‘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).
