I was a regular drinker of Special Brew at one time. It was my gig-fuel of choice – knowing that there’d never be anything decent at the bar, and that I wouldn’t want to make more than two trips if I could help it, I made a rule of starting the evening (before or if possible during the support act) with a Special Brew and going back (after they’d finished) for a Red Stripe. Not being with it any more (I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was) I haven’t encountered this problem for quite some time.

And I thought – like Ghostie and indeed the Colombian blogger – that, drinking without prejudice, it was fine.

Red Barrel, though, was piss. The thing about Bleeding Watneys Red Barrel – and 70s keg bitter generally – was that it tasted exactly as if somebody had taken a kind of olfactory snapshot of the taste of a mouthful of cask bitter at one second in time, then reverse-engineered that flavour and applied it, Sodastream-style, to heavily-carbonated cold water. It tasted exactly the same all the way through, and it tasted as if the fizz had been added afterwards (which of course it had). It was beer-ade, in short.