’s Old Tom.

More surprising is that nothing is included that could broadly be described as “mild”, which fifty years ago was the staple drink in English and Welsh pubs. Bateman’s DM or Brain’s Dark could surely have been included, or even, to annoy the tall poppy haters, Banks’s.

If he’d wanted to be really mischievous he could have included Carling too ;-)