Pubs good for the soul: Official The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) has perhaps merely confirmed what all right-minded people already know: that those who have a local boozer in which to quaff ale and chew the fat with mates are "significantly happier" than wretched souls who do not. CAMRA asked Oxford Uni's Professor Robin Dunbar to look into the link between …
THIS MUST BE WRONG
THIS MUST BE BANNED
WE ALL KNOW THAT THERE IS NO SAFE AMOUNT OF ALCOHOL
and alcohol free beer isn't ever going to make anyone happy.
Only miserable tea-totallers are entitled to be happy
Our government has spoken
(But please continue to buy booze coz we can't afford to lose the tax revenue)
Only miserable tea-totallers are entitled to be happy
How very bloody dare you!
I don't wish to be a grammar nazi, or a pendant, I make enough typos of my own. But the very concept of changing teetotal to tea-total fills me with horror!
I am currently suffering from serious mental pain at the terrible dilemma this has forced me to consider. Which would I prefer to live without, tea or booze? The mental cruelty of the quesiton that your use of language has implied is too terrible to contemplate. I'm afraid I'm now forced to contact my lawyers - and you may await your trial at the Hague for crimes against humanity.
The horror! The horror. The horror...
> I am currently suffering from serious mental pain at the terrible dilemma this has forced me to consider. Which would I prefer to live without, tea or booze? The mental cruelty of the quesiton
I'm very sorry
I truly am
I feel your pain
I too couldn't chose between tea and booze
In my defence I can only say that I've not had any booze yet today so can't be expected to get my spelling nor my grammar right.
So you noticed the section where he was quoted as saying;
"Friendship and community are probably the two most important factors influencing our health and wellbeing. Making and maintaining friendships, however, is something that has to be done face-to-face: the digital world is simply no substitute.
"Given the increasing tendency for our social life to be online rather than face-to-face, having relaxed accessible venues where people can meet old friends and make new ones becomes ever more necessary."
No mention of pubs, this is about face-to-face vs online.
[DISCLAIMER]
For my sins I'm still a fee paying member of CAMRA
This post has been deleted by its author
"Giving beer a head is a cultural thing."
True that. Here in Spain, the preference is for a ridiculously large head for the reason that it keeps the beer fizzy for longer (it does - we have tested this scientifically with a control pint and everything).
Brits tend to prefer a more minimal head because:
1) Beer tends to be more expensive in the UK so we want as much of it as will possibly fit into the glass
2) Due to the way we're trained to get the desired result in a limited amount of time (licencing laws) a pint doesn't tend to live long enough to go flat anyway.
Giving beer a head is a cultural thing.
At the risk of being prejudice in England it tends to be a North / South divide topic.
Larger usually has a head and is usually fizzy. In Holland it is (or was) a legal requirement for a glass of beer (larger) to have 2 fingers worth of froth on the top. So barmen with fat fingers are popular with publicans because that means there will be less beer in the glass. The 2 fingers are counted as being part of the legal measure.
With most real ales there is no fizz and so the head is largely made in the nozzle of the pump (beer engine). A barman can usually choose whether to put a head on the pint or not, it's in the wrist action. When I used to work behind the bar at a rugby club, for customers I didn't know I'd put a head on the beer if they had a northern accent and pour them flat if they didn't. Visitors were often intrigued by this and you'd get customers asking you to to pour out successions of pints alternately with and without the head without changing anything on the pump.
Brings back misty memories from when I were a lad. Dow ale was selling like hotcakes in the sixties thanks to their wildly popular TV commercial which went something like this...
SCENE: Western frontier town, local saloon
ACTION: Huge bar brawl, cowboy gets tossed out into dusty street.
CUE: Drop-dead beautiful actress (probably in mini dress, can't remember). As cowboy, sprawled out on his belly looks up to honey, she purrs, "Wouldn't a Dow go good now?
That's all it took to launch Dow into the big leagues with Carling, Molson and Labatt in Canada. Unfortunately, three heavy Dow drinkers in Quebec died in quick succession. It turns out that Dow was adding some agent to their brew to make the head last longer. It had been tested and approved for consumption, but nobody allowed for the amounts that these three boozers gargled, (over 24 pints a day).
