These questions changed history and laid the foundations of humankind’s place in the universe. Who are we? What do we stand for?In August 2024, five young men in a London pub asked a different question.

How many beers had they enjoyed in their lifetimes? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? How long would it take to drink one million?One of these men is Charlie, a 31 year old TV producer from London, who I meet for a pint.

I wanted to know whether he was serious about trying to drink a million beers. “We were talking and the conversation turned from how long it would take to how we could actually do it,” he tells me. In 2024, he set up a WhatsApp group called One Million Beers Please, and invited a handful of close friends to share pictures of every frosty beverage they drank in a bid to reach a million.

“The rules were simple and haven’t changed: each pint posted is added to a total, no one chats online, the only interaction between members is through emojis.” Can a group of Brits sink a million pints? Just how did a joke among mates bloom into a community? “Friends began adding friends, and friends of friends,” he says as he takes a picture of our pints to post in the group, nudging the total number up to 92,002.

“Our phones overheated and crashed because of the amount of photos being uploaded.”And so it was with me. Charlie’s sister, a friend of mine, brought me into the fold. While some contributors post pictures of run-of-the-mill pub tables stacked with glasses of amber nectar, the now-global reach of the group means even the most ‘normal’ post can be a glimpse into a different world.

Pints sipped at elite ski chalets, under fluorescent street signs in Thailand, and at beer pong tournaments in Tennessee.The other type of photo shared is the selfie. The rule is ‘the stranger the better’: people necking their drinks on mountain tops, while wearing costumes and during acrobatic tricks. Someone gulped one down while posing with their seconds-old baby.Ed, a 54-year-old British expat banker living in Singapore, who was added to One Million Beers Please by a friend back in the UK, has found the app useful for making friends in a foreign land.

“It sounds silly but you are never alone drinking a beer,” he tells me. “I love it for meeting new, interesting people all over the world”. The pub has gone digital There are various factions.

A group of Texans monitor the count and call out mischievous behaviour, from video soliloquies on why people prefer cider (considered by many on the group to be blasphemy) to swiftly deleted pictures of penises concealed by pints. Horns were locked when a belligerent group of French saboteurs posted endless pictures of red wine; they were silently, ruthlessly expelled. Recently a contingent of Papua New Guineans posed with beers raised next to a fish the size of a Nissan Micra.At its best, the group feels like an extension of the pub, a way to feel a sense of community while I enjoy a beer alone.

Ste, a 41-year-old music rights executive from “the North” sums it up perfectly when he tells me it’s about companionship: “Life can be beautifully simple sometimes”.The group is explicitly not about drinking to excess. As a nation, we may sink billions of pints every year but any suggestion the nation’s pubs, those bastions of British culture, are purely for binge drinking would be doing these great institutions a disservice. Some of my earliest memories are weaving between the knees of my parents and their friends under pub tables after a Sunday roast.

Some of my closest friendships were forged surprisingly sober around the fire at The Lord Tredegar in Mile End. A ‘no pressure’ social media platform But this is a troubling time for Britain’s pubs. The British Beer and Pub Association estimates that nearly a fifth have called last orders for the final time since 2010, and 2023 alone saw the closure of 500 boozers.

The state of the industry is laid bare on the website ismypubfucked.com, which shows how the proposed hikes to business rates – now reversed, gladly – would have affected the nation’s boozers, with the worst-affected facing tax increases of more than half a million pounds. One Million Beers Please is a way to offer support, both moral and financial.There are now 857 members. They have access to a fully stocked merch store (caps come in at £25 a pop, although there’s a MOTM – Man of the Match – branded version that will set you back £100,000), a schedule of meet-ups and events, including a much anticipated game of Ou Est Le Poulet (involving teams of drinkers scouring local bars for a person in a chicken suit), as well as quiz nights. Sponsorship of the football team Old Boys Clapham FC means bespoke shirts are also available, and mem