The Best Beers in the World

My dad is the king of eating toaster-oven-tin-foil-tuna-melts and cold Yuengling on the living room floor to keep the furniture clean

When I swallow beer I make a low groaning sound and exhale with a breathy, satisfied “ahhhh.” I like to get beer foam in my mustache when I take a swallow and then I like to slurp it off. I can drink a lot of beer. I’m not good at drinking beer slowly. I love all kinds of beer. I love beer burps and I’m at peace with the flatulence, too. It’s a sign of a healthy digestive system, that your body is doing something with the beer. Wine and liquor don’t cause it, which surely betrays their narrow character, high speed, low energy, vapid personality, and general lack of mass-moving oomph.

I read something on this platform that David Coggins wrote called The Beer Commandments. I agree with a lot of what he said, but was frustrated by the “Lowenbrau pilsner in Munich” comment, but I’m being pedantic and I suppose we can let him slide on the peculiarities of helles and the geography of modern pilsner in Germany. Either way, it inspired me to write something about beer, too. I don’t write much about beer anymore because beer is my job. They say don’t turn your hobby into your job because it will ruin it, but I still love beer, I just don’t like to talk about it as much. This has as much to do with our changing beer culture as it does my own personal beer-story-arc, which is an interesting topic for another day.

A “best beers list” is, of course, subjective, and obviously most of the beers on my list are there because of who I drank them with or where I drank them, and usually both, and not necessarily because of the kind of beer it was, but they were all beers, and they all had to be, which is something important to note.

I will suggest that you carefully consider the context of all your beers, because it has more to do with your experience of them than the liquid itself, and that’s actually a very important realization that goes far beyond a playful list of “best beers” and cuts right to the core of my professional work on a sensory panel, in product development, and has informed my day to day perspective on lots of things in addition to beer.

So, with this context, please consider the following list of The Best Beers in the World.

The just-finished-yardwork or other project beer and you’re sitting on the deck in the sunset or on the floor of the living room eating lunch and the Creedence or the baseball game is still playing on the radio outside. This is typically a light, refreshing beer, though I’ve enjoyed many a long neck bottle of mean green STBC IPA machine, too, a 7% abv OG crystal malt and c-hop stalwart, on my patio after some hard work. This kind of beer reminds me of my dad who is the king of toaster-oven-tin-foil-tuna-melts and cold Yuengling bottles on the living room floor for lunch to keep the furniture clean catching part of a college football game before he has to get back to work.

This is very similar to the work-crew lunch beer. The cans of Tecate are dumped unceremoniously into a five gallon bucket and a bag of ice is just laid on top of it but the beer doesn’t last long enough for a cooler to matter. I was always the designated driver not because I was sober or didn’t drink beer at lunch but because I had a driver’s license and was a citizen and had the built-in privilege of talking to the Tredyffrin Township cops like they worked for me. They weren’t interested in our immigration status - they wanted to write tickets for the expired registrations - but the dudes were scared and I think the interactions wouldn’t have gone so smoothly if I or someone like me wasn’t there and so for that I’m glad, I guess, but man, it’s also a bummer that it’s got to be like that. I sat with Conejo y David y Nazario on the ground in the shade behind the trailer eating raw jalapeños like pickles with big sandwiches and we washed them down with cold lagers and then we operated big lawn mowers and weed whackers all afternoon.

A Coors Original thrown to you from another raft or drift boat on a river in Colorado or Wyoming or Montana. A green bottle of Yuengling at your friend’s apartment in West Chester eating pizza and cheese fries and watching the Sixers or Flyers or Eagles or Phillies lose a playoff game. St. Bernardus randomly on draft at Brazil Lounge with Jess sitting in the sun in the late summer on a weekday at a sidewalk table. A porter in the shade on the banks of the Allegheny river on a hazy hot August day with cold fried chicken and mirabelle plums, swimming to cool off, swinging up a smallmouth in Don’s sweat-slick. A twenty year old half-pint bottle of Thomas Hardy Ale in the smoke-filled Brickskeller Tavern in Washington DC with Séan.

These best beers are easy.

Several German beers stand out to me as “the best”, which should not be terribly surprising. Altbier is served in 0.2 liter cylinders in the Altstadt in Düsseldorf. The breweries only have one beer, more or less, so the servers whirl around with trays holding twenty or thirty full glasses and if you have an empty glass in front of you they replace it with a full one and make a tick mark on your coaster and you pay your coaster ticks at the end of the night. Altbier is a delicious, malt-forward beer, but hoppy, too, and real Düsseldorf altbier is hard to get in the states and the experience of drinking it with two good friends a month after we graduated college felt expansive and worldly. Turns out the Altstadt in Düsseldorf was leveled during a firestorm bombing in 1943 and was completely rebuilt after the war to look old.

Phin and I had fruehschoppen beers while crowded into long tables with lots of people at 10am at Schneider Bräuhaus in Munich on a Sunday with a hefeweizen, of course, and pretzels and weiss wurst and a fried egg with a really orange yolk. The original Schneider Brewery was also destroyed in WWII and this building was rebuilt to look old, too.

