Taking sides: Bitter v Lager

bitter is superior to lager. but sometimes i forget this, and start drinking lager instead. then i have a bad hangover and remember that bitter is much kinder to the system.

having said that, lager sometimes decides that it is going to be better than bitter for the day, while on other days its like metal water.

Guinness.

I have *never* *ever* experienced a hangover from Guiness in my life. Saying that, I've never managed to get past the eight pints mark due to limited storage capacity.

Guiness is officially an ale cos of the way it's brewed and therefore counts as bitter for the purposes of this thread. However, it does give me the most wretched intestinal hangovers unlike proper bitter.

Bitter is superior. Bottled lagers come next in line with draught lager the worst. Luckily I quite like San Miguel, so the Club Sussed drinking experience is reasonably good.

Bitter is obviously best. It slips down a right treet. Lager is somewhat refreshing and good in the summer. I'm not so great with fizzy drinks at the best of times so obviously lager is not my drinkbitch.

DISTURBINGLY though I am losing my prior downright REFUSAL to drink lager, what could be happening to me?!

Bitter is the best. I love visiting England so I can have lovely pints of bitter. mmmmm.

Old Speckled Hen is lovely. What does that come under?

Lovely bitter.

What cateRgorie does Boddington's go in?

There are several problems with lager, but I like it because it is nice and crisp and refreshing and I don't actually enjoy the taste of beer all that much in strength so the 'blandness' is to me more the equivalent of a korma or passanda in the curry world.

The main problem is that the crispness and refreshingness wears off after a few pints and then what to switch to?

Which beer is superior? BELGIAN BEER naturally. :-)

I think re-imagining the bitter-lager polarity as some kind of continuum might save a whole lot of silly bother.

If you're in a Sam Smith's pub, it almost doesn't matter. Ayingerbrau and its derivatives are terrific, SS's OB is gorgeous (and usually cheap) and SS's various bottled lagers are smashing too.

Search: bud (beer or lager? i do not kno)

Destroy: that UTTERLY HORRIBLE "organic" lager I was tricked into drinking by evil neo-Jazz Age winos in a Sam Smiths' pub on the rainbow crawl. It is SO EASY to be teetotal.

ale glorious ale

particularly pale ales and India pale ales at the moment (USAers drink Bass or sam smith's IPA if you know whats good for you)

its obviously not lager vs bitter but lager vs ale seing as ale includes bitters milds, brown ales, pale ales, stouts, porters, trappist beers and infact anything that isn't eurofizz, aussiefizz or yank fizz or just fizz

I choose Ribena!

bud=lager, boddingtons=bitter. Prefer bitter in UK, but its Belgian beer, ales + various trappist concoctions that get my taste-buds salivating... Corsendonk, Verboden Vrucht, De Konninck + the magnificently named Kwak. All available extremely cheaply in Holland. 24 uur van het Belgische bier

Who can tell me what a bitter is that's produced in the USA? Do love IPAs, though I prefer Lagunitas, a Bay Area microbrew.

Ed, you're right, it should really be ale vs lager but I was full of evil hangover chemicals this morning and my brain malfunctioned.

As Underworld sang ...shouting lager lager lager

Berg Quell Pilsener = great taste, great value 89p for 500ml bottle from Oddbins off license. Berg Quell Pilsener, brewed at the legendary Linden Brauerei Unna, Germany.

That bitter stuff sucks, you want evidence look at who consumes it:

dour tasting creamy muck consumed by Northerners (Lancs & Yorkies) with whippets 'n' flat caps - its grim up north as KLF stated.

overrated liquid lunch for ye olde trad Irish folk who talk and chatter until their jaw's drop or they stumble over ala Shane from the Pogues - pissed as an old fart unable to string two sentences together and walking zig zag style stumbling home stinkin of the big G.

or Welsh whingers from the South Wales valleys whose lives revolve around the dullest game ever Rugby and only listen to classic rock muck ala Stereophonics and consume 15 beers on a saturday nite as there is naff all else to do in the crappy towns - they then get in a ruck/street fight at pub kicking out time ..with rival lads from the next neighourhood/village/town.

