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The Session

The Session #144: The best beer you can drink at home right now

Jaipur and cheese on a table at our old house.

We’re hosting the next edition of The Session, where beer bloggers and posters around the world respond to the same prompt, on the same day. (Or thereabouts.)

For Session #144 that day is Friday 28 February 2025 and the prompt is:

What’s the best beer you can drink at home right now?

Not necessarily right now. You can go to the shops if you like.

But you shouldn’t have to get on a train or a flight. Or travel back in time.

If you like, you can choose a top 3, or top 5, or top 10.

What makes it a good beer to drink at home? Is it brewed to be packaged? Does it pair well with your home cooking? Does it pair well with drinking in your pyjamas?

If you don’t think there’s any such thing as a good beer to drink at home, that’s fine, too – talk about that!

Whatever your response to the prompt might be is absolutely grand.

It’s just a starting point, or trigger – not a set of rules to a game of which we are the umpires.

When you’ve written your post, wherever that may be, let us know by:

Remember, it doesn’t have to be an epic. Our post for Session #143 was 300 words.

Even a social media post is fine.

We just want people to feel as if they can join in, however much time or energy they might have.

Check out last month’s contributions for inspiration.

And let us know if you’d like to host. (Before we start tapping people up.)

16 replies on “The Session #144: The best beer you can drink at home right now”

I’ve been thinking about this recently after many years of trying a lot of different beers, I’d be pretty happy staying with cases of Chouffe, Saison Dupont, Jever (or Bitburger given Majestic have it) and Sierra Nevada. Maybe whatever’s new from Simple Things too as their stuff is always good and I’d be supporting a local brewery as they’re near to my house.

That’s five beers. Does that count?

Orval
I’ve a collection of bottles from starting from 2021, so if I there is smth to celebrate, I’d open one.
Still figuring out the sweet spot when Orval is the best. So far triaged it to be between 18 months and 5 years.

The beer I always have a few bottles of at home is Guinness Foreign Extra Stout. You can buy it pretty widely in supermarkets and off licences, but I tend now to just buy a box of a dozen from the same online retailer when they’re close to running out, so there’s always at least a couple to hand (a bit like the office at Park Royal brewery in west London which David Hughes describes in A Bottle of Guinness, Please, where a crate was sent up every morning for staff and visitors and if stocks ran low halfway through the day someone just phoned for another).

Local off licence which is a 10 min walk away always has a good range of Belgian beers.The jewel in the crown for me would be Westmalle Tripel,pricey but worth it.Nectar of the Gods.

A few of my current standards (all reasonably priced and easy to get).

Shepherd Neame Double Stout

Don’t love most SN beers and it’s not widely touted, but this is hugely underrated. It’s available in supermarkets, reasonably priced, and an excellent, flavoursome, not too strong stout. The bottle looks great too!

Wye Valley Butty Bach

Again, widely available, good from a bottle, ticks the box for me for a malty trad bitter.

Five Points Gold

Very sessionable percentage and available from Morrisons. Tasty, refreshing and crisp.

Budvar or Pilsner Urquell

Obviously classic pilsners. Majestic normally has them.

La Chouffe or Bruggse Zot

Go to Belgians. Widely available these days.

The best beer that I can drink at home right now?

The trouble is most bottled, or canned if you must, beers are over carbonated compared to their cask counterpart. They’re just too gassy straight out of the bottle and this masks a lot of the taste.

A notable exception are beers from Thurston’s brewery, so it’s no surprise in my ‘top beers to drink at home’ is:

Thurston’s Horsell Hooker. Bottle conditioned and wonderfully complex. Not widely available, I got mine direct from the brewery, but worth the effort.

What else to drink at home? I still have a few bottles left of Dark Star’s re-creation of Gale’s Prize Old Ale left, but these are for those special occasions.

Four pint cans of Hobgoblin (Gold). It’s the stairway to heaven (available from Tesco).

For me, a craft snob hobbyist, I don’t want a beer that is going to bite me back when I am home relaxing for a game on the tv or a sappy movie with the wife. I get enough hops on our weekend brewery hops that when I am at home it has to be a beer that is flavorful but smooth. There are so many IPA’s out there. Give me a malty red or a creamy nitro at home. Snake bite red from my local brewery is a favorite, especially this time of year.

You can’t go wrong with Belgian, as others have commented. Saison Dupont and Orval are regulars for me, they never disappoint and are usually easy to get hold of.

I’m lucky to have a number of breweries nearby producing beer that tastes good enough out of a can / bottle for me to be happy (I can’t get to the pub for a Harveys as much as I’d like) – Beak, Burning Sky, Unbarred. You can’t go wrong with any of Burning Sky’s seasonal saisons but their Luppoleto pilsner is also very satisfying. Unbarred’s bueno shake is a lovely sweet hazelnut milk stout that I always try to have in the fridge, but I’m also enjoying the Timothy Taylor / Northern Monk Unity stout that you can get in Morrisons, which is dryer and makes me smile.

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