Victoria Bitter

Victoria Bitter is not a bitter — it's a golden Australian lager, and for decades it was the best-selling beer in the country. Nobody calls it Victoria anything, either: it's VB, the green can, ordered by two letters in every state despite wearing one state's name.

The lineage runs back to Melbourne's Victoria Brewery in 1854, but VB's real monument is an ad campaign: for generations, a gravelly voice over footage of people sweating through honest work promised that "a hard-earned thirst" deserved a big cold beer. The line ran so long it stopped being advertising and became folklore — whatever the work had been, the beer you'd earned was simply VB.

Carlton & United Breweries still makes it, these days inside Japan's Asahi Beverages, and though lighter beers have since passed it on the sales charts, none has taken its place in the language. A VB remains the default noun for a beer across a large slice of Australia.

Deep gold with a quick-falling head. The malt is sweetish, faintly toffee-ish, and then comes the signature VB edge — a rough, hoppy tang on the finish that fans call character and critics call bite. Drink it very cold from the can; it was engineered for heat, thirst, and the end of a shift.