It’s summer, which means you can have a beer on a Wednesday afternoon if you damn well please. The big question is, what beer do you reach for? Personally, I’m grabbing a juicy, hoppy double IPA. But you might think that’s a bit much, which is totally fair. In fact, that’s why I spoke to a handful of experts in the beer industry to get their takes on the best summer beers. You might be surprised by their answers, but after crushing one or two of their picks, you’ll be happy you heeded their advice. –Chris Hatler, deputy editor
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Nothing goes better with scalding-hot summer days than an ice-cold beer. Crack open our favorite cold ones and share a toast that chilly weather is many, many months away.
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Blue skies. Shining sun. A beach, golf course, porch, campsite, or backyard. Such is the summer setting that calls for an ice-cold beer. You can’t just grab any old bottle out of the fridge and expect a good time, though. Some beers are better suited to the summer months than others. We call these, appropriately, “summer beers.” And yes, there are traits that all of them share.
At the bare minimum, a summer beer must be refreshing.
If you need a little guidance, Esquire asked these experts to share their favorite summer beers. Some are macro, some are craft, but all are perfect to crack open on a scalding Saturday afternoon.
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When I heard Taylor Sheridan had a book coming out, I couldn’t believe this era’s most prolific producer, director, and writer— Yellowstone, Landman, Lioness, Sicario, to name a few—had time to write a book. When I saw the book was a guide, How to Not Die in Prison, I wondered, What does Taylor Sheridan know about prison?
When an advance copy of the title landed on my cell bars in Sing Sing, I was shocked it didn’t get denied because of the censorship rules. On the back cover is an illustration of a sharpened toothbrush and in its pages a tutorial on how to make it: “A sharpened toothbrush can make a decent knife on its own, or you can heat up the brush and insert an old razor blade into the handle,” writes Sheridan’s coauthor, an ex-con named Tom Nelson. (I wouldn’t bring one of those to a knife fight in Sing Sing—the boys in here have real knives.)
This book, I quickly realized, is not Taylor Sheridan breaking into the literary world—it’s really him looking out for Tom Nelson, who did 17 years on an installment plan, mostly in California joints.
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To tell you the truth, this job has allowed me to try a lot of cameras I have no business holding. Every year, I get hands-on with the newest Leica releases. I love it, obviously, but then I talk to a professional photographer friend and realize that what I’m experiencing is the equivalent of a rich guy paying to drive a car that could only be appreciated by Max Verstappen. I realize the camera is carrying me.
I love all the pro and prosumer tools, but I’ve started to realize that a point-and-shoot, something that forces you to get up close, is what I find the most fun. I’d been tooling around on eBay for something vintage—an Olympus, a Pentax, or something above my pay grade like a Yashica. But when I was back home, a friend of mine—who is a professional sports photographer (follow him here), and a geek about gear—was carrying a brand-new Kodak Snapic A1. I told him my dilemma and showed him my eBay saves. He immediately said, “Well, what you really want is this,” and held up the camera he’d been shooting with all evening.
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