Doth the beer make the man?

I'm not a beer drinker, so I don't know how your taste for alcohol changes across your life. Frank, as we all know, was a big (in every sense of the word) beer drinker.

My entire childhood – that I remember, anyway – he drank Reschs Pilsener. If we went out for dinner on the weekend, which we did almost every week for long stretches at various favoured Chinese restaurants around the Sutherland Shire from Caringbah to Miranda and Menai and back again, he drank Crown Lager. Back in the day it was the creme de la creme, and it gave your beer drinking a slightly celebratory air.

I think I remember him going through a VB phase, and the only reason that stands out to me now is because Uncle Les used to call VB 'green death', which I presumed meant it was considered some sup-bar product from the south that wasn't a patch on the far better stuff that came from Queensland. Funnily enough I think Les drank VB himself years later.

I can't remember the other brands Dad preferred (he went through various phases), but I remember being surprised in the last years of his life, both when he used to go to the Gymea Tradies with his boozy mates and when he moved himself into the old age home, because he drank XXXX. To the extent I took any notice when I was far younger, I remember it having a reputation for being pretty poor in quality.

There was a bit of a renaissance in beer drinking at some point and it was very much within his lifetime. Back when I was a kid blue collar Dads in the Australian suburbs drank one of about six or eight types of beer – expensive European kinds like Grolsch and Heineken were for wankers. It was all Tooths and Tooheys and Carlton Draught, all those names you'd see on those very stylised advertising art prints in pubs, of blokes in cravats smoking pipes and playing golf or standing in front of light planes.

But he was around when all those new movements around craft beers, low carb beers and every large pub chain having their own label became trendy. During Uncle Bob's later years he used to drink James Boag, which I think is a bit of a prestige brand and I don't think existed when I was a kid. Frank just never cottoned onto all those trends.

The last year of his life in the home in Peakhurst, he'd order two sixpacks of XXXX a week from Dan Murphys and have them delivered, and the nurses would put them in the minifridge in the little reception area around the corner from his room. He'd have two a night – a considerable reduction from his younger years.

But I wonder now why he liked it. Not beer – just particular kinds of them at different times throughout his life. It's just as likely XXXX was on special one day so he bought it and never stopped. He was never a particularly eater or drinker and if nothing else Frank Turney was a creature of habit (sometimes to a fault).

But I never asked about his taste in beer. It's one of the hundreds of questions I only realise I'm curious about now he's gone... probably because he's gone.

Of course, I also might be overthinking it. He probably would have shrugged and said 'it's wet'.