I highly recommend a half liter of helles vom fass (from the wooden barrel) on a snowy weeknight in the winter at a long table with a few solitary strangers at the Augustiner Braustuben doing snuff and ignoring one another. The Augustiner Brewery, the oldest in Munich, founded in 1328, was also mostly destroyed in WWII and has also been reconstructed, but the brewhouse itself was not modernized until the 1970s.

Phin and I took the train from Munich to Herrsching and walked almost three miles through the town and up the mountain through the woods in the snow to Andechs Monastery and their chilly Bräustüberl. We got pssssched out of some stammtisch seats and we drank liters of dunkel and half liters of Andechser Doppelbock Dunkel and ate schweinshaxe with potato dumplings and closed the place down and took the bus back to the train station because we were too drunk to make it through the woods. The Andechs Monastary and Brewery “escaped bombing by the Allies in 1945 by good fortune.” I cannot recommend a visit to Andechs more highly.

There are other European beers that belong on a best beers list, and they’re not the obvious ones, at least right now. They are not the Czech pilsner or the Baltic porter. They are the Spanish or Italian beer in an eight hundred year old square on a flagstone street in the summer in the corner in the shade as the sun is just starting to set and the temperature is just starting to fall below 95F and people are just starting to come outside again. Too hot for wine, for me, and I’m sure it’s the same in Greece and Albania, places that are wine countries first but they have a beer that people drink in these hot stone squares in the summer and it’s light and crisp and cold and thirst quenching in a way that wine can never be.

The southern European beer is very similar to the stereotypical Mexican beer that surely belongs on the best beer list, too. A long neck flint glass bottle of Sol lager in Campeche in the spring where the oppressive heat and humidity doesn’t really go away in the evening, with a tall shot of some sort of agave spirit and a slice of lime and one of orange, pounding this weak beer when you have too much habanero salsa on your taco, ordering two beers at a time.

But Mexico has a lot more than Sol and Pacifico and Modelo Especial and Corona that reflect their German brewing heritage - there’s the dark lagers, too - Negra Modelo, Indio, Bohemia Oscura - which are great, but maybe don’t belong on the best list. Piedra Lisa from Cervecería de Colima, my favorite Mexican craft beer, does belong on the list, though. It is not a lager, but a session IPA, which just means it’s a light and drinkable ale that’s hoppy. Discovering this beer with my wife Jess in April 2019 in Mexico City in the cafes around Parque Mexico was awesome and I highly recommend a trip to Roma-Condesa.

A bottle of Sierra Nevada Porter with the blue paper label at the Video Saloon definitely makes my list. This bar is in downtown Bloomington Indiana on the third floor and you have to climb about 30 stairs to get in. Mike was the bouncer sitting at the top of the stairs. He’s probably still sitting there. Back then it was a dark, wooden, very smoky, broken-up-into-a-bunch-of-small-rooms dive bar. On weeknights in the summer when the undergraduates were mostly gone six of us would sit in a booth built for four. We’d chain smoke Camel Lights and one night we were talking with a random French post doc in the Math department and I told him all the swear words I knew in French and he was pretty impressed but then I said “pédé” and he got legitimately mad at me. It’s apparently the French equivalent of “faggot”, and the particularly offensive version because it equates being gay with being a pedophile, a gros faux pas on my part, but I didn’t know, so I guess my old French roommates are to blame. I apologized profusely, but he didn’t really care one way or another. And those couple summers in the mid-2000s were filled with bottles of Sierra Nevada porter, Camel Lights, and what I now realize was a rare kind of camaraderie that I really miss.

Finally, to what I’m realizing is a woefully incomplete but already too-long list of “the best beers”, I’ll add Topcutter IPA. This is an IPA made by Bale Breaker Brewing Company. Bale Breaker was founded by a hop farming family in the hops capital of the world, the Yakima Valley in Washington. The brewery is literally in the middle of a hop farm. During my visits to Yakima for hop harvest each fall I seek out Topcutter. It’s an awesome west coast style IPA and I wish I could drink it more and it’s just as tasty when I smuggle a couple cans home in my checked bag, but I’m glad it’s not distributed outside Washington and Oregon. I’m selfishly glad about that, because it is a beer of its place and context that forces me to have the same experience with it every time.

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In the gallery below, left to right - me in the hop fields in Yakima a few years ago representing WNY. Ben and I in Dusseldorf in July 2001 at Zum Schlüssel in the Altstadt drinking altbier. Nearing Andechs on the trail from Herrsching. Schweinshaxe and dunkel at Andechs. An Augustiner delivery truck with wooden casks of helles in Munich. A box of Andechs branded snuff. A bottle of Piedra Lisa in Mexico City. Some vintage barleywines consumed in 2018 - I don’t have a photo handy of a Thomas Hardy. A Topcutter at the source.