Categories
Beer history Generalisations about beer culture

What is the evolutionary advantage of booze?

A fun question to ask of any apparently irrational human behaviour is “What’s the evolutionary advantage?” Consider drunkenness, for example.

Ray recently read William Golding’s 1955 novel The Inheritors. It’s about a band of Neanderthals struggling for survival in the forests of prehistoric Europe as a new threat emerges – Homo sapiens, AKA modern man, AKA us.

It’s an extremely thought-provoking book in many ways as Golding attempts to demonstrate that the seeds of modern human behaviour, from war to capitalism, have long roots. But of course the thing that stood out for Ray, and that got us talking, is its treatment of drinking.

The Neanderthals (who think of themselves as “the people”) don’t drink alcohol because they don’t have the technology to make it, sophisticated as they are in many ways.

When “the new people” turn up, however, two Neanderthals, Lok and Fa, observe them as they gather round their campfire at night after a day’s trekking. We see what’s going on through Lok’s eyes:

His nose caught the scent of what they drank. It was sweeter and fiercer than the other water, it was like the fire and the fall. It was a bee-water, smelling of honey and wax and decay, it drew toward and repelled, it frightened and excited like the people themselves… The girl Tanakil was lying in front of one of the caves, flat on her back as if she were dead. A man and a woman were fighting and kissing and screeching and another man was crawling round and round the fire like a moth with a burnt wing. Round and round he went, crawling, and the other people took no notice of him but went on with their noise.

They’re drinking some form of mead from beakers – which the Neandarthals, who don’t even have the simple technology of cups, conceive of as round stones. This orgy of drunkenness continues for several pages until the humans drift off to their caves, or sneak off to shag in the woods.

It’s easy to imagine Golding making observations, and taking notes, in the pubs of Salisbury on Saturday night. He was also an alcoholic and had plenty of personal experience of how it felt to binge yourself silly.

Later in the book, Lok and Fa find a jar of mead abandoned in a human camp and get drunk themselves. Golding reiterates the point that the liquid is repellent and attractive at the same time. It burns, but in a way that is strangely addictive.

Having previously been peaceful, rather gentle creatures, the mead also immediately makes them aggressive, competitive, bold, and – this seems important – visionary. Lok finds himself having big ideas, and envisioning great success, the limits of his mind having expanded.

Unfortunately, he also finds that he cannot walk in a straight line and that the trees themselves have become unstable. And the next morning, he has his first hangover: “Lok opened his eyes and yelped with pain for he seemed to be looking straight into the sun.”

Why did we evolve to get drunk?

Golding’s book is fiction, and it’s old. To answer this question we sought some more recent, more academic texts.

Unsurprisingly, it’s been much discussed, often with a focus on understanding why people today (like Golding) might be driven to drink so much, and so often, that it becomes harmful.

This paper from 2023 describes it as an ‘evolutionary’ mismatch: something that was useful in the early days of the species, when resources were scarce, is less helpful in an age of abundance.

This is also the argument for why we crave sugar and fat, both of which are bad for us. In the deep past, we evolved to consume as much as sugar and fat as possible, when it was available, to see us through winter, or periods of famine.

In the case of booze, the suggestion is that perhaps we evolved to be attracted to the smell of ethanol because it might help us find rotting fruit, and so find the trees from which it had fallen. Or, related to the point above, eating rotten, alcoholic fruit might have given us the munchies, stimulating our appetites, so we would consume even more fat and sugar.

Another suggestion is that the ability to process ethanol was itself an evolutionary advantage, meaning that some of our ancestors could eat the ‘bad’ fruit that had fallen on the ground. 

Individuals who could “metabolise ethanol” could eat more, and continue to function while pissed. So, at a very fundamental level, we learned to associate drunkenness with pleasure and satisfaction.

But what about getting drunk together, as a social activity?

But why did we evolve to go to the pub together?

