Homer Simpson said it best: "Mmm Beeeeeeeer." To borrow a phrase, beer is a drink made for men who enjoy being men.

After all that's what beer is ? a man's drink made in a manly way, by cultivating and harvesting crops and by using large manly equipment and lots of manly fire in order to create a drink that is rich and frothy and served in a frosted glass that manly men set down with a satisfying thunk on a good bar top.

If makeup and heels are generally the accepted domain of women, then hops, barley and reinheitsgebot are the male antithesis.

As boys, we grow up grabbing dad a cold one from the fridge on braai days and then listening to that satisfying release of gas as the can of Ohlsonns or Lion (remember them?) was cracked open. One day we knew that that beer would be our beer. And that satisfying crack of the beer opening was our rite of passage to adulthood and satisfaction.

Maybe it's those memories of the Halcyon days watching dad and his mates chewing fat over a frosty or maybe it's the constant subliminal messaging from sports and the alcohol sponsorships that does it. Whatever it is, my first reaction to the barman's nod is, "What beer do you have?"

So it is beyond me that for some reason or other at a function the other night I decided to shoot for a new drink.

So I plumped for a whisky instead. Double. On the rocks. It's still manly ? not exactly a Cosmopolitan with an umbrella is it? And yet I felt rather naked as I roamed the room hobnobbing with the ladies and chest bumping with other manly men etc etc.

Without a bottle in my hand I found it hard to get my point across in conversation. My natural "pointer" (read bottle) had been replaced by a rather futile tumbler which I found to be rather clumsy when gesticulating with purpose.

My "manliness" was constrained by the clinking ice in my short crystal glass. One can quite easily adopt a thoughtful, intelligent and yet meaningful masculine stance with a beer in hand. With whisky I fell all too easily into the foppishness of Hugh Grant ? wispy and not quite there.

A bottle too is easier to hold when eating the finger food provided at such events as these. Free hands are essential in the balancing act of drinking and eating at the same time. Again anything in a glass, be it tumblers or highballs makes this grazing negotiation immensely difficult.

I went the scotch route because I had noticed the stomach of a newborn Free State farmer on myself post-World Cup. I had been quietly goading myself into dropping a bit of weight and getting back to "pre-season" fitness. Whisky however true or untrue it is, seemed to me the slimmer's choice by comparison to anything served from a keg.

Of course I could have gone the lite beer route. The path where one tries to lie to the brain that what you are imbibing is actually beer and not strained cold Darjeeling with bubbles. As much as the producers of light beer and "near beer" ramble on about the closeness of their product to the real thing, it will never be.

Just as a bloke driving his wife's SLK with the top down will never be seen as Camel-man material, beer can never be served light. "Lite" defeats the point of the existence of beer.

Even women drinking beer looks strange to me. If you're not a female lorry driver from Copenhagen on your way to deliver a cargo of coal to the depot, then beer in female hands looks very out of place. Sure women do partake in the odd Peroni, but let's be honest it just doesn't look good in the hands of the opposite sex.

I think this is the crux of the manly beer argument. We don't drink it as much for the taste as we do for what beer represents for us. Sure it quenches the thirst on a hot day but so does an apple juice. Still, we wouldn't drink apple juice at a bar. It's just not done.

At the end of the day we all want to have a little bit of that "hard day's night" look about us. From the potato farmer supping on a pint of warm Guinness through to the Stock Exchange whiz kid sipping frosted ale, we all want that moment where we get to pop the cap on a cold one from our fridge or watch the golden liquid be poured from the tap at our local.

It's our reward moment. The one that tells us that the job is done, the stress is now over and we can claim our right to enjoy ourselves. The beer we earned.

Sadly for me whisky just doesn't cut it. Three kilograms overweight or not, I'll have to stick to ale for now.