Valentine’s Day is just around the corner and, whether you’ve been loved up for decades or you’ve got a new paramour in mind, you might be thinking about a way to spoil them. If they’re a beer drinker, there’s no better way to surprise them than with a bottle of delicious beery nectar – but what if you don’t (or can’t) drink beer yourself and don’t know where to start with selecting something your Valentine will love?
The path of least resistance would appear, at first glance, to be to get them a beer that you know they’ve enjoyed before. This is a perfectly valid course of action if you’re certain you know which one to get. However, many beer lovers these days are adventurous and want to try new things, so you might want to think a bit outside the box.
We often get people coming to us at fairs and markets wanting to buy something for their significant other, but not knowing which beer in our range they would enjoy the most. The first thing we always ask is, “What colour is the beer they normally drink?” Now, to be fair, the answer they first give is usually, “Er, brown…” (which is a completely reasonable thing to say!), but after a little bit of further digging, we can usually get to a colour that falls into one of the following:
Really dark, almost black: in this case, they are probably fond of stouts and/or porters. Slightly less likely is mild, and there’s an outside chance that they’re really sold on black IPAs. Our 1820 Porter, Blackbeerble Stout, Imperial Mild and Barrel-Aged Imperial Stout fall into this category.
Dark/mid brown: this one’s trickier – lots of beers are brown! We’ll hazard a guess, though, that their tipple of choice will be a bitter. Bitters are having a resurgence right now, although we don’t think they ever really went away. Our 1853 ESB and Edmonton Best Bitter are in this basket.
Reddish brown/red: there are a few possibilities here. Some reddish beers are red ales, others get their red colour from added fruits (such as cherries), and yet more will be traditional IPAs or slightly red bitters. Beerblefish 1892 IPA has a lovely red tint to it.
Amber/Golden: many beers this colour are actually called amber ales or golden ales, which is really helpful!
Yellow: This is probably the hardest, because there are so many different kinds of pale beer. Broadly speaking, these are in two camps – it’ll either be lager (which would also encompass, for our purposes, pilsner/pils and kölsch) or it will be a pale ale (which we’ll say covers modern IPAs and American Pale Ales). Wheat beers are also typically straw-coloured (and cloudy). Our Pan-Galactic Pale Ale, our Hoppy Pale series and our Cashmere Brut IPA are pale ales, and our Lager is, well, a lager…
Once we’ve nailed down the colour, the next thing we ask about is whether the lucky recipient of the gift likes their beers to be hoppy – you might not know right now, but you could take a look at a bottle they’ve got in the fridge or cupboard. If it says it’s hoppy or hop-forward, then it’s hoppy. If it doesn’t say, but has a long list of types of hops on the label, it’s most likely hoppy. If it says something like “malt-forward” on the label or there’s a longer list of different types of barley or other grains than there is of hops, then it’s less likely to be hoppy. Sometimes beers claim to be balanced – that means that they are neither too hoppy nor too malty.
In the Beerblefish range, all our pale ales are hoppy. Our 1853 ESB, Edmonton Best Bitter and 1892 IPA are, we think, balanced. And all our dark beers and our lager are malt-forward, and so less hoppy tasting.
There are plenty more factors you can take into account when choosing a beer or beer style – whether the hops are fruity or floral, whether it’s made just with barley or with other grains added, whether the finish is dry, whether it is sour and what the mouthfeel is like, among others – but focusing on the easiest and most differentiating elements should help you to get something your loved one will like.
At the end of the day, if you still can’t decide which beer your Valentine would like the best, there’s no shame in judging a book by its cover – choose the one you think looks the nicest on the shelf and we’re sure they will be thrilled with your thoughtfulness.