One paper from 2017 suggests that there are multiple benefits attached to getting drunk deliberately, together:

[There] is an implicit assumption that its hedonic (physiological reward) and anxiolytic (reduction of anxiety or stress) properties are the main reasons for its universal use. However, alcohol also plays an important role in social contexts by reducing our social inhibitions, as well as being a potent trigger of the endorphin system… In other words, it functions much like the many other behavioural mechanisms (including laughter, singing, dancing and storytelling…) that are used to trigger the endorphin system so as to facilitate large-scale (i.e. communal as opposed to dyadic) social bonding. The other possibility is that alcohol in some way affects our social or cognitive skills in ways that allow us to function more effectively in social situations.

We think this can be interpreted to mean that societies which drink together become stronger overall, as a unit, and so gain a competitive advantage over other ‘tribes’.

From our own perspective, as generally well-behaved, rather uptight 20th century specimens, there’s something in this.

When we’re tipsy with friends and relatives, we express our feelings more freely. It helps us resolve conflicts and strengthen connections.

And, of course, we know many couples who got together after, in effect, drinking mead together around the campfire before sneaking off into the woods.

Main image adapted from the profile of the restoration of the head of a Neanderthal man via the Wellcome Collection.

Categories
News

News, nuggets and longreads 16 March 2023: Hole in my Shoe

Every Saturday we round up the best beer writing from the past week. This time, we’ve got pandemic memories, solo drinking, and Dublin pubs.

First, some news, from the ever-reliable Beer Today: Rooster’s has acquired Daleside, another brewery of a similar vintage, also based in Harrogate. Why is this interesting? Because small real-ale focused breweries don’t often merge or take each other over, even though it might make sense for them to do so. Daleside used to have quite a reputation back in the days of Michael Jackson. We occasionally found their beers in corner shops in East London. But they’ve disappeared from the scene somewhat in recent years, and now it seems their management team is ready to retire. We expect more of this in years to come.


Shutters with a paper sign attached with tape: "Sorry, closed until further notice".

“Four years ago,” writes Jeff Alworth at Beervana, “the world stopped.” In his post reflecting on the pandemic he considers the longer-term changes it seems to have made to hospitality and our drinking habits:

This is a blog about beer, so let me use this small part of society to illustrate what I mean… The multi-year shift to packaged beer sparked a wholesale conversion to cans from bottles, which are nearly extinct now… Drinking habits changed, and draft remains well below its 2019 baseline. Consumption may be down overall… Younger drinkers who never had the party-hearty experiences of early generations may never fully embrace alcohol… Delayed by government intervention, far fewer breweries closed than expected, but even four years on, Covid closures continue… Thanks to service industry staff getting tagged “essential workers,” many left the industry. That sparked a sharp wage spike that was long overdue, but it did impact breweries already struggling with dropping sales…

We’ve been thinking about some of this, too, especially in relation to young people and their relationship to alcohol, and the fact that people in the UK now routinely drink outdoors even in winter.


A fancy old-fashioned shoe.

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Generic beer pumps in photocopy style.

David Jesudason has written something of an exposé of the management culture at an unnamed pub where multiple staff have spoken to him about shocking behaviour and policy:

Staff say they felt intimidated by management with several reports of workers being shouted at in front of customers, told off for taking breaks and humiliated by a laddish culture… One source claimed that they worked with a manager who boasted about employing a homeless man to clear glasses in exchange for inedible food and say they reported this manager to the management at the time… One source, who is black, claimed they were called a thief by a manager for taking a company T-shirt to use on his shift, while another person of colour alleged that management ignored racist taunts by a customer and instead ordered the staff member to serve him.

Of course it’s frustrating that David can’t name the pub but shouting “Name and shame!” isn’t helpful. He doesn’t have a legal team behind him and can’t afford to be sued. And some of the behaviour he describes is probably more common than we’d like to think, so perhaps keeping it vague is a helpful reminder that this could be happening almost anywhere.


Roadworks in Brussels.

