Summer time

Summer is a great time to drink beer. You can kick back on the lawn with a few bottles (as above) or enjoy a pint of golden ale in your local pub's beer garden. A traditional practice of mine carried on from when I first got into beer is to hoard up a number of session beers for a few months before taking a day off to sit out on the lawn at my parent's house on a sun bed drinking beer. Sometimes I would invite mates round once or twice I even used my mobile phone to ring the house and order my mother to bring me the next beer. 

The great lawn session (GLS) I called it and the picture above is from GLS 2008, the last one where a single hour of sunshine was witnessed the entire day. But things change as you get older, these days I don't have a lawn and just can't be bothered/have other stuff on. The good news is that the new place I'm moving into in a month or so will have a lawn. I plan to hoard a few bottles together to have a few lawn sessions that's for sure but nothing's stopping me cracking open some summer beers now.

The thing about summer beers is, a lot of them are quite subtle.  Anchor Summer beer is no exception. The label description classes it as an American Wheat beer, but it doesn't drink like US Hefeweizen at all. Lots of fluffy wheaty texture but no subtle yeasty orange peel-coriander notes. In fact when I first tried this beer a few years back I wasn't that impressed but this time I kind of fell for it. So did my wife Helen, so I'm glad I had the sense to buy two bottles. The thing with this beer is it has that property that many beer geeks dislike and many non beer geeks admire, it's 'delicate'. Easy drinking and great for kicking back in the summer heat, with enough flavour to keep it interesting.