Drink for Victory: BV's favourite cask beers of all time!

The VE Day celebrations last month, fairly subdued as they were, got me thinking about VE Day 1995, which was much more of 'a thing'. Perhaps understandably, because 50 years is a 'bigger' anniversary than 80 and, more poignantly, there were many more people alive back then for whom it actually meant something tangibly memorable.

Me being me, it got me thinking about Young's Victory Ale, and that, in turn, got me wondering if it would be possible to come up with a definitive list of my favourite cask beers ever. 

People do occasionally ask me 'which one was your favourite?' when they find out out many pints I've had, and it's really not a straightforward question to answer, precisely because I've had over 12,500 cask beers since I started keeping records in January 1996. 

I was drinking for a few years before that too, though the only beer from my 'bibens juvenilia' period that still stands out as a contender for this list would be the aforemented Victory Ale. That's how good it was.

Forever Youngs?

Little bit of background: I grew up in and around Young's pubs in South London. 'Ordinary' bitter was the standard go-to drink for most folks, because it was always reliable and very easy to drink. Dry, astringent, moreish; I had a lot of issues with the way the brewery did business, right up until the point they sold out and shut down, but I know decent beer when I drink it, and Ordinary wasn't bad.

The stronger Special was far more hit'n'miss. When it really good condition it could be stunning - special, indeed - but it very often wasn't. The only pub I remember where the Special was always better than the Ordinary was the long-closed Bedford in Streatham. There was a reason many who wanted a stronger beer actually drank 'Ram and Special' - a half of Special in a pint glass with a bottle of RamRod to top it up.

So many pints to drink...

But on a good day, Special definitely had its moments, with a delicious crisp fruit character - and this was long before brewers had the shortcut of cramming in bagloads of Citra! In the darker months, we got to enjoy the ruby caramel goodness of Winter Warmer, which didn't so much vary from pub to pub but from year to year.

Those three beers were pretty much the cask range we got from Young's. A short-lived Porter was very hard to find, and a 'Best Mild' failed to find favour and was dropped in no time at all.

So that brings us to 1995 and Victory Ale. £1.35 a pint in Young's pubs, which was a bargain even back then, this was a 5% pale ale that somehow managed to capture the very best of all the other Young's beers.

It sat on a butterscotchy base (in the most pleasant sense, not a diacetyl mishap!) with fruity hops in the mouth and the dry 'Ordinary' finish that just seemed to balance everything out. A perfectly crafted cask beer, and one that, sadly, never returned after VE Day 1995.

(I know I'm reliant on a 30 year old memory here, but I did drink it fairly obsessively at the time and was heartbroken when it disappeared from the bar - it was like being dumped for the first time and 'knowing' you'll never find love again!)

One of my favourite beers of all time, then. But what are the others? Strap yourself in for a lengthy journey... 

 

Best beer ever?

Since I started keeping records I've given exactly one cask ale my top score of 9/9. Yep. One out of 12,500. This is probably not entirely fair, but it gives me a quick way of answering the 'favourite' question at least!

That beer was Masala Mama, from the Town Hall brewery in Minneapolis, sampled in 2008, which is longer ago than it feels like it should be! I believe they still brew and cask this one, so be sure to check them out if you're ever in the Minnesota area. 

Objectively, it's not a particularly unusual beer. A 6.4% Hoppy American IPA - that sort of thing is ten-a-penny these days; you certainly wouldn't need to cross the Atlantic to find one. This beer doesn't even seem to get super-high ratings on Untappd. But when I drank it, it was the greatest cask ale I had ever sampled, and that experience simply hasn't been bettered since.

Maybe I just caught it on a really good day? Maybe it's changed for the worse in the past 17 years? Maybe it's just been overtaken by so many better beers and my 2025 palate wouldn't rate it as highly? 

Maybe that same logic could be applied to Young's Victory Ale and any other beers I loved years ago? But these are unanswerable questions, and I'm sure as fuckflaps not going to try and answer them now!

Strangely, when I chose my favourite beer at every unique ABV a few years ago, I didn't actually pick this as the 6.4% option, which puts my brain at risk of explosion.  

That's not the only difficulty we're facing here. I surely need more than two beers on this list, but what else should make the cut? 201 beers have scored 8/9 and sorting through them is going to be challenging. Maybe we should break it down and look back through the decades? 

 

Hip Hops, Hooray!

Occasionally you get beers that are game-changers - transcendent brews that make you see the world of beer differently.

Nowadays it's likely to be something batshit-insane that just happens to work out as an experiment, but in the 1990s the mind-blower was hoppy pale golden ales. Yes, the type of beer that has become pretty standard now. Cask beer that tthat 'looked like lager' and was served a bit cooler and had noticeably more hops than the regular bitter we were all used to. Absolutely fucking blew our limited minds, so it did.

The one I'm going to pick out that really made me go 'Wow!!!11FUCK1111' was Brakspear's Hooray Henley. The Oxfordshire brewery is long-gone and any beer with the same name that Carlsberg-Marston-Britvic-Whatever put out is not going to be anything like a faithful recreation of the original 4.6% version that was so stupidly quaffable it was, for me, one of the beers of the 90s.

It wasn't the first one; Hopback brewery were putting out several pale hoppy beers that changed the way we thought about drinking, and I have heard that Brakspear's employees saw - and drank - what their relatively near neighbours were doing and decided to try something similar. And, as it turned out it was even better. 

