Michael Jackson is a man after my own heart, and liver. He is a man with a mission, and that mission is beer. Not the stuff most of us consume in our local, but the real thing: proper beer, in a multitude of varieties, from the growing ranks of microbreweries around the world. His opinions on some of the world's most popular beers are scarcely printable, and he believes drinkers who stick to these well-known brews simply don't know what they are missing.
Jackson - popularly known as the Beer Hunter, following his successful television series - is without any doubt the world's pre-eminent authority on beer. He is big in Britain (his native land) huge in Belgium (where he is feted as a hero in that beer-loving nation) and enormous in North America, where the microbrewery business is thriving. His books on beer have been translated into 15 languages and have sold more than three million copies. As a sideline, he writes on whisky, on which he is an equally respected authority. He also knows a thing or two about cocktails.
For a beer enthusiast who can sample up to 500 different brews in a typical five-week US tour, Michael Jackson is himself not all that big, though you would guess correctly that he enjoys his food and drink. Indeed part of his mission, which he takes very seriously, is to encourage the consumption of food with the appropriate complementary beer, rather than with wine (to which he is not averse either). He has written on this subject in these pages in the past, enthusing over combinations such as San Francisco's Anchor Liberty Ale with oysters in pancetta and a Scotch ale with a chocolate tartlet.
A fairly regular visitor to Ireland, Jackson was in Dublin recently to officiate at the All-Ireland Independent Brewers' Festival. The party to announce the winners was appropriately held in the Porterhouse in Temple Bar, a "brew-pub" (i.e. microbrewery and pub) familiar to lovers of real beer: not too surprisingly, its own excellent products won a number of awards. The Supreme Champion award went to Scullions Cask Ale, from the Hilden Brewery, in Lisburn, Co Antrim.
So how does Mr Jackson cope with this kind of itinerant, beer-guzzling life, and more to the point, does he need a research assistant? He suggests it is not as easy as it looks, and admits that if it's a happy life, as it certainly appears to be, it's not necessarily a healthy life for a grown man (he's in his mid-fifties): "I don't necessarily drink high volumes, but my real problem is my irregular lifestyle. There's a lot of travel and stress and interruption of sleep."
It can't help either to have the temptations of one's office next door to home, when the office contains 1,500 different beers. Playboy magazine suggested Jackson take a medical and write up the findings for the magazine, but he refused: "It would be like asking a boxer to undergo a medical." He regularly suffers from hangovers - for which he offers no miracle cure, apart from an Irish fry-up - but regards them as an occupational hazard. Jackson is more interested in simply pushing his message about the goodness of good beer, and he has certainly played a part in the growing appreciation of microbrewery products. "When I started writing, there were fewer than 50 small breweries in the US - now there are over 1,500. I used to go to the US and never find a decent beer, but today you can get about 50 good beers in New York alone."
In this State there are now 10 microbreweries, and real Irish ale fans will have been cheered by the very recent success of the Tipperary Brewing Company, one of whose ales has been shortlisted at the Millennium Beer Competition in England as one of the top three in the world for its category: final judging will take place in London on April 4th.
Michael Jackson describes himself as an eclectic eater and drinker: "I can't understand people who aren't, who think it's elitist to drink wine. Nobody who seriously likes wine says they don't drink beer. Oz Clarke for example is very keen on beer. You get thirsty drinking wine, you know." (I know).
He is keen on the "hearty eating" cuisine of Belgium and its enthusiasm for genuine beer: "You could be offered a specific beer as an aperitif, then wine with dinner. In Germany, too, people would often consume beer with their food, and drink wine after dinner."
Jackson notes that the Belgo beer-restaurant which recently arrived in Temple Bar is part of an international chain: "In New York there are five or six other places like that - there is almost a Belgian beer-restaurant district there, just as there is in Philadelphia."
There cannot be many beverages turned down by a man who has sampled an American home-brew containing cannabis, and a Dutch lager containing chlorophyll: is there anything Michael Jackson won't drink? "I don't drink mass-market lagers, nor massmarket vodkas. I like vodkas with flavour, but most are just neutral alcohol."
He also believes vodkas are greatly over-priced, comparing them with the complexity of a 12-year-old single malt Scotch, which can justify its high price.
As for Guinness, he respects the success the company has made of the brand internationally, but is no longer so keen on the brew itself: "I used to regard it as a world classic, and it may still be, but it has lost a lot of character." "And it's also served so damned cold".
And what about Budweiser, the best-selling beer in the world? "A lot of effort goes into making it - but that's also true for Kraft cheese slices."
Nor does he think much of the advertising campaigns mounted by massmarket beers: "They encourage invention because all these beers are much the same and there's not much to say about the actual drink itself." I ask the eminent Beer Hunter (and Whisky Chaser, and Maven of Malt, as he is also known) if there is a philosophy of beer. "Well . . . when we were kids we knew that beer was a consciousness-changing drug, which would make us less shy. Now it's advertised with sexual overtones. It's like losing some of the rituals of courtship, or of sociability around the dinner table. It's a shame . . . to lose out on a lot of pleasure."
Finally - more out of habit than anything else - I complain to the man with this enviable job about the price of beer in general. "Price? I wasn't aware that you could actually pay for beer."
Michael Jackson goes to work on a beer, left, and poses with some favourites, above