Rejoice! The Football World Cup 2018 is nearly upon us. Evenings will be spent at home watching the telly and drinking beer. Evenings will be spent in the pub watching telly and drinking beer. For one month, we’ll be living in beer and football utopia.
But we can’t start getting too excited just yet, because we’ve got important work to carry out before the first toot of a referee’s whistle booms out from our TV speakers. We’re putting together a list of World Cup Beers for the Independent – suggesting a beer to represent each country – and we need your help to track down booze from some of the countries involved.
Beers must be available to buy in the UK and we’ve already got most of the European contenders covered (although some countries, such as hosts Russia, aren’t exactly setting the world alight with the bottles we’ve found). But for much of the rest of the world, there’s work to do.
One country you don’t have to look for is Argentina. Much to our surprise, this one was easy to find, so we’ll be toasting Messi’s mazy dribbles with bottles of Quilmes lager. We’ve given you a taster of what this beer is like below and, hopefully, it’ll inspire someone to seek out other nation’s brews to help plug some our our gaps.
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Quilmes, 4.9%
The Quilmes label proudly boasts ‘Argentina’s favorite beer’ and, whenever this boast is displayed, you know what the contents are going to be: a mass produced lager. A little research shows that the Buenos Aires brewery is unsurprisingly owned by beer giant InBev, so we know roughly what we’re getting before we even pour. But, hey, it’s beer, with a decent amount of alcohol and, within the easy-going caramel sweetness, some pale malt and hopping does come through. Watching football can be thirsty work and, although this lager is no world beater, it amply does the job of providing beery refreshment while cheering on Messi’s magic and chomping on salty snacks. So we’ll be drinking it with pleasure. Unless, of course, you can do better…
You can stock up on Quilmes at Beers of Europe
