There’s a time and a place for expensive, artisanal beer — for dry-hopped IPAs, barrel-aged barleywines and the terroir of spontaneously fermented wild ales. But there’s also a time and a place for just the opposite … when you just want a beer, and you don’t want to think much about it.
And at those times, a beer tends to taste only as good as the setting. I’ve had more craft beer than I tell my doctor, but the best beer I ever had was an ice-cold Sapporo over a bowl of spicy ramen. Or was it while sharing a cooler of Pacificos on the beach with my family? I also seem to remember drinking a particularly fantastic, sweaty can of PBR while playing bocce behind a dive bar in South Carolina.
You get the idea.
Cheap beer is unselfconsciously itself. The perfect unity of refreshment and alcohol. Craft beer “enthusiasts” occasionally get a little heated about “flavorless” cans of macro beer, but sometimes you don’t want an expressive, expensive pint that’ll make the room tilt.
To prove it, we reached out to a long list of beverage directors, bar owners, craft beer brewers and other experts — many of whom toil away making or serving esoteric, undeniably delicious or purposefully interesting beer, but afterward crash on their couches with a cheap and easy, everyday drinker. Here’s what they reach for (or fondly recall) when not drinking craft.
From trusty Budweiser to a crisp lager brewed in the Bahamas, the below list represents the cheap beers our opinionated experts attest are the best.
