Drinking a can of Rivet gave me under-age drinking flashbacks.

When I was 15 years old, a group of us would catch the train into Circular Quay. Once there, someone would go to a bottle shop and buy a case of beer. Then we’d walk around drinking it. Right out there in the open too. Never got busted by a copper. And the person going to buy the beer never got refused service.

Ahh, the cavalier 1980s – where no-one cared if high school kids got drunk in public.

I can’t really recall what beer we were drinking at the time. Aside from the fact that it was probably a lager, which isn’t saying much – damn near every beer in Australia in the 1980s was a lager.

What I do know is this Rivet lager from Aldi tasted very much like it (why do I have a can of Aldi’s Rivet? I’ve got six of them actually. They read a newspaper review I wrote of some beers they stocked and asked if I wanted to try some others in their range. I said what I always say when someone offers me free stuff – ‘‘Sure. Send it over’’.).

It gave me flashbacks of wandering around Circular Quay – something I hadn’t thought about for ages (and something which was not entirely welcome given that I’m a father now and fully expect to freak the hell out if my child does something like that).

Now maybe it’s because the beer makes me reminisce a bit but I have to say, as your mainstream lagers go, I didn’t find this one too bad. Reckon if I was a big lager drinker, I’d be buying this over your VBs and so on.

Might even have another can of it at some stage – when I feel like remembering the old days again.