Poker

A beer named after a card game is telling you how it wants to be drunk: around a table, in company, with nowhere better to be. Poker is the mass-market lager of Colombia's Andean interior — Bogotá, Medellín, Cali — and one of the country's biggest sellers.

The brand dates to 1929, though its origins are patchier on paper than its reputation: the exact where-and-how is less documented than the corporate history of its maker, Bavaria, Colombia's dominant brewer for over a century. What isn't hazy is the pitch — decade after decade, Poker's advertising has worked a single theme, friendship, until the beer became the standing prop of a Colombian friends' night.

Bavaria now sits inside AB InBev, which means the card-table beer of Bogotá shares a corporate roof with Budweiser and Corona. At the table itself nothing has changed: the deck comes out, the crate comes over, and the empties are counted at the end.

Light gold with soft carbonation and a mild sweet-grain nose. The taste is rounded and faintly sweet — white bread, a little corn — with the bitterness kept politely low. Colombians drink it thoroughly chilled through long evenings of talk; a session lager in the truest sense, built to accompany conversation without ever interrupting it.