It predated the cultivation of the Citra hop by some years, and was almost certainly ahead of Simcoe too, but I'd bet quite heavily on the secret parent hops of these varieties being involved in some way. It couldn't have just been Brewer's Gold and Cascade, could it?!?

Another trend that began in that decade - and that has never really gone away since - was the use of adjuncts. Until then, a beer described as 'chocolatey' or 'toffeeish' wouldn't contain actual chocolate or toffee - it would just be a featurette of the malt character. 

This all changed in the mid-1990s. Bateman's Jawbreaker absolutely blew my fucking mind when I tried it in 1996. An experimental brown ale-type beer, with a whole load of actual toffees added to it, creating aromas of pure sweetshop heaven.

My palate has changed a lot since then - I was 19 at the time - and I probably wouldn't want to drink such a sweet beer nowadays but at the time it was quite amazing.

Right around the turn of the Millennium, another game-changer for me was Harviestoun Natural Blonde. Intended as a sort of lager-wheat-pale hybrid, at least based on the malts used, it had a lot of appeal to me as a young drinker that was starting to notice how conservative some of the old brewers were, and embracing the variety of experimentation.  

Naughties by Nature 

Between 2000 and 2010 the 'craft' scene as we know it really began to emerge in this country. Many new faces appeared with a determination to change the world, and established small breweries like Titanic, Rooster's and Oakham upped their game to keep up with the likes of Thornbridge and, yes, Brewdog.

I'm going to pick out a few beers from these brewers in this decade, because I just can't deprive them of a place in my all time Top Whatever:

Firstly, the elephant in the room. Brewdog Trashy Blonde. The original 4.9% version on cask. I was one of the very earliest objectors to the direction that Brewdog chose to take, but I'm not going to rewrite history and pretend that they weren't putting out great beers in the late Naughties when they first set up in Fraserburgh because they were. And Trashy Blonde was fucking great. It did everything I wanted a pale ale to do and so much more. So drinkable; such a great bill of hops; Such perfect balance.  

And such a shame they haven't brewed it - or anything as good - for many years now. 

One of my favourite breweries, Oakham have brewed many beers I've loved over the years, most of them blonde and hoppy. But none were better than Akhenaten. Not entirely dissimilar to the aforementioned trashy one and, strangely, also 4.9%. 

Titanic Velvet Curtain is an absolutely great dessert stout, with chocolate and vanilla delivering knockout pudding vibes. But whereas so many similar beers are high-gravity and therefore hard work, this was a relatively sessionable 5%. I loved that stuff - why couldn't that have become the everlasting poster-child instead of the overrated and synthetic-tasting Plum Porter?

And Rooster's Bangtail is my favourite of the many delicious beers that have came out of Harrogate over the years. A great many years, in fact, as I first tried a Rooster's beer in 1994 when I was 17, and they're still going strong now. Bangtail - if I'm recalling it accurately - was their take on a proper Yorkshire bitter, but with a refreshingly contemporary approach to hops, rendering it absolutely delicious.

I cannot ignore another American hop-monster. Left Coast Torrey Pines IPA, which I enjoyed on holiday in San Diego, perhaps a couple of years before British breweries started regularly taking on the style. And when I say 'enjoyed' I really, really fucking enjoyed it. Got quite pissed on the stuff. 6.8% but too drinkable.

And finally for the 00s, perhaps surprisingly, a beer brewed exclusively for JD Wetherspoon! One of their earliest 'International Collaboration' projects, the brewers from Stone brewery (San Diego again) travelled to Shepherd Neame to brew a 7% Double IPA. And, to many folks' surprise, it was absolutely fucking brilliant. No scrimping on the hops, no compromises for the British market like they'd probably do nowadays, and very definitely the best beer ever sold in a Spoons, by some distance! By about 5000 miles or however far it is to Kent to California...

 

We live in recent times 

I wrote about my favourite beers of the 2010s when that decade came to an end, and from those ten years I think a couple of beers deserve to make the all time list:

Firstly Cantillon Kriek. On cask. I'm an absolute fucking slutmark for sour fruit beers, but in recent years the market has been flooded with slightly disappointing imitations that aren't that sour, don't use real fruit or haven't been aged very long. 

None of those criticisms can be applied to Cantillon though. It is, for me, the definitive Kriek. Stunningly gorgeous cherry goodness. Just a shame it's so hard to find on cask outside of Brussels.

The other beer from that decade I'm going to go for is Thornbridge Honeydew Melon pale. I only got to have one single pint of the stuff, but what a pint it was. The memory of its fruity, quenching drinkability stayed with me for a long, long time. And Thornbridge might possibly be my favourite all-round brewer of all time.

Moving into the 2020s, the only beers that really, really, really stand out as all-time greats are both weird ones. Tiny Rebel ThaIPA was a lemongrass pale at 4.5% that tastes of, well, sex! There's no other way of putting it, and I have a fairly substantial vocabulary at my disposal. Special stuff indeed!

I'll also pick Drop Project Lip Smack, a Raspberry and Blackberry sour that's pretty fucking good but somehow even better on cask. They're giving Cantillon a run for their money in the fruited sour stakes - and you only have to go to Mitcham, not Brussels! Though I suspect many might prefer to make the Brussels trip...

Well, that is, I think, my 15 favourite beers of all time, which is probably enough to be getting on with. Ask me on another day and some of the favourites might change.

There are so many potential 'honourable mentions' (literally any of the other 180-odd beers I scored 8/9) so I'll not bother with them. But it's been an interesting exercise trying to narrow them down to the very best of all.

And I'm thirsty, so I shall bid you good day!