Eoghan Walsh has got into the habit of having one or two beers at the same Brussels bar every Friday night while his kids are swimming. This has set him thinking about what it means to be ‘a regular’, the desire to be alone versus the desire for company, and the importance of routine more generally:

These are not the thoughts of an ordered mind, and it’s not an attitude that has served me very well; I know I’m missing out on some essential aspect of pub drinking. So part of committing to this routine is to confront this way of thinking and overcome it – exposure therapy, if you’d like. But also, alongside my desire to be left alone I also have a contradictory one whereby sometimes I do want people to come up to me. I know there’s a vanity to this, wanting other people to make the effort but being unwilling or unable to reciprocate. Where that comes from, beyond vanity, I’m not so sure. Maybe it’s a desire to be around people but not among them; to put myself into a situation where the latent potential for talk is there if I want it, but it comes with no obligations. And that’s what this place provides.


A pub pool table with bright green baize.

At Oh Good Ale Phil Edwards has been interviewed by a song. Which is to say that ‘Favorite Bar’ by the Magnetic Fields asks a series of questions which Phil has attempted to answer:

Do you have a favourite bar
Where you can play pool with strangers
Maybe wear some lipstick and not be in danger
Of getting beat up in the men’s room

Feeling safe is important in a pub. (Being safe is, too, but in the nature of things you only generally find out if that’s not the case a lot later.) I generally do feel safe in pubs these days, but then (a) I’m White, male and middle-aged and (b) I very rarely go anywhere even slightly rough (Holt’s pubs in the suburbs, on CAMRA crawls, are probably as close as I get). I can remember being in a few places where I felt it would be inadvisable to stay for another, but this is going back a bit – I think at the time my youth was as much a factor as being a posh Southerner. I also think one effect of the general decline in pub-going – and the broader decline in all-male socialising – is that it’s harder to find pubs that are likely to get seriously lairy, or at least easier to avoid them.


The interior of a pub with wooden panelling and dividers, dark red walls, and a couple of drinkers.

Lisa Grimm’s Weirdo Guide to Dublin Pubs continues with a trip to the famous Fagan’s and some nods to the strange relationship between America and Irishness:

Bill Clinton wuz here. And you’re not likely to forget it, as he seems to be on every wall in Fagan’s, somewhere… Of course, to Dubliners, Fagan’s is better known for its Bertie Ahern connections, but I think it’s the Clintoniana I’ve always found a little bit off-putting; in short, for us Gen X folk of all political and national stripes, that aspect of the décor can seem a bit, well, Boomer. However, it’s not every pub in Dublin that’s had national and world leaders enjoy a Guinness (or other beverage) there, so it’s entirely understandable that there would be more than a few clippings on the wall… And, to be fair, it’s not truly throughout the entire pub, as Fagan’s is enormous.


Finally, from Instagram, a particularly alluring looking pint…

For more good reading check out Stan Hieronymus’s round-up from Monday and Alan McLeod’s from Thursday.

Categories
News

News, nuggets and longreads 9 March 2024: Heroes & Villains

Here’s our selection of the best beer writing from the past week, including Meteor, Elusive and Lokalbiere.

First, though, some news. We wrote recently about what we’ve gained and lost in British beer in the past decade and had Meantime in the ‘lost’ column. Now, it’s got even more lost, as Asahi has announced it will be moving production from South East London to Chiswick, consolidating its UK brewing at Fuller’s.

And there’s more: from this fascinating story about a Ukrainian woman who has taken on the running of a pub in Newport, South Wales, we learned that Tiny Rebel is closing its flagship bar in its home town because of “decreasing footfall and rising operating costs”.


Meteor beer advertising sign, Strasbourg, France.

For Good Beer Hunting Anaïs Lecoq has written about Brasserie Meteor whose distinctly superior lager we enjoyed in Strasbourg a few years ago:

It’s unusual to find a big production site in a town center in France, but Meteor brews its 500,000 hectoliters (about 420,000 barrels) right in the middle of Hochfelden. The gigantic silo, with the brewery’s name in large, bright red letters, is unmissable from afar, giving Meteor a place in the skyline… The aroma of wort that blankets the streets is also part of the town’s atmosphere, with Meteor brewing as often as seven days a week in the busy season.


Lager illustration.

