So, The Session is coming to an end, and for the final installment, we've been asked to think about "a beer for the end of a life, an end of a meal, an end of a day, an end of a relationship."
Now, there are some obvious truisms about the last beer of the night. It's got to be big. It's probably dark. It's likely to be expensive, too. However much we like to praise beers for their subtlety, elegance and drinkability, the last beer is the time to reach for imperial stouts and barleywines.
This makes sense purely in terms of tasting, of course: it's relatively unappealing to go from a very big beer to a lighter and subtler one. The temptation is always to make each beer one-louder than the last, so naturally you're going to want the biggest, baddest beer available to be the one you finish with. But there's also a another component to it. Time stands still while you're drinking a big, rich beer. Last orders has come and gone, you know that the time is coming where you're going to be turfed out into the dark and the rain, but until then you're living every moment in a boozy kaleidescope of rich flavours and high spirits.
What goes for the last drink of the night goes a thousandfold for your last drink on the planet. You've heard the bell, and you know that you haven't got much longer in this bright, cheery place, but you've got one more glassful to get what joy you can. But for this most final of final beers, there's another element in play, too. It feels somehow wrong to ask for your last beer to be something rare, exotic, seldom tasted - to me it feels like it should be something comfortingly familiar, a connection back to many happy nights before.
Big and rich, yet comfortingly familiar? For me, the beer that covers that, with a slight hint of something beyond the temporal is St Bernardus 12. See you on the other side!
