Beer

This story starts in July 1981. The Hunger Strikes in Northern Ireland were entering their grim final denouement, Reagan was invading Central America and warming the coals under the Cold War cauldron and Thatcher was just starting on her project to destroy the social cohesion that Britain had enjoyed since the war.

But I was oblivious to this. I was 16 and setting off on my first independent adventure.   The Father of one of my friends was the local station manager and had sourced cheap tickets for three of us to travel the country at our will. We borrowed a tent and packed the backpacks that had nestled in our cupboards since our days in the Scouts.

We ended up camping in sand dunes just outside Tralee in County Kerry. We had barely two pennies to rub together, so free accommodation was a priority. On our last night before heading home, we pooled our remaining cash and decided to execute a plan that had been bubbling through every conversation for the previous two weeks.  We planned to buy beer.

We approached the off-license warily. None of us could muster the hint of bum fluff on our upper lips and we looked as guilty as a guy in a mask and stripy jumper in an Art gallery.

Conor was chosen as the oldest looking and most confident. He approached the shop nervously and we waited outside for what seemed an eternity. Then he emerged, grinning from ear to ear and clutching a six-pack of Harp Lager to his chest.

We raced back to the tent and prized open three bottles. It would be years until we realised that beer should be served cold, but at that moment we didn’t care that the bottles we held were as warm as tea. We gulped them down greedily. I seem to remember a fight then breaking out. Same as it ever was, I guess.

We awoke the next morning and packed up for the trip home. We still had three bottles left and didn’t want to carry them. So, we drank them before we left. This grew into an urban myth that we had poured beer onto our cornflakes. The truth was more prosaic. We rose late as we did every day on that trip and were packed and ready to go at 2pm. I’ve started drinking earlier than that on many occasions.

It is now almost forty years since my first taste of the amber nectar and I’ve been a regular visitor to the well ever since. It took almost 18 months from that first venture into the world of beer before I had my second. By then, I was in full-time employment and able to stand my own round. I got drunk for the first time at a work Christmas party in December 1982 and at almost every Christmas party since.

I’d be reluctant to estimate how much beer I’ve drunk in the interim, but suffice to say that my sister once described me as a not too complicated mechanism for turning alcohol into urine.

But I sat in a pub last week, fresh from turning 56 and finally took some time to contemplate my relationship with beer. I’d been invited on a pub crawl around four of Auckland’s most famous craft beer pubs. We were there for the Fresh Hops Festival, an annual event when craft beer companies are able to extort even greater revenue from their punters than they normally do. I had just tucked into my third pint of the day, a cloudy Extra Pale Ale, when I realised that I don’t actually like this craft stuff. My companions were all searching for the hoppiest, darkest beers they could find. They wanted something that was as far away from the generic beers of Heineken and Carlsberg as possible.

In that moment, I realised that despite forty years of drinking the stuff, my tastes are still the same as they were in 1981. I like Lager. I’ll tolerate a Pilsner but anything with Ale in the title can disappear up its own arse, as far as I’m concerned.

I drink beer to be social, to loosen up conversation, and to get merry. I don’t drink it for the flavour. As long as it’s cold and refreshing I couldn’t care what it tastes like. I realise now that my favourite memories of drinking do not involve what was in the glass that I was holding. My memories are of the company or the venue. A thatched roof cottage in Doolin with a fiddle band playing and the Atlantic Ocean crashing outside. The bar in Raffles Hotel on a sultry afternoon in Singapore. The Great Northern in Melbourne on ten-dollar steak night. I probably drank Guinness in Doolin, Tiger Beer in Singapore and Carlton Draught in Melbourne but none of that matters to me.

Craft beer is now the assumed beer of choice for men of a certain age. You are expected to mock the generic, mass-produced beers in the way a fine diner mocks McDonalds. I’ve seen these phases before however. You see it with coffee, where instant coffee is frowned upon and unless the beans have been passed through the intestinal system of a Malaysian monkey, they are not acceptable.

I’ve seen it with Wine. Blue Nun used to the perfect gift at a dinner party, now it would be akin to bringing a bottle of petrol.

I’ve decided I’m too old for this. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks and I’m set in my ways. From now on, I’m only going to drink what I want and not be bullied into going with the crowd. I just hope that all the favourite places I’ve drunk in will be accessible in the future. That I can visit old friends and continue the odyssey of travel and adventure that I started in 1981. That one day we can celebrate an end to this pandemic. I’ll raise a glass to that.