The Best Pint You'll Probably Never Taste

The charred black body belies an ember glow at the glass's base; cinder-red suppressed by the very weight of beer above.

A creamy hide head, shotgun-peppered, slips into misty constellations that shift with every sip.

Escaping, an aroma of burnt cream and fresh ash, akin to roasting marshmallows too close to a bonfire; your poker-full burning just before the knees of your jeans become uncomfortably warm.

First lick, a lactic tang tempered by fruits souring in the hedge. You feel your lips retreat across your teeth before puckering enough into the second wave of recalcitrant berries.

This is a beer born just down the corridor from where I'm drinking it. To me, it's a unique moment... every time I drink it. But beer like this must be brewed all over the world.

In a tap-heavy west-coast USA bar, it's a passing seasonal soon to be nudged out by the proprietor's Next Great Thang. In an away-from-the-motorways Belgian town, it's a single barrel served on gravity, still brewed only because somebody's grandmother insists. In a broken-neon Tokyo side-street, it's a rare cask that perplexes and delights with equal measure.

In the pointy end of an English brewpub, where there are neither customers nor a fire in the grate, where passing traffic and gobshites hollering into mobile phones provide the only soundtrack, I find myself lost in a beer that within a few precious weeks will be gone, another moment lost like tears in the rain. Ephemeral, enhanced by time and place, kicking and screaming all the way down your throat.

I've just enjoyed the Best Pint You'll Probably Never Taste.

But, do you know what's really, honestly, truly, achingly great about Good Beer?

(whisper)

today, tomorrow, you stand every chance of drinking a beer just as good.

If you don't go topering out and about, you'll never know.

You owe it to yourself to go and find it.