Beer, lager or ale? The whole thing leaves me hop-lessly baffled

Can we go over it just one more time? Beer is in short supply because there is no carbon dioxide. Even though environmentalists say there is too much carbon dioxide. Right…

So does this mean beer is fizzy? And what’s the difference between beer and ale? What does “craft” mean, and where does lager fit into all that? Those cartoonish cans hipsters drink in the park, what’s inside them?

I find the whole subject of beer to be at once bewildering and boring.

Every time my exasperated husband attempts a quick recap, the information slides off the back of my head because I can’t make myself care. Except when I’m in the supermarket and under instruction to buy – what? What was it? Cans or bottles? Weissbier or IPA? Stubbies sounds rude. I must have misheard.

I regularly go to pieces in the drinks aisle because I know he will be really grumpy if I get it wrong again – but surely even grumpier if

I come back empty-handed? Once, in a moment of sheer panic, I bought him mead.

And the thing is, I have an encyclopedic knowledge of my Scottish husband’s surprisingly esoteric cheese preferences. I know which olive oil he likes and I can unerringly predict his bizarre nationalistic fervour when

I pop a box of Tunnock’s

Tea Cakes and a pack of dark-chocolate caramel wafers in the trolley.

But where he stands on the beer-lager-ale continuum eludes me, which is ironic, as he’s not exactly teetotal and a rootle through the recycling bin would tell its own story.

So I end up buying him the one brand I am categorically certain I have seen him drink. Admittedly, that was on our first date, in 1989.

Apparently, he no longer drinks Grolsch. Who knew?

This whole farrago usually ends in an argument, but to his credit he doesn’t interpret it as proof I never really loved him, or weep with rage the way I would if he came home with a bottle of chardonnay swilled from Jacob’s Creek instead of a splendid 2016 Giffords Hall Bacchus.

But the truth is, he never would. He might not know which cheese I’d choose, but he certainly knows which wines I drink.

Dear reader, that’s why I married him.