Eight alternatives to awesome

Simon ‘Reluctant Scooper’ Johnson’s pondering on the use of the word ‘awesome’ made us think (in mischievous mode) about how other hyperbolic terms might be applied to beer. So, with reference to an old post on ‘boring’, here are some words which, if you’re feeling silly, you might use to describe a particularly impressive pint.

Intimidating: a beer with a reputation for excellence and/or intensity of flavour that takes a few attempts to approach.

Sublime: a beer both grotesque and beautiful, inspiring something close to horror but tipping over into breathless, shivering delight.

Abyssal: a beer so deep that it feels as if you might fall into it forever without reaching the bottom.

Transcendent: a beer that defies comparison to other beers; categorisation by style; and simplistic ‘ranking’ and ‘rating’. Existing on a plane of its own.

Immortal: a beer, such as Bass Pale Ale, that does not bow to time, takeovers and such simple concepts as ‘ownership’. (It may well have become sentient and self-replicating for all we know.)

Ravishing: a beer that is a delight for all the senses — which mesmerises and enraptures the drinker. (But they might, perhaps, wake up in a fairy grotto the next day and realise they’ve been drinking mud from an old boot.)

Incredible: a beer that it is scarcely possible to believe exists and which, at any rate, cannot have been fashioned by the labours of men. (Cyclopean beer?)

Petrifying: a beer that leaves the drinker stunned, unable to move or speak.

P.S. We don’t really mind people using ‘awesome’: it’s no worse than using ‘great’ or ‘amazing’, or describing a slice of cake as ‘enormous’, but it wouldn’t hurt some people to expand their vocabularies.