In the beer geek world there are beers that are dismissed. Beers that have been saddled with a bad reputation. Beers that you’re supposed to say you hate, because otherwise you’ll lose a whole lot of beer geek cool points. Beers that are bad for no real reason other than they’re in a lot of bottle shops and must be liked by the filthy hordes and therefore are beneath the true beer geek.

These are the blacklisted beers. And, as I don’t give a damn what people think about the beers I like, I’m going to write about them this week.

And I can’t think of a better beer to start off the week that with probably the most maligned Australian beer there is – Fosters.

When someone is nearing a milestone check-in on Untappd, there’s often talk about what beer they should check-in. Usually people will suggest an ‘‘ironic beer’’ – one that is the opposite of such a special milestone.

Usually one of those beers suggested is Fosters.

Which is funny, when you consider that for ages, Fosters was as rare as hen’s teeth in Australia. It’s only been in the last year that I’ve seen bottles and cans of the stuff in bottle shops around my place. Which can only lead me to the conclusion that at least some of the beer geeks mocking Fosters were doing so without actually trying the beer.

That goes against one of my Cardinal Rules of Beer (which probably isn’t significant enough to be spelt out in capital letters, to be honest). If you want to have an opinion on whether a beer is crap or not, then you have to have drunk it. Otherwise, your opinion is worth jack-shit. And you have to treat the beer seriously, have to think about what its doing. Yep, you treat it just like you would any other beer.

If you do that, I reckon you’ll be surprised. You’ll find Fosters to be much better than you expected. Oh sure, it’s not great but it’s definitely better than some of the other mainstream lagers in this country.

There are some slight fruity notes which I’ve not found in other mainstreamers followed by bit of sweet malt. Yes, you get the wet cardboard hit at the back end, but which Aussie lager doesn’t have that?

I’m not going to be drinking this stuff on anything approaching a regular basis but I know Fosters doesn’t deserve the immense level of scorn it cops.

And if that costs me mega beer geek credibility points, I couldn’t care less.