Light Beer

It's recently dawned on me that no one drinks light beer here in England. You'd think that in a land well-populated with the beer-bellied would latch on to the concept of getting a little more beer for your calories, but alas, this does not seem to be the case. In the carbonated beverage realm, both diet coke and coke zero seem to have been embraced by the market, but beer is another tale. There seems to be a general obsession in this country about the alcohol percentage in beers, wines and spirits (so much so that there is Becks Vier to signify it's 4% alcohol and Carling introduced C2, their 2% beer), but little attention is paid to the calorie content. I consider this a relatively large difference in concerns considering both aspects are directly related to health. In England apparently you just aren't supposed to get too intoxicated, while in America it's just key your belly in check. This all being said, I don't know anyone in the US who regularly drinks light beer as it's generally just a yellower version of water, and they do actually sell light beer here (this is based purely on the fact that there was a Coors light commercial on tv over the weekend, I haven't seen it anywhere).

Perhaps another trend is the general way different beers are, for lack of a better word, branded. In the US we have frosty carbonated ales, which is of course a general fault of this place. This being said, in the US we tend to have a wider variety of 'flavors' of beer. At a bar or restaurant you can opt for the pale ale, the IPA, the amber, guinness, lager, or lager light, so to speak. You might say, hmm, what goes well with a burger? And go from there. In these parts, there is comparatively little flavor distinction. While some pubs will have ales, this is not a certainty and they are generally non-existent in restaurants. So, being generally limited to lagers, the choice of what to drink is often times based on the 'premium' factor of the beer (Fosters says 'I'm cheap', Kronenbourg: 'I'm a little less cheap'), with taste generally improving as you move up the scale. Based on this taste scale, the general tasteless nature of light beer would likely put it at the bottom of this scale and then I would imagine there would be no money involved.

Finally, to stick up for this place a little bit, there are some bars out there with incredible beer taste arrays. Mark and I have been going to a bar called the Temperance down by Putney Bridge recently. The main draw of this place is its vast array of different beers available on tap. They have your traditional lagers (although these are sort of hidden away), then some wheat beers, fruit beer, an impressive assortment of premium lagers, regular and pear ciders, pumped casket ales, and as I even discovered last Friday, a frosty carbonated pale ale (it was called Meantime Pale Ale, no idea where it came from, but I'd get it again, it had a neat glass!). Oh, and they also have Sierra Nevada on tap for some reason... Anyways, it's definitely a bar you go to savor the flavors of the beer. Quite frankly I think Seattle or Portland would both be lucky to have a place with such a selection! (this is probably where I get barrage of comments attesting that they do...).