Beer writers often say that a beer is “worth buying by the case” (Tim Webb and Joris Pattyn, we’re looking at you) but, being easily-distracted dilettante bloggers whose favourite beer is always the next one, we’ve tended to mix-and-match, trying to cover as much ground as possible.
Fuller’s Past Masters XX Strong, however, was only available by the case, so we bit the bullet and did it.
A whole box of the same beer? What if, once we tried it, we found ourselves lumbered with eleven bottles we don’t want to drink?
As it happened, although we liked it from the off, we only became more impressed as the beer matured. If we’d based our view on bottle number one, we might have stuck with our cautious thumbs-up and the view that Fuller’s 1845 is a better beer.
A whole case of beer takes the pressure off a little. It gives you the chance to just drink without over-thinking; to see a beer from different angles, at different times; to really get to know it. It also helps avoid Open It syndrome — a cupboard full of beers too precious to drink which are slowly going stale — because, hey, there’s a whole case, so why not have another?
This post is based on a lie: we’ve bought cases of beer for parties loads of times, but as we never got to touch any of that beer, and were just left with empty bottles and boxes, they don’t count.
