Tip #6: Drink some sugary sports drink. And eat something you dope.

This tip (well, it actually covers two things so, technically, it should be ‘‘tips’’ but anyway…) was derived from something I wrote around this time last year – almost to the day in fact.

It dealt with my plans to combat the effects of too much beer by drinking Gatorade (or Powerade or any other of those sugary electrolyte replacements) throughout the day and eating food. And I can say it worked a treat – for a guy terribly prone to hangovers that effectively wipe out a day I was as right as rain each morning of my Good Beer Week odyssey.

So I can very much personally recommend you do the same. Every time you go to a beer-event in the next two weeks, take a bottle of sports drink with you. Then sip from it regularly throughout the event. Then fill it with water if you empty it. This seems to work in two ways. Firstly, you’re replenishing your body’s water supply way earlier than you normally would (ie when you get home from the funky craft beer bar with a skinful). So it becomes much harder for you to become dehydrated.

Secondly, any time you’re drinking sports drink, or water, means you’re not drinking beer. So that helps too.
As for the ‘‘eat something you dope’’ part, well that’s a bit of self-flagellation there. For ages, I’d known about the importance of eating something before a few beers, of not drinking on an empty stomach. But when push came to shove, there have been more than a few times I ignored that, got smashed on a hungry belly and felt like shit the next day.

Last year I made sure I ate decent meals – even booking tables at pubs ahead of time (an exercise that saw me as literally the only person in the Royston dining room on the last Saturday of Good Beer Week). I haven’t booked tables just yet but I have factored in lunch and dinner during my beery jaunt. Luckily for me so many of the beer venues participating in Good Beer Week also have food.

So for the next week or so, enjoy your beer. But enjoy your food and sugary sports drinks. They can be your friends too.