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Jonathan Meades on Beer

Ray Ban sunglassesSource: John McStravick, via Flickr Creative Commons.

9781908717184We’re very grateful to commenter BT for suggesting that we read Jonathan Meades’ essay ‘Pint Sized’, written in 1994 and collected with other pieces in Museum Without Walls (2012).

It is a rare treat to read something substantial about pubs and beer by someone who is not A Beer Writer, not least because, though he apparently thinks beer important, he does not love it unconditionally.

Writing of a childhood ‘spent… in pub car parks’, Meades recalls thinking that the adult world, as represented by the bar where is father and uncles drank, was ‘bad, stale, fungal, fusty’. Those xenophobic uncles considered beer a sacred part of Englishness, along with Vaughan Williams and G.K. Chesterton:

The Boy’s First Pint was about as close as middle-class, middle-century, middle-England got to the bar mitzvah.

Meades’ uncle was, it turns out, town clerk of Burton-upon-Trent, which recollection prompts this wonderful passage:

He and the councillors he despised and the brewers he sucked up to would have seen no virtues in hundred-year-old-industrial buildings. Especially not in the white heat of the Keg Era: that sort of beer, no nicer and no nastier than the preceding stuff, I thought then, was the brewing industry’s contribution to ’60s neophilia. This was the beer of the future. Soon the world would be all monorails and robots… And we’d toast our success in Red Barrel and Party Sixes…

Beer, he goes on to argue, is an ineffectual intoxicant; it makes British people poorly, because it is just nourishing enough to stop them eating while they down pint after pint; and wine is in many ways a better drink.

And yet, he concludes, to drink anything else in ‘deepest England’ would be ‘an act of ingestive treachery, dead wrong’. Beer is part of Britain, and Meades has apparently come round to his uncles’ way of thinking.

Elsewhere in the same anthology (we have not read it all yet) opponents of the term ‘craft beer’ might find useful ammo in Meades’ railing against classification and style frameworks in creative endeavours. ‘Do not judge by genre but by accomplishment’, he writes, and then quotes Duke Ellington: ‘The question is not whether it’s jazz music or whether it’s classical music but whether it’s good music.’

We bought Museum Without Walls in the Amazon Kindle store for £6.83. Isn’t the cover dreadful?

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