What do you imagine when I use the phrase ‘lawnmower beer’? I spend a lot of time thinking about how to tell you enough about a beer for you to decide whether you’d like to drink it.
There are lots of ways to do that – some poetic, some listy, with abstract terms like ‘rich’ or ‘clean’. Another way is to get to the point, with two words evoking as much of a sense of the beer as a paragraph of flavours.
Lawnmower beer does that, I reckon. It tells us it’s a simple brew that’s going to be refreshing after some work on a hot day. Perhaps you don’t have a lawn to mow, so it could be a post-run refresher, a barbecue beer or a picnic beer. Shift seasons and we might want a fireplace beer.