At Daft Eejit Brewing Andreas Krennmair tackles a persistent gripe: “All beer is IPA these days!” As he explains, with reference to German language sources, people have been complaining about the dominance of one beer style or another for centuries:

150 to 200 years ago, German beer and brewing experienced a massive shift. Small breweries were previously mostly brewing relatively small amounts of beer solely for the local market using little to no automation, brewers were organized in guilds, not interested in scaling out their businesses, and sometimes even bound by local law to brew and sell their beer on a rota (Reihebrauen). Then the industrial revolution came and destroyed a lot of these structures… Within just a few decades, a lot of small, local breweries simply shut down because they couldn’t compete, and local beer styles… simply went extinct because nobody wanted to drink them anymore. A lot of these beers we only know by name these days, a few have been preserved in the form of recipes, though a lot of details like how specific malts were prepared are not so well documented, leaving more questions than answers.


A smiling Andy Parker with a glass of beer outside Elusive Brewing.
SOURCE: Pellicle/Matthew Curtis.

At Pellicle David Jesudason has profiled Elusive Brewing and its founder, Andy Parker, who has acquired the perhaps burdensome reputation of “the nicest man in brewing”:

Andy’s journey from experimental homebrewer to Elusive owner and operator was documented in detail in his 2018 book CAMRA’s Essential Home Brewing. He also blogged about beer and homebrewing from 2010 under the name ‘Musings of an Elusive Beer Geek.’ But to properly understand his origin story we have to go back to 1983… At 10 years old, Andy first caught a glimpse of a beige plastic box that would change his life. The BBC Micro is now the kind of retro computer that looks garish from the harsh glare of tech-savvy 2024—a box monitor, sat on a basic 8-bit processor and Cold War nuclear launchpad-style keyboard. But to schoolchildren like Andy, it was a glimpse into the future.


BrewDog bar sign.

At VinePair Will Hawkes has dug into the collapse of BrewDog’s reputation among UK craft beer drinkers and the possible future of the company:

Every so often, Brewdog goes viral on British social media. An ill-judged spat with a much-loved Scottish lager brand; anger over the revelation that it was going to stop paying Britain’s real living wage; a skit that appears to make fun of the middle-aged, baseball-capped owners; an arch review of the brewery’s flagship London bar, which describes it as an “infernal pint crèche for confused children and the wife-dodging salarymen they’ll one day become.”… As one Twitter user put it recently, “When you see Brewdog trending it’s never because they’ve made a lovely new beer, is it?”


The City Arms, a Victorian pub in central Manchester.

On Substack, Jim Cullen recounts a crawl of central Manchester pubs, including old favourites, famous classics, and some that were new to him, despite his decades of drinking in the city:

As we approached [The Circus Tavern] Jaz said “At least the doors are open”…. Which reminded me that when the pub used to reach (its very small) capacity, they’d lock the doors. At the front. (Those in the know could access via the rear of the premises.)… In this pub, the great thing is that you don’t have a choice but to interact with the other customers. We got chatting to a lovely couple from Maghull and shot the breeze for a while. Just one of the things that makes The Circus special.


Finally, from BlueSky

IrishBeerHistory (@beerfoodtravel.bsky.social) on BlueSky: "There are those who say we shouldn't be doing  this kind of thing. Those people are wrong, of course..." The accompanying photo is of Rye River Big Bangin' IPA blended with Saison Dupont.

For more good reading check out Alan McLeod’s round-up from Thursday.

Categories
pubs

The lesser-spotted underage drinker in 2024

When did you last see underage drinkers even try to get served in a pub? It’s what you might call a dying tradition.

Ray’s dad says he started drinking in a pub on the Somerset Levels when he was 12, surrounded by adults who made sure he and his brothers (mostly) behaved themselves.

And in the mid-1990s, Jess went to East London pubs from 16 hiding behind her tall friend, though nobody ever got asked for ID.

She’d sit in the darkest corner of the back room with all the other juvenile boozers, tolerated by management on the understanding that they behaved. 

(Teenage Jess’s drinks of choice, in case you were wondering: snakebite and black, or Newcastle Brown Ale.)

It sounds sort of cute and nostalgic but there are good reasons why you might not want actual children to drink. Pubs have quite rightly been put under pressure to apply the law, check for ID, and refuse service if they’re in doubt.

