This is what I will be doing this week.

Like any science, social science – the study of people – can make discoveries based on observing repeated patterns. Unlike astrophysics and neurochemistry it falls down somewhat when confronted by the sheer erratic lunacy of human behaviour, where 2 + 2 can equal 4, 5 and ministrone to different people. Nonetheless beneath this madness runs a steady tide of predictable behaviour which we can learn from.

Using this power they call science I have, then, been able to observe the repeated pattern of me

1. knowing I have something to do,
2. knowing I have plenty of time to do it in,
3. therefore proceeding to fill this time with journeys to supermarkets to buy beer and cheese.

This pattern has not failed to emerge again today as I know I need to spend most of the next three weeks doing uni work, but it’s not quite urgent enough to stop me doing everything else. I’ve just managed to temper it a little by giving myself a reward to motivate me to work – if you like, treating myself like a child, a donkey or a plantation worker.

This is what I want to be doing this week.

And so this week, to help me get through the ceaseless, crushing feeling of boredom and impending death I feel when I know that I’ll just be at home after work every night, I’ve picked up four bottles from Morrisons to get me through each night. One for Tuesday, one for Wednesday, one for Thursday, one for Friday. I have a lot of reading to do each night, chapters from six books on the New Right’s impact on welfare provision (1979-1990), so I’m aiming not to open a bottle before 10.30pm each night. That’ll give me an hour and half to enjoy the bottle and a few crackers and cheese – which I read so much about beer lovers enjoying too, as well as Matt earlier this week, I thought I had to give a try – and then give a brief write-up. If I can do that each night, I’ll get all my work done and the cloud of lonely ennui which hangs over my head will take a kick in the balls from my beers to keep it at bay.

I’ve got four to try, as I mentioned – Joseph Holt’s Maple Moon, J. W. Lees John Willies and Brakspear’s Oxford Gold and Bitter. Not the most inspiring bunch ever but as I discovered today while looking through Morrisons selection, I’ve already tried most of them so I’m down to the ones I’ve skipped over in the past.

Look out for tonight’s first report at approximately 11.30pm, unless science proves itself right again and I neck all four by half eight.

Beers · Brakspear · J. W. Lees · John Willies · Joseph Holt · Maple Moon · Morrisons · Oxford Gold

Being from a staunchly working-class background, my only memories of Marks & Spencer as a child was of it being the place that people with white hair who wore pastel coloured slacks went to pay more money for their shopping than could be explained. As I grew up a little I began to see that they get away with it by selling the image – if you “shop at Marks”, it means something in certain circles. Just like wearing Nike means something to other people.

Nowadays I see Marks & Spencer as a shop I simply have no reason to go near. The food costs more for no reason I can see and the clothes are aimed at a demographic whose only link I ever want to have with is being from the same planet. What I didn’t expect was their beer range. Is this a new thing? By chance I ended up in the beer section – it’s not an aisle by any means – and spotted the “4 for 3″ deal that works out about a quid more than Morrisons “4 for £5.50″ deal.

The full range of Marks & Spencer's middle of the road beers. Note: drinking all of these will turn you into a Dire Straits fan.

And to the beers. This has been a troublesome write-up as I’m doing it live over the night, and I’m looking after a one year-old and a dog which has just pissed and shat diarrhea on the floor in front of me. So I must look back on the Cornish IPA in hindsight, as part of a golden age of this night which didn’t involve screaming children and canines with loose bowels. At 5% you’d expect some kind of taste but this ranks among the most flavourless beers I’ve ever come across. No smell, no real taste, nothing standing out at all. It’s bland personified, utterly inoffensive yet totally unmemorable like a drunken conversation at a party with your girlfriend’s friends of friends who you can’t even remember her connection with.

Next, Suffolk Bitter. What is this concoction? Another tasteless one, is what. It’s perfectly drinkable in the way that you buy a carton of Ribena and drink it without expecting it to taste like anything other than Ribena. But it being within expected parameters doesn’t make it good; it just tastes exactly like the last Ribena you bought, just like this beer tastes exactly like the last one.

And on to the Sussex Golden Ale. A near carbon copy of the previous two, tasting just like the most generic bitter you could ever hope to imagine. If you had to give an alien a beer to summarise the entire spectrum of beers, this would be the one to use – slightly malty, slightly hoppy, slightly impatient to finish the damn thing so you can move on to something different. My last great hope for a good finish was Staffordshire IPA, and generally being a big fan of anything IPA I was optimstic. Oh no, cruel night, you wouldn’t even let me off at the end. This is a sharp, strange beer with a feel that’s difficult to swallow and was flat in the glass half way down. A sure sign for me is that if I go more than a minute without instinctively thinking of picking the glass up, there’s something amiss. In this case a lot was amiss as I totally lost interest in drinking the rest and it dragged on for over an hour. Roger Protz said “the beer is straw coloured with sulphur on the nose, a digestive biscuit maltiness and tangy hop resins”… and “very refreshing”. I must have been drinking a different beer because mine made my mouth taste like mud.