When the national media showed thousands, or maybe even millions of gallons on Dow beer being poured into brewery sewers, running down the street, that was it for Dow. Their sales fell off a cliff and never recovered. In 5 decades of chugging in Canada, I never saw another person drinking Dow. Lesson... don't mess with our beer.
I just Googled Dow Brewery. It was not related to Dow Chemicals. There were 50 cases resulting in 20 deaths.
On a not related note, my father worked for Union Carbide (in the unrelated Flame Coatings Division) at the time of the Bhopal tragedy. His fellow workers were assured by management at the time that the cause of the leak was Indian bureaucracy nixing expensive safeguards to prevent such leaks. Indian Government-controlled banks and the Indian public held a 49.1 percent stake in the plant. I note with interest that Dow Chemical bought Union Carbide 18 years later.
In the dim and distant past I was involved with patents and trademarks. One of our industrial chemical clients had a range of trademarks for food grade foaming agents, mainly for beer. The stuff is still around, despite Camra's excellent work.
The traditional way of encouraging the head in Real Ale is to add a small quantity of wheat to the malt in the mash tun. This is why St Austell beers have a great head, despite (usually) not being served through a sparkler.
"Visitors were often intrigued by this and you'd get customers asking you to to pour out successions of pints alternately with and without the head without changing anything on the pump."
"Wait, I missed it. Pour another one; let me see what you did there? Damn, missed it again..."
Because:
You can have a beer.
Play darts with your mates.
Have a beer.
Chat with your mates.
Have a beer.
Order some excellent bar snacks.
Have a beer.
Chat up the barmaid/man
Have a beer.
Play dominoes.
Have a beer.
Order a cab home from Uber and try not to get shot for looking a bit queasy.
CAMRA says that boozers "are increasingly under threat of demolition or being converted to another use by large developers with 29 pubs closing every week"
Save the pubs. Some day I'm going to go back to the mother land and sit in one of those pubs. Can't do that if they all close.
That being said, I'll have to find a proper brewery from which to drink. I've had some of that liquid you Brits call 'beer' (and that funny German stuff too), and it's pretty awful. Even that swirly Irish stuff they call a stout is not that great. Although, I may be spoiled for choice living in the U.S. Pacific North West. :D
@Dakooba
Thanks for pointing that out. I've had Bass, Guiness, Harp, etc. They are all unenjoyable. Although I can handle one Guinness. Beyond that and it it makes my stomach feel - not right.
Gotta love beer, though. Brings all kinds together no matter what the preference.
> I've had Bass, Guiness, Harp, etc. They are all unenjoyable.
Hmmm
Has anyone sold Harp on this side of the puddle since 1977? I hope not!
The Bass I've had in the US has absolutely nothing to do with the Bass over here where it's a very nice real ale. Mind even if they did sell the real stuff in the US it would almost certainly be served at the wrong temperature. I used to frequent a pub in Cupertino across the road from what is now I guess Apple but didn't used to be. They used to sell Fuller's beers but ice cold. It was like drinking warm white wine or ice cold red wine or port (the real reason the English have been at war with France since our ancestors dug out the channel is because those damn foreigners drink port from the fridge!). It just doesn't work. I always used to have to order 2 pints at the start of the evening. That way while you suffered the first one, the second one had time to come up to temperature. It still doesn't taste quite right but it helps.
Guinness? well that depends on what sort.It's an acquired taste. Then again there is Guinness and there is Guinness it depends on what you were brought up on. Me I grew up near Park Royal so that's the taste I acquired. Not that I mind the stuff they sell in Dublin :-)
I seem to remember that Samuel Adams does quite a passable Stout.
My favorite pub in town does British style pours. Room temperature kegs and glasses. Love it. At home, the IPA's, ales and reds are in the fridge and pour into freezer cold glasses. The porters and stouts are garage temp into a warm glass. (Russian imperial stouts are my favorite - and on NO2 it is even better)
Sam Adams. Meh. When I first started drinking beer it was passable. I've gone back to in in recent years and found it to be pretty mass produced tasting. They've even tried to get in on the micro brew vibe and put some beers in 22oz bottles. Artsy labels and cool names. I tried their IPA. And promptly poured it down the drain it was so awful.
