Drink! How much is too much?
Prior to my visit to Masham the best beer I ever tasted was a drink of IPA* in Napa, California, USA, which is west of Ireland. I have no idea what made me order a beer in the middle of wine country, possibly it was because I was sitting in a pub with a micro-brewery attached and thought that if they were as serious around here as they seemed to be about ladies’ drinks, then they might take blokes’ drinking just as seriously, more probably because I like beer and I am an optimist.
I like micro-breweries or, as they were known a few decades ago, breweries. It’s really not that long ago that pubs used to brew their own beer and certainly the idea of site specific booze is appealing when one begins to tire of breweries the size of refineries and with about as much soul. Surely brewing should be about a lot more than just combining chemicals and adding a sachet of flavouring at the end. I’m not expecting actual magic but some alchemy would be nice.
Where we seem to be is huge multi-national corporations throwing together beer the same way they might throw together fertilizer, with about the same result when it comes to taste. There are other brewing companies who are more interested in being property developers and screw over their tenant landlords so that they can sell the pub to become…what exactly? Not a bank, that’s for sure, which in a way is a shame because in most cases turning a chain pub into a bank would simply be a case of looking out the old sign and putting some safety glass up at the bar. Then there are smaller breweries that sell to local areas and massive supermarkets.
And it’s the supermarkets where the problem with booze lies, because next to the bottles with the labels by a local artist and the beer by a local artisan, sit crates of beer brewed in a megabrewery. Go into the drinks aisle at Tesco or Asda and it’s like that scene at the end of ‘Raiders of the lost ark’ but with cases of Carling and Strongbow instead of wooden crates, there’s so much of the stuff.
One buys it cheap and drinks it as one would consume any discounted product – quickly and with little respect. This is why the Scottish Parliament’s idea of minimum alcohol pricing is such an excellent idea. It impacts on the sort of person who likes to drink cheap, coloured cider so often that for them ‘bluetooth’ is a medical condition rather than an option on their Nokia, but doesn’t touch the committed drinker, because he’s already paying well over the odds to booze anyway on something that was made using traditional methods (usually outlawed in conventional food praparation and involving a sheep), hence all the health and safety warnings on the bottle.
Minimum alcohol pricing, we are told, will not impact on those drinking in any pubs that still remain open, nor on the social drinker who likes a bottle or two of red with their lunch. It is aimed to impact on the sort of chap who considers that the correct beverage to have with lunch, or actually instead of lunch, is a bottle of supermarket cider. Claims that this is a tax on the poor has been vigorously denied, although a sneak peek at next year’s budget revealing a tax on shell suit bottoms, tattoos and saying the word ‘fuck’ on public transport do all point to a strategy of social engineering.
The correct, though unlikely, response to a minimum alcholoh tax is a micro-brewery movement producing not artisan beers, but artisan discount cider. One can imagine that around the country, illicit micro-breweries will be churning out ‘tru-blu’ artisan sippin’ cider and carpet cleaner.
* Not a pint, some sort of 330cl measure. Shocking, I know the colonials overthrew the yoke of British oppression but, really, they could have kept the pint as the standard measure of all that is right and just and true and godly. Honestly, without the pint measure, how do you know how hungover to feel the next day?
I like micro-breweries or, as they were known a few decades ago, breweries. It’s really not that long ago that pubs used to brew their own beer and certainly the idea of site specific booze is appealing when one begins to tire of breweries the size of refineries and with about as much soul. Surely brewing should be about a lot more than just combining chemicals and adding a sachet of flavouring at the end. I’m not expecting actual magic but some alchemy would be nice.
Where we seem to be is huge multi-national corporations throwing together beer the same way they might throw together fertilizer, with about the same result when it comes to taste. There are other brewing companies who are more interested in being property developers and screw over their tenant landlords so that they can sell the pub to become…what exactly? Not a bank, that’s for sure, which in a way is a shame because in most cases turning a chain pub into a bank would simply be a case of looking out the old sign and putting some safety glass up at the bar. Then there are smaller breweries that sell to local areas and massive supermarkets.
And it’s the supermarkets where the problem with booze lies, because next to the bottles with the labels by a local artist and the beer by a local artisan, sit crates of beer brewed in a megabrewery. Go into the drinks aisle at Tesco or Asda and it’s like that scene at the end of ‘Raiders of the lost ark’ but with cases of Carling and Strongbow instead of wooden crates, there’s so much of the stuff.
One buys it cheap and drinks it as one would consume any discounted product – quickly and with little respect. This is why the Scottish Parliament’s idea of minimum alcohol pricing is such an excellent idea. It impacts on the sort of person who likes to drink cheap, coloured cider so often that for them ‘bluetooth’ is a medical condition rather than an option on their Nokia, but doesn’t touch the committed drinker, because he’s already paying well over the odds to booze anyway on something that was made using traditional methods (usually outlawed in conventional food praparation and involving a sheep), hence all the health and safety warnings on the bottle.
Minimum alcohol pricing, we are told, will not impact on those drinking in any pubs that still remain open, nor on the social drinker who likes a bottle or two of red with their lunch. It is aimed to impact on the sort of chap who considers that the correct beverage to have with lunch, or actually instead of lunch, is a bottle of supermarket cider. Claims that this is a tax on the poor has been vigorously denied, although a sneak peek at next year’s budget revealing a tax on shell suit bottoms, tattoos and saying the word ‘fuck’ on public transport do all point to a strategy of social engineering.
The correct, though unlikely, response to a minimum alcholoh tax is a micro-brewery movement producing not artisan beers, but artisan discount cider. One can imagine that around the country, illicit micro-breweries will be churning out ‘tru-blu’ artisan sippin’ cider and carpet cleaner.
* Not a pint, some sort of 330cl measure. Shocking, I know the colonials overthrew the yoke of British oppression but, really, they could have kept the pint as the standard measure of all that is right and just and true and godly. Honestly, without the pint measure, how do you know how hungover to feel the next day?
Labels: Alcohol, Drink, Drinking, Supermarkets
1 Comments:
I'm all for minimum alcohol pricing...mostly because it would save me a ton of money, but also because I think it would solve a lot of societal issues...of which I could go on and list, but would rather get back to my stiff drink and....well, I would say dinner, but I can't seem to afford it so I'm having to make rather difficult choices. My buddy Darwin and I prefer to call it "survival of the fittest". My super liver can and will handle any blood alcohol levels that I might incur due to reduced alcohol costs and those who can't, well...probably deserve to kick the bucket anyway...hence, solving our healthcare cost issues, etc, etc.
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