Not my kind of day

August 1 is IPA Day, when you can ‘join beer enthusiasts, breweries and bars across the globe in a collective toast to one of craft beer’s most iconic styles: the India pale ale’. You can raise a toast in a favourite bar (or crumbling bedsit or palatial penthouse) or roast your way through the grid of social media using the special hashtag. Without sounding like a sourpuss I find the whole concept of any day set aside for any beer or anything else infantile and shallow (I occasionally get press releases telling me that National Vegetarian Day or National Incontinence Day are incoming, they go straight into the bin). For me it’s infantile and shallow because it reduces what is a great beer style that has mutated and divided over time, thus giving us a multiplicity of meanings of IPA, to a ‘look-at-me’ status; it’s cheer-leading of the most facile sort; dumbed-down drinking (no doubt the playground hollering of ‘whoop’ will feature a lot). I know people won’t agree with me, but so be it.

Why not celebrate IPA throughout the year? You don’t need a hashtag or special badge on your twitter feed to do this. I’ve been drinking the stuff since the 1990s (or I could say the early 1980s if I include Greene King) and like all sorts — ones that I particularly remember are Freeminer’s Trafalgar in the late 1990s, Goose Island, Stone Ruination, Punk IPA and even eventually understanding and enjoying White Shield (though I think Hook Norton’s Flagship runs it a close second). I don’t need August 1. Like dogs, IPAs are for life.