Drink on!
Living in the US on and off for a number of years (16 years ago), I always enjoyed Sam Adams. Haven't tried it in the last ten though. I can imagine it has gone downhill - a requirement for much larger production volumes and absolute consistency (tends towards the least common denominator) makes that almost inevitable. What a shame.
*"...Has anyone sold Harp on this side of the puddle since 1977? I hope not!..."*
You've obviously not been to Ireland [or parts of Scotland] recently. Harp lager is 'brewed' [for want of a more petrochemical sounding word] by Guinness and found everywhere in Ireland that its more famous stablemate is.
> Well, one day, you might progress onto beer...
Or switch to a proper drink. Cider. Wiv bits in it. As bought fresh from the farm.
I can drink lots of cider/scrumpy with no problems. Likewise red wine. One pint of beer == hangover. Except German/Austrian Weissbeer - that I can also drink lots of.
I recall an anecdote from one of my friends recounting the time they were working in a northern bar.
A customer, most likely from the saarrff, ordered a pint and bleated at the barman "That's not a pint"
The barman took the beer glass back and examined it, declaring "Yes, you're right" and promptly poured some off into the drip tray and handed it back.
It took some explaining to the customer, that northern glasses have a pint mark on the side allowing for an inch or so of head.
How disappointing it was to hear that the industry refused to adopt this very sensible and fair glass as a national standard.
I can vouch for this having worked in a southern pub back in the early 80's
We had a shipment of oversized "pint to the line" glasses arrive and no matter how much explaining or demonstrating with measuring jugs was done we regularly had punters complaining about being short changed over how much beer they were getting
In the end the landlord decided to just remove the larger glasses and revert back to the standard sized ones
Some years ago, I was forced to wait several hours for a visa in central London. By sheer good fortune the pub opposite the embassy had just been refurbed and was now open for business and by even more good fortune had Leffe Blonde on draught!
Jackpot was finding out that none of the staff present had worked out what the line a (very long) way down the side of a large Leffe glass was for. This rather serious oversight meant that it worked out somewhat cheaper to drink than the rest of their offerings, being pretty bloody close to a "buy one, get one free" deal.
Yes TeeCee, yes TC. You hit pay dirt with that one.
I tended to force my luck by presenting my very own northern glass in southern pubs, for an extra inch of beer. I was a poor student after all.
Worked every time, although times have changed so much, it is more likely they'd take the glass and put it to be washed, before grabbing a hideous flower vase...which is a whole new point of ire I have with the trade.
Yes - this modern thing for washing a glass every time really annoys me. I want to get a glass at the beginning of the evening, and hang on to it until the end even if I drink from different pumps. This used to be the proper way to drink, but now the bastards will insist on nicking the glass. Some won't even let me cling on the glass if I ask, mumbling "elfin safety and iGene rules" when challenged.
Some of these comments make me smile. Over here we have a plague of pubs selling 'craft' beers, the current fad being IPAs which are supposed to be India Pale Ales but which are actually over-sweet American-style beers. As a local writer has recently observed, most craft beers taste like they've been strained through a donkey. I think it takes a long time to learn to make good beer, and not every one can actually do it, although I have manfully volunteered to continue the experimental tastings.
*"..I may be spoiled for choice living in the U.S. Pacific North West..."*
Being accustomed to those insipid concoctions Americans call "beer", I think it's more likely you don't actually know what beer's supposed to taste like.
And, if you happen to be a "bourbon" drinker too, I have more bad news for you: whiskey's not supposed to taste like aftershave, either.
Lately, my friends have been gathering at my place to catch up, and to try the real beer I've been brewing.
Amber Ale, English Bitter, Irish Cream Ale, Munich Lager, Ginger Beer (both alcoholic and non alcoholic for the designated driver), Cider, Cerveza, and currently have a Ruby Porter and a Sparkling Ale in vats fermenting away. Got the makings for a spiced mead, and Weiss beer once the current batch is done.
They pay me back by bringing the sacrificial lamb (or other animal) for the bbq, snacks, and saving the bottles of the generic beers they drink at home. One even brought over the pool table he had in his mancave, once it became apparent there was more to offer in my mancave than his.
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