A warm evening in late summer, the smell of weed on the air, and blackberry stains on the pathway to the pub door.
Ahead of us in the queue a middle-aged woman in sensible shoes and a sensible but bramble-bothered jumper, with black mud beneath her nails.
“Oh, hello — I wonder if you can help me… Do you, by any chance, have any beer dregs I might take away with me?”
She waves a large margarine tub hopefully.
“Dregs?”
“Waste beer. For the slugs. On my allotment.”
“For the slugs?”
“For the slug traps. Slugs love beer. Keeps ’em off my plants! They drown in it.”
The young woman behind the bar eyes the gardener with suspicion. How can she be sure this strange stranger won’t just guzzle down the slops straight from the plastic the minute she gets outside? Desperate people will do all sorts of weird things for a freebie. She decides on a delaying tactic, a test of commitment.
“I can’t give you any now because we’re in the middle of service but if you come back at closing time when we’re cleaning out the drip trays I might be able to help. Once I’ve asked my manager, obviously.”
“Closing time? Oh, no, I’m afraid I shall be in bed by then. You couldn’t…?”
She waves the tub seductively.
A shake of the head.
And so the slugs, or perhaps the gardener, went thirsty that night.
8 replies on “Pub Life: For the Slugs”
I wonder whether a can of Tesco Value Bitter would do the job, or would it be too weak for the slugs’ liking?
I tried Tesco Value once in slug traps. It didn’t work nearly as well as more regular brands
Beer for slug traps is perfectly legit, of course (wasps like it too), and the chances of the person you describe actually being a roving alkie sound very remote indeed – I think you owe her an apology! Just a shame the bartender was such a jobsworth about it.
*We* didn’t think she was. (See bramble-bothered jumper and mud beneath nails.)
“the slugs, or perhaps the gardener”?
30 years ago I made 10 galls of home brew – but changed the bottle sterilizing agent – not realising that this solution had to be rinsed from the bottles unlike the previous one. The beer was undrinkable. We really did try but NO.
However, the slugs loved it even more than the dregs and leftovers from my usual brews. The Pied Piper of South Wales I was, albeit with slugs rather than rats or children. Should have marketed the stuff.
I look for reduced cans usually for my slug traps, co-op 2.8% bitter used this year with some success. I have always meant to do a highly unscientific study on whether they prefer lager or bitter but never got round to it.
The bitter was very poor BTW and they were welcome to it!
[…] Mostly because we’re enjoying writing something that isn’t all opinions and/or footnotes, we turned in another post in our Pub Life series inspired by a conversation about slug traps overheard in Bristol. […]