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beer in fiction / tv

Beer and Doctor Who Matching

Beer Opener
Dalek bottle opener. Source: James Bowe, via Flickr Creative Commons.

If our Twitter timeline and blog roll are anything to go by, a Venn diagram of Whovians and beer geeks would feature two very nearly overlaid circles.

Though we are not serious Doctor Who obsessives, we are certainly excited about next weekend’s fiftieth anniversary episode, and so here are a few suggestions for beers to drink while watching The Day of the Doctor.

1. The essence of 1963

The year the Doctor first appeared on TV screens was also a big year for British beer:

Doctor Who, though, was born amid the popular post-Sputnik obsession with space travel and ‘the white heat of technology‘, and, so perhaps ‘space age keg’ is the way to go?

Five litre mini-kegs from British breweries are generally good value and should help your Who-watching party go with a doo-weeeee-ooooooooooh!

2. Time travel

Fuller's Past Masters 1966 Strong Ale.There is an increasing range on the market of beers brewed to historic recipes, giving your taste buds the chance to experience, for example, 1880, 1938 or 1966. (‘The Doctor? Some call him… the Past Master.’)

Drinking beer from the future is somewhat more difficult, though. You could experience the near future with a kvass (‘You Maniacs! You brewed it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!’) or, in traditional sci-fi fashion, put blue food colouring in normal beer and drink it from Tupperware.

3. Regeneration

Perhaps this is just the special occasion to unearth your collection of your favourite brewery’s vintage ales and do ‘a vertical’? If you’ve got a Tom Baker-era Adnams’ Tally Ho to compare to a mere David Tennant, then all the better.

4. Something bigger on the inside

Following on from an interesting discussion here about the apparent ‘bigness’ of beer, and thinking again of the TARDIS, what about drinking something which is a small beer on paper and yet somehow houses near-infinite amounts of flavour? Something like Magic Rock Circus of Sour (3.5%) might be a candidate, or maybe this silly beer from Brewdog? (We’ve never tasted it.)

5. Specific beers for each doctor

There are (probably) three actors playing The Doctor in next week’s episode, but you might want to warm up before the episode with something that brings to mind Paul McGann (would one of these do the job?).

There is an obvious choice from to represent David Tennant — a certain lager from his native Scotland, with a name which is almost perfect.

Matt Smith… well, he’s a right hipster, isn’t he? So perhaps one of trendy brewery Kernel’s historic beers which look young but are actually very, very old?

John Hurt is still a mystery, but something war-like and well-respected. And from Derbyshire. Thornbridge Jaipur!

(And it might be a good idea to keep a bottle of Marble Manchester Bitter on hand in case Christopher Eccleston does show up after all…)

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