Bitter = Dud. Bores that go on about CAMRA and I remember them well at Uni back in the late 80s the amount of Yorkies that go on about Theakstons. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Auf Lagersien pet.

Czech Bud is lager (and my chosen drink when there is no decent bitter) but American bud contains RICE and is therefore FALSE BEER.

You don't really get very many pubs which sell great bitter in Glasgow, which is why I usually drink lager. But whenever I'm in London, bitter usually wins. Mmmmm....flat.

Shoulder to shoulder with DJ Martian - Blimey. Though he is somewhat more hawkish than me on this one.

My first trip to London I was embarrassingly excited to stroll into a "pub" and ask for a "pint" of Bass Ale, which had recently risen to extreme connoisseurish prominence in the States. We were all much impressed with the fact that Mr. Bass apparently had appointments with the Queen herself. I was walking along somewhere, motorbike messengers squirreling around me; I spied a real authentic-lookin pub festooned with garish Bass Ale banners and crammed to burst with World Cup fans. It's hard to describe how much I was anticipating this experience. Imagine my surprise.

Are ALL American beers lagers, basically?

Oh dear I'd better go and get myself a whippet and a flat cap.

Cor, I'm an evil neo-Jazz Age wino.

You are. Alcohol made with rice = bettah than alcohol made with hops viz TSING TAO which is nectah obv

As hard as it is to believe, given strength of flavour of the former approx = 0, American Budweiser and Tsingtao still contain hops. It fair breaks my heart to think of those lovely tasty hops evilly befouled by the false taste of rice.

Bass in states is Bass IPA, Indian pale ale, the sort of beer britain used to export to india. its a very light ale. the definenition of ale (oppossed to lager ) is bottom fermenting yeast, lager is top fermenting. pale ales are ales useing light malts lots of hops and bottom fermenting yeasts ( may have go tmy yeasts back to front).

bass in the Uk is bass bitter which is a dark bitter ale, darker malts different and fewer hops.

I are not understanding people who drink beer and stuff for the taste. I only drink that liquid disgust cos it makes my head go funny.

"hah, these foreign office boys will drink anything" chuckles Master Bass, readying a warm sticky pint of flat ale in the gathering gloom...

don't throw us colonies in the briar patch, please!

i like lager on hot days. for every other time i prefer bitter.

some beers i like: Guiness, Duval, Emmersons (exceptional Dunedin beer), Founders, Monteiths. I never liked Bud when i had it.

Drink = good. Tsingtao = BEER OF GODS. Consume, drink, love. Search also = Ethiopian beers, Moroccan beers (discovered one just the other day).

When in England with the ILx massive, they insist on getting me drunk on things. I don't mind. I think the preferred brews were always dark, but is that bitter per se?

not necessarily, generally most dark things in most, not all pubs are the evil caskflow/smoothflow/draftflow muck where they get some acoholic brown liquid and blow nitrogen through it to create a creamy smooth head. The prime criminals are john simth and worthingtons, niether of which claim to be bitters any more and certainly aren't. They completely lack any kind of flavour. and are out there with the eurofizz.

a bitter handpulled from a cask could be any colour from dark almondy to almost black and would be realtively smooth with a definate bitter taste given by the high hop content. (incidentally bitter's are favoured by brewewrs precisely because of the high hop content - hops=preservative so you can ship it further)

anything less than bitter in flavour will be a mild.

with all cask beers its best to go for the most local ones to where you drink as beer does not travel too well

botles are another matter. bottled beer will always be fizzier than its cask equivalent and travels a whole lot better

I liek Miller LITE

that is not beer its warm piss . i like moosehead and big rock and alexandar keiths and newcastle and guiness

Why do Limey's drink bitter, ever tried their Lager