Still, the other day, we saw what looked to us like a group of adolescents getting served in a pub without too much trouble.

We say “what looked to us like” because we’ve reached a point where people under, say, 25 all look about the same age to us. What we think is a schoolboy turns out to be a bloke on his way to the office or, worse, a teacher. That kind of thing.

Anyway, these lads definitely looked young, and the bar staff thought so too, because they asked for ID. One of them produced a document which, even from a distance, looked unconvincing. After a bit of conversation, the person behind the bar was convinced, or gave up, and agreed they could have their drinks.

They ordered, nervously, three pints of lager, without specifying which one.

As they made their way to a table they all but gave each other fist bumps. Their conspiratorial manner and excitement were obvious.

“Alright lads, play it cool, play it cool,” said Jess.

At which point, they took out their phones and started recording videos of themselves with their beers, pouting and posing for, we suppose, Tik-Tok or something similar.

The middle-aged group on the table next to them asked, amused, what they were up to. The phones went away and some polite, good-natured conversation ensued.

There’s no astonishing twist to this story. The lads drank their pints, slowly and a bit weirdly, as if they’d never held a glass before, or tasted beer. They made quiet conversation. And after a while, they left, with a round of shy waves and goodbyes to their neighbours and the pub staff.

Legally, they probably shouldn’t have been served – one ID, even if it is legit, doesn’t cover three people. But it was hard to find the whole business anything less than rather sweet.

And we need them to develop the pub habit, don’t we, if we want these places to exist at all in 20 years time?

Back in the 1990s and 00s there were conversations about lowering the legal age for drinking in pubs so that this could be a safe, supervised activity. It was tied into various moral panics over kids ‘hanging around’ on the streets, alcopops, and lager loutism.

Which politician would bother arguing for that now?

There are some additional thoughts on youthful drinking habits and the avocado toast paradox for subscribers to our Patreon.

Categories
News

News, nuggets and longreads 2 March 2024: Because of the Cats

Here’s our pick of the best reading about beer and pubs from the past week including old breweries, writer’s pubs, and at least one machine gun.

First, a couple of bits of news that grabbed our attention:

  1. The Crooked House, the pub that was burned down in suspicious circumstances, is to be rebuilt by order of South Staffordshire Council. Here’s the news story from the BBC and there’s detailed commentary by Laura Hadland on her website at the bottom of a long page we bet she now wishes she’d structured in reverse order.
  2. A slew of new flagship pubs and taprooms have opened or been announced which strikes us as interesting in the wider gloomy context around hospitality: the Craft Beer Co’s new vintage beer pub, a St Austell and Harbour partnership in Cornwall, and a big Siren place in Reading. All via the indispensable Beer Today.

An old sign advertising Stella Artois on the corner of a bar in Leuven.

At Beervana Jeff Alworth digs into a thorny question: how old really are these breweries that claim to be old? And from where do they get these fantastic founding dates?

According to its own history, Weihenstephan started life as a monastery, going back to the 8th century. A nearby farm produced hops, so the brewery believes the monks were making beer there, but they don’t mark their start date until 1040, when the abbot received a license to brew on the grounds. Over the next four centuries, the monastery burned down four times and was depopulated by three plagues, and hit by armies and at least one earthquake. Still, the monks rebuilt. While the history through this period is pretty sketchy, I don’t have any problem calling this legit continuity… However, here the historical record fragments for the next 400ish years and we skip to 1803, when the monastery was secularized. Did the monks continue to brew consistently that whole time?


A drawing of a man with a pint of beer and his hand raised to his head, looking troubled or pained.

There’s a rather soul-bearing piece by Adrian Tierney-Jones on Substack about loneliness and the pub:

There are certainly times when I have been lonely, a state of mind desperately endless it seemed, alone in a flat that once held someone else’s voice and still contained some of her items, the lack of promise petering out and the slowness of the tick-tock of the clock stifling — anxious times as I thought then, when I thought I wanted to sleep for a long time, even though not long afterwards I realised this feeling was an indulgence… Now though, if I feel I am lonely what am I really asking myself and how do I deal with it? Maybe it is a case that the loneliness I feel can be assisted, as well as resisted, by the imagination and the memories of friends, past lovers, family members and that small island of delicious and decadent solitude I experience when in a crowd, sitting in a pub that is slowly being filled with people for instance. They bring with them their lives, their voices and their happiness…


Illustration: a quiet corner in a quiet pub, with table and stools.

