We Tasted and Ranked 32 of the Best Beers for SummerWhat, exactly, is a “summer beer”? Is it a specific style, one that’s been packaged and marketed as a “summer ale” in recent years? Is it a special seasonal release that hits shelves between May and September? Or is it something a little more nebulous that can best be defined as “something you’d want to drink four to six of while you get sunburnt on the beach”? For our money, you can’t go wrong with a wheat beer of some sort this time of year, but we decided to put our theory to the test by rounding up some of the most well-loved examples of the best styles of beer for summer — kölsches, goses, pale ales, pilsners, hefeweizens, Mexican lagers and American wheat beers. We rounded up 13 InsideHook employees — some of whom are craft beer aficionados, some of whom almost never drink beer — and had them taste all 32 beers and rate them on a scale of zero to five in the hopes of getting an unbiased, definitive answer on what exactly the perfect summer beer entails. If you’re looking for some input on what to load your cooler with, check out how the ones we tasted all fared here. | 