I'll Drink to that.

I was in the States recently, not on a fact-finding mission of national importance or anything, but on hols. Mrs O and I had intended to visit Japan, but that was lidder-ally blown out of the water. (Don't look at me like that. Humour's all they've got left.) As Wilde famously observed (Oscar, not Kim), Britain and the United States are two great nations divided by a common language. This is less true now, perhaps, that it's ever been, due to instant mass communication. However, there are other areas in which the vide between ourselves and our cousins across the pond appears wider than ever. One such area is beer.

We are middle-brow tourists at best, Mrs O and I. We generally eschew museums and galleries in favour of down-at-heel supermarkets and bars. I've concluded from my travels over the years that you only get to see a country properly when in locales like this, when the natives have their guard down and don't expect to meet foreigners. It's pointless visiting a bar in Times Square for example; you'll be served German beer by a Pole. I could experience that in Beckton were I minded to. No, you need to seek out the grubbier quarters.

I shouldn't dress these actions up entirely as a work of social anthropology. We both like a drink and bargain, so it does pay to go off piste like this. But while doing so, we did learn that modern America is in thrall to Newcastle Brown Ale. It's everywhere - and not in the slightly shame-faced way it is in the UK, where it's kept hidden on low shelves in pubs in case someone brings his mother in for a sherry before dinner. They not only stock it in the States; they celebrate it. There are giant promotional bottle tops emblazoned with the blue star on every bar wall.

Needless to say, I didn't feel tempted to sample any while there, but it did raise an interesting question: if they can misjudge us and our culture so completely, might we be doing the same to them? I suspect yes.

Before I visited America for the fist time, I thought I knew their beer. It would be straw-coloured, fizzy piss. In fact, they have a wonderful range of fascinating ales to try - wheat beers, honey beers, porters etc. And yet we picture them in dungarees and baseball caps, drinking Bud Light at kegger parties (I have no real idea what a kegger party is incidentally).

I remember an Australian friend of mine telling me that on arriving in London for the first time, he'd been horrified to find that Britons believe he and his kind drink nothing but Fosters. According to him, only confused old woman and infants would even consider touching it, such is its lowly status.

It's a minefield.

That reminds me: I was at a party some years ago, to which someone brought four cans of Special Brew. He was English, so had no excuse for this unconscionable breach of etiquette. He was quite unapologetic too; he parked himself on the sofa and placed his booty on the coffee table just in front of him. Then all we early arrivees sat around chatting and drinking as we waited for the party proper to kick in. A friend of mine arrived a little time later. He spotted the SBs on the table, pointed at them, and shouted "Who the FUCK brought those." Which is what each of us wanted, but was too repressed, to say.