One Million Beers Please, and no conversation: I may have found the perfect WhatsApp group

Because for a few months I’ve become quietly obsessed with a WhatsApp group called One Million Beers Please.

It might actually be one of the best WhatsApp groups ever created (sorry local neighbourhood watch chat).

That’s not because the idea is massively clever. In fact, it’s brilliantly stupid. A few years ago a group of mates sitting in a London pub started wondering how many beers they’d collectively drunk in their lifetimes. Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Which naturally led to the only conclusion a group of lads could reach after a few pints. Why don’t we see if we can get to a million?

So they started counting. And then other people joined in. And one of the people in on the ground was someone I know

The rules are very basic. Every pint gets photographed. Every pint counts towards the total, you just take the number before your pint and add however many beers you have in your photo.

There is absolutely no chatting. No arranging nights out. No endless discussions about dates that never work. No memes. No political arguments. No “sorry, only just seen this”. If you like someone’s pint you throw an emoji at it. If you don’t, you carry on scrolling. That’s it.

It’s social interaction for people who don’t necessarily want the social interaction.

I absolutely love it. My biggest concern is forgetting to upload a pint. I've actually turned down a cocktail in recent weeks because I couldn't upload a photo.

I’m an investigative journalist, which means a surprising amount of my life happens over a pint. Sources are far more likely to open up in the corner of a decent pub than they are sitting under fluorescent lights in an office meeting room.

Some of the best stories I’ve worked on have started with someone quietly saying, “Fancy grabbing a beer?” So these days I’ve developed the slightly awkward habit of interrupting conversations with military officers, security consultants or defence officials to explain that before either of us touches our drink, I just need a quick photograph of both pints for a WhatsApp group.

It has become really difficult to explain with a straight face.

“Honestly, it’s for a group trying to get to a million beers...”

You can almost see them trying to decide if they should actually be telling me anything or if I have lost the plot.

The only bit I’ve really struggled with is the selfie.

It took me weeks to post my first selfie. There’s a strange pressure to it because the accepted standard is that the more ridiculous the setting, the better. People have posted pints on mountain summits, in fancy dress, on holidays, after sporting events and in situations that probably shouldn’t involve alcohol at all.

But, I’m already looking forward to September because our annual lads’ pilgrimage to Butlin’s for an adult 90s Weekender should produce some properly unhinged entries.

If there was ever a place designed for bizarre pint selfies, it’s several thousand adults dressed as they’re convinced it’s still 1997 while singing along to The Spice Girls with a plastic pint in hand. Those photos are going to be off the scale.

I also belong to another group where we post wrist shots of whatever watch we’re wearing that day, which creates an unexpected logistical problem. It’s incredibly tempting to take one photograph featuring both the pint and the watch and save yourself the effort.

I tried that once. The response from One Million Beers Please was an immediate thumbs down, they were not a fan.

Not because the pint wasn’t up to scratch, but because I’d contaminated it with watch content. It was a useful reminder that nobody in this group cares whether you’ve got a Rolex, a Casio or something you found in the back of a drawer. The only thing that matters is what’s in the glass.

There’s actually something quite refreshing about that. At a time when almost every photo online feels like it’s trying to say something about the person posting it, this group is gloriously free from all of that. Nobody is pretending they’re living a better life than anyone else. Nobody is selling anything. Nobody is crafting a personal brand, it’s just a pint and photo.

It's made me far more curious as a drinker. I'll see someone in the group post a beer from a tiny brewery in Poland, a Japanese lager I've never heard of or some strange-looking Belgian ale, and before long I'm ordering a couple of cans online just to see what all the fuss is about. Half the fun is discovering something I'd never normally have picked up, simply because someone else happened to be drinking it.

I also think it scratches an itch a lot of us didn’t realise we had. Life gets busier. Friends move away. Jobs become more demanding. You don’t see people as often as you’d like, but every now and then your phone lights up with a stranger in a country pub in Yorkshire, someone else in an airport bar in Singapore or someone enjoying a Guinness after work in Dublin, and without anyone saying a single word you get this quiet reminder that everything is alright.

Do I think we’ll actually reach one million beers?

Absolutely. My entirely unscientific prediction is sometime around 2032.

And when pint number one million finally arrives, I doubt there’ll be a trophy or a speech or a commemorative plaque. Someone will upload the picture, the group will respond with the appropriate emojis, and within a few minutes someone else will post number one million and one.

Which, somehow, feels like exactly the right ending.

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