In summary, I thought these four Marks & Spencer beers are shit. They neatly fit into the image of the rest of the place – middle of the road and awfully polite. We couldn’t have a beer that didn’t look like beer, now, could we Marjorie! What they appear to have collected is a group of beers which virtually all of their customers will find acceptable, and will think that the regionalised names on the label mean they are “trying real ale”. I find this idea as dangerous to the real ale ethos of drinking mad beers because you never know what the next one will be like, as the attempts to make ale brands big and national eg. Spitfire and Old Speckled Hen. They are taking the essence of real ale and sanitising it for the masses, which I find very wrong.

If you ever find yourself in the beer section in a Marks & Spencer, just keep on walking. You’re not missing any beers you won’t have tasted a million times already.

Beers · Cornish IPA · Marks & Spencer · Morrisons · Old Speckled Hen · Spitfire · Staffordshire IPA · Suffolk Bitter · Sussex Golden Ale

Tonight is my cousin Rob’s 21st birthday party. Rob is a CID (Chav In Denial) and drinks lager and any kind of spirit over 40%, preferably on fire. Rob is a sound bloke though and it is my ultimate ambition in life to convert him to real ale. His dad drinks the stuff by the gallon so it’s feasible.

#Gordon Brown...

Tonight I’ve picked up a few bottles from Morrisons to take round and I’ve got another Castle Rock Harvest Pale, the beer I recently declared my favourite ever. I’m left with that conundrum now of when to drink it – near the start so I appreciate it most, or near the end to look forward to? Do I pass it round to try to convert others to the cause, or keep it all to myself? Not easy questions when you’ve been lured in by the sweet taste and end up injecting pale ale into your veins to get an even better hit.

I’ve also picked up one of Innis & Gunn‘s oak-aged beers, which I’m really not convinced I’ll like. I’m a very recent convert to the odd whisky or brandy and hot, but only very rarely, and I’m certainly not sure what a beer with those kind of flavours might do to me. To balance that out I’ve got a nice Shepherd Neame Whitstable Bay, an organic beer and one approved for vegetarians – it really is fortunate that my variety of vegetarianism isn’t so strict as to preclude me from the majority of ales around today.

Finishing off the list are a bottle of Piddle Ale (the brewery eludes me at the moment) which was on offer for £1 and finally an old favourite, Hook Norton Old Hooky. As a list goes I’m pretty happy with that one and with the strengths they are I’m confident that with a cup of tea before bed I’ll even wake up with a clear head! Match report to follow tomorrow, which will invariably be me raving about Harvest Pale at great length again.

Beers · Castle Rock · Harvest Pale · Hook Norton · Innis & Gunn · Morrisons · Old Hooky · Piddle Ale · Shepherd Neame · Whitstable Bay

Tonight I’m round at my cousin’s having a cheap night in because of the recession and global economic crises and the rising price of rice and AAAARGH PANIC WE’RE ALL POOR!!! No doubt they’ll be on the vino and, as much as I do like the odd glass now and then, it’s a night on the ales for me. I’ve come to learn that red wine can be tremendous if you drink it in the right company, with someone you can trust to drink at the same pace as you, but if you get even slightly out of kilter with one another then an hour down the line, you’ll feel like your head weighs 20 tons while your mate will have entered into a Jagermeister-based drinking game with the neighbours.

The jazzy label honestly did make me buy it.

I’ve picked up a few bottles from Morrisons, anyway. They’re doing four bottles for £5.50 round here at the moment which ain’t so bad. First up is Greene King’s St Edmunds, a golden beer with a label that stands out a mile. I don’t know about you but the labels really do work on me, and I don’t see any point denying it. Maybe it’s because I don’t really care much what it says on the back because I like all kinds of beer, but the label says more to me while I’m looking through 50 beers on the shelf. Is that bad?

Next up I’ve got White Horse’s Wayland Smithy. Morrisons describe this as “fiery and aromatic” which is probably shorthand for really bitter and smelly, making you cock your head to one side after every gulp to figure out what the hell you’re actually drinking. Hopefully Wychwood’s Circle Master will be a bit more reliable, and the final of the four is Castle Rock’s Harvest Pale which from everything I’ve read sounds like a classic golden ale.

My usual success rate based on randomly picking beers based on their labels is 50%, so I’ll probably get a couple of really good beers tonight and a couple I could take or leave. I’d rather have it that way than be one of those gits blocking the aisles with a trolley full of Andrex while he inspects the labels through ancient reading glasses, merrily reading out loud the full list of ingredients to all and sundry.

As you may guess, I much prefer buying beer from pubs.

Castle Rock · Circle Master · Greene King · Harvest Pale · Morrisons · St Edmunds · Wayland Smithy · White Horse · Wychwood