Imagine you had to introduce beer to an environment where it was all but unknown. People don’t drink much, but when they do drink, it’s almost always wine. So there are few pubs or bars—not as we know them—and hardly any selling draft beer. There are restaurants and cafes, and coffee shops that arguably serve similar functions, but there is no culture at all of sitting down together and consuming an alcoholic beverage that is long and cool.
Publication: All About Beer
Surviving Being Over-Entertained
Swearing, when judiciously employed, is brilliant. Sometimes, there’s simply no non-cuss word that will do, no mild alternative that can add the same perfect spice and flavor to a sentence. Arguably, one of the sweariest – and certainly one of the most quotable – films of all time is the Brit cult comedy Withnail and I. And some of its best swearing relates to the after-effects of booze. The titular Withnail, an out-of-work actor, spends three-quarters of the film drunk, and the rest of the time dealing with the fallout. His potty-mouthed evocations of alcohol-induced suffering are nothing short of poetic.
Blind Eyes, Bribes and Beers on the High Seas
“The only people who drink in this bar are sailors, drug dealers and whores. Shall we go in?”
Two hours after nodding mutely in reply to the cargo ship’s captain, eating cake at a Brazilian prostitute’s birthday party while my seafaring companion told the gathered ladies how I’d slept through my watch the night I was supposed to be keeping lookout for pirates, I wondered again if my beer obsession had gone a little too far.
Mythbusting IPA
Most people would call it crazy, but the crazies call it ‘living archeology’: if material remains of our past no longer exist, we have to recreate past times as best we can in order to figure out the truth of how people lived back then. It drives some to live as bronze-age villagers, others to dress up as Roman legionnaires and go ten rounds with Gaulish barbarians. It drove me to recreate the greatest journey beer has ever made, an 18,000 mile sea journey that hasn’t existed for 140 years.
Burton Beers Today
A visit to Burton-on-Trent can still yield delights for the discerning beer drinker. These beers may not fit the American idea of what an IPA should be, but they are all heirs to the tradition and have much to recommend them.
Burton-on-Trent – The World’s Most Important Beer Town
Ask your typical British beer drinker what Burton-on-Trent is famous for, and you might not get the answer you were expecting. They’ll probably frown, think for a second, then say, “Oh yeah, the FA Cup upset last year!”
Rounds and Reciprocity
Let’s call him Dave (that was, after all, his name). Years ago, when my friends and I were on the cusp of legal drinking age, we’d go to the pub every Friday and Saturday night, simply because we could. Standing there self-consciously holding our pints, trying to grow wispy moustaches, we were a bunch of boys who together became men.