Katie Mather has been thinking about what might constitute a “writer’s pub”:

I’ve been trying to plan a short pubs-and-pushbikes break for myself over the summer where I can also get a little reading and scribbling done, and honestly, it’s become a fixation. No matter where I look I can never be sure what I want. Comfy seats? Not old enough. Rural and quaint? Too isolated. What am I looking for? Does the ideal writers’ pub actually exist? I’ve been zooming in and out of Google Maps all week trying to find a place that strikes the balances I require—most of which are incredibly hypocritical.


The Dirty Shame Saloon, a simple wooden building in wild west style, in the snow.
SOURCE: The Beer Chaser/Yaak Real Estate.

You know when you discover a website that’s apparently been around for years and you’re not sure how you missed it? The Beer Chaser is written by Don Williams, a retiree and compulsive ticker of bars and pubs across America. He has a particular interest in dive bars and one of his favourites is The Dirty Shame Saloon in Yaak, Montana, which sounds very… American:

Joan Melcher’s two books on Montana Watering Holes [suggest] there are at least three and possibly four incredible stories strictly on how the Shame was originally named… One involves fighter Joe Lewis and a second relates the saga of seven dead cows – shot by a guy named Jimmy who left them on the road in front of the bar.  Don’t forget the other about a mother-in-law of one of the original owners who would sit in the corner of the bar and admonish him “What a ‘dirty shame’ it was that you bought this bar.” 

There are a few things in the post that made us say “Oh dear” and “Yikes”, including a weird reference to someone as “a female”. But as a portrait of a place, and a people, and a pub that is not our world it’s fascinating.


A view of the Tyne Bridge in Newcastle.

Stephen Liddell has been putting together some historic pub crawls which has led him to investigate the story of Newcastle pub landlord William Campbell, “the heaviest man in the world”:

Born in Glasgow in 1856, Campbell was one of seven children in a family who were all of average proportions, but his parents will have realised they had a whopper on their hands when he’d reached four stone at the age of nine months… Inspired by a freak show that visited Glasgow, Campbell decided to exhibit his vast body for money. He billed himself as ‘The Biggest Man In Britain’, ‘Her Majesty’s Largest Subject’ or ‘The Heaviest Man In The World’, depending on how the fancy took him… The Duke of Wellington public house on High Bridge in Newcastle was owned by the brewers Bartleman & Crighton and had been raided by the police for illegal gambling, coming within a whisker of losing its licence. The brewery decided to change the tone of their business by hiring a celebrity to run the pub, and celebrities didn’t come any bigger than William Campbell.


A selection of crisps and nuts on a pub bar.

As you’ll know if you’ve been following us for a while ‘pub grub’, pub snacks, and the rise of the gastropub are favourite subjects of ours. Ron Pattinson is currently mining 1970s editions of The Brewers’ Guardian for nuggets and has shared a few posts on related subjects this week, including a survey about pub food from 1970:

“Apart from the obvious things, like bad hygiene, I think what I dislike most is that one can never really tell how long the food has been standing in the warming cabinet. It’s easy enough to spot a curled up sandwich or a piece of mouldy cheese but if you fancy shepherd’s pie or sausages I am put off by the thought that they may have been re-heated from the morning session. Perhaps I am too nervous.”

This also reminded us of a joke in the 1940 Ealing comedy Saloon Bar, in which a pub landlord asks a barmaid since when the sandwiches have been on sale. “Last month,” she replies, “but they’ve been under glass you know.” He drops one on the floor, picks it up, blows off the dust and puts it back. “Well, see that they go tonight.”


Finally, from social media…

For more good reading check out Stan Hieronymus’s round-up from Monday and Alan McLeod’s from Thursday.