Called to the Bar - Ever fallen in love with a beer you shouldn’t have?

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We fall in love with the wrong people, the destructive people, the people who want to shine in the flames of ruined towns, the people who want to lock the door and never allow anyone in ever again, the people who don’t actually know you exist, the wrong people. Do we fall in love with the wrong beer? Is that possible? Should it be possible? What is the wrong beer? If I fall in love with a pale barley wine and drink far too much of it tomorrow and the day after and the day after and eventually I find myself rummaging through bins in the big city in the search for food having spent all my money on this beer, is it the wrong beer? Or am I just the wrong person in the wrong (or even right) place? What about that beer that confers on me the sainthood-like confederacy of being joined to something that I swell with pride about or that I feel makes me walk a bit faster and a bit taller? Is this the wrong beer? Is this the sense of pride? Can the beer that you have fallen in love with and shouldn’t have be the wrong shade in the glass, a chestnut brown that gleams like Bruce Forsyth in his prime, or shimmers like a dream that you are desperately trying to return to at 5am, aware that the alarm will soon be barking in your ear like the dog you had when you were a child and sometimes still miss? There have been moments when an exemplary Best Bitter has been that beer, a hangover, an old makeover, a bothersome beer, though it doesn’t do as much for me as a Franconian lagered beer with its layers of flavour and pleasure and recognition that beer can be something more than this sin of wrong-doing. Should it be a beer that everyone drinks, a beer that screams and howls like a crowd-pleasing guitar solo, but you really know that you feel a little bit smaller on drinking it, letting yourself down, letting your friend down, letting the person who used to get excited about artisanal and smallness down, like a stricken Zeppelin falling to earth, Wagnerian in its fire and fury? A duplicitous DIPA, all flails and fury, stripping the tongue like a barbarian in training, gilding the tonsils with illustrious hails of hop curiosity and after far too much glasses of good-natured insobriety toppling the Gulliver of a drinker you have become. Have you ever fallen in love with a beer you shouldn’t have?


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