Beer talk in the most unlikeliest of places

‘You ok boss?’ says the young lad at the checkout. ‘What’s this like then?’ he says holding up the bottle of Herold’s Světlý Ležák, which I gleefully filled my basket with at 93p a pop in Llandudno’s ASDA. ‘Me, I like my continental beers,’ he says with a conspiratorial wink. ‘Me too,’ I reply, though some sort of reflex going on inside my head is thinking that he’s thinking Stella, so not much common ground there. Boy do I get it wrong. ‘Have you tried Duvel,’ he continues. I wake up and engage with him, recalling the time I had eight on the trot in an Eindhoven bar. Then it’s a quick canter to Trappist beers. ‘What’s your favourite I ask,’ he says Chimay Blue, but would like to find the red more often. ‘Tried Westmalle,’ I ask. He nods, ‘is that the one with the diamond shaped label’. He sings the praises of Weihenstephaner Kristall, which is on sale in ASDA, and says that he and his mates went on a trip of northern France and Belgium looking for beers. I’m bowled over, I rarely get into a conversation about beer if I have bought some in a supermarket (well there was the woman in Okehampton Waitrose who couldn’t praise Golden Pride enough) and all too often if you have a basket-load of, say, Flying Dog’s Imperial Porter (for laying down of course), you often feel like a right sot. But not here. In a few minutes we’ve established a beer connection in the most unlikeliest of places, I’ve been corrected of an innate beer snobbery and — I suppose most importantly — picked up a shedload of cracking Czech beers at a decent price (and I’m not going into the price-of-beer debate, it was there, I was there and it was 93p).