1) When it comes to tasting beer it’s really easy to let your prejudices take control. Say you’re a real craft beer geek and you somehow find yourself drinking a mainstream beer. Who knows, maybe you’re at a friend’s place and they’ve offered you the beer so you take to be polite. Even before you try it, you may well go into “beer snob” territory and start mentally belittling the beer.

2) “Oh, great. It’s a macroswill beer. These are all terrible. Bet there’s not even any hop profile to speak of”. You will perhaps feel ever so slightly smug, as anyone who feels superior to something or someone does. But then something unexpected happens.

3) You actually think the beer’s okay. Sure, there is not much of a hop profile but you think, “hey, this isn’t as bad as I thought. I won’t quietly leave the half-full bottle on a table somewhere like I planned. I might actually finish it”. But do you tell anyone?

4) Probably not, because you reason that might ruin your beer geek cred. If you want to keep craft beer geek “cool points” then you can’t be seen hanging around the uncool beers. And do you continue spinning the “macroswill” story. This sort of approach shits me to tears. I think you have to be open and honest about every single beer you try. If you like one of those uncool beers, you can’t hide that away like a dirty secret, only drinking them when no one is around to take cool points off you. If you like it, you have to admit that – no matter where it comes from.

5) I call myself a “beer geek” not a “craft beer geek”, which means I have an interest in all beer, not just the ones with a hop profile. And so I was genuinely interested in trying the Summer Bright Lager with mango flavour. This surprised me because I hate the original Summer Bright Lager – there’s so little going on it should be Summer Bland Lager. But that bland lageriness actually works as a nice backdrop for the mango. Because there’s nothing happening, it allows the mango to take centre-stage. That mango is slightly sweet without being cloying and makes a dull beer more interesting. I actually reckon I’ll be trying some more of this over summer.

Free or paid for?: While the PR company apparently sent me some samples, they never arrived. So I bought this myself.