This column was pitched to me as a vehicle for me to reprise “The Grumpy Brewer” a character I played during lockdown that comedically allowed my frustrations with the world of beer and my general eccentricities out into the world.
However I didn’t want to wallow in the negative; there is enough to be mad, sad, dismayed, grumpy and enraged at in the world today, days past, and I’m sure on those to come.
I wanted this column to have an element of poetry, to capture that which is good and special and worth prizing about the culture of beer — and of drinking and brewing and pubs.
Two years ago a customer reached out to me via an email to let me know that one of our beers had provided a moment of pleasure and calm in an otherwise terrible day.
“Was having a shitty day, whole family sick … lots going on had one of those (beers), amazing.”
I present this not to blow my own trumpet, I brew plenty of beer that underwhelms people as well as the odd one that finds favour. Rather I present this to show how sometimes a beer offers that shaft of light in a dreary mine. A moment of respite and even of communion.
I spend my days working in a brewery separated from the dining room of our restaurant by a glass wall. While people look on and watch me the reverse is also true, and I get to watch people sitting and drinking beer together hundreds of times every week. They are taking part in something that has been happening since the dawn of civilization. The coming together to slowly ingest an intoxicant, which when things go well, relaxes those taking part, reduces their ability to use guile or deception and lowers the barriers to social cohesion.
In fact, one theory has it that drinking together in important times — meetings between clans, negotiating pacts, forging of alliances — is, in some ways, like the origins of how we shake hands, which was to show that we were not holding a concealed weapon.
Alcohol sedates the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is crucial to lying, subterfuge, and the suppression of desires. By taking drink together we are ritually ingesting a truth serum. And so I watch people drink beer together in business meetings, after work, on dates, before weddings, and after funerals. I watch them find unity in their tribe or — to use the modern terminology — I watch them engender a sense of belonging.
Some customers come to drink alone but in the presence of others. Some sit with the paper and a pint, a book with a half, or a laptop with a goblet of Belgian tradition. I feel a particular synergy for these drinkers. As someone who counts a fox terrier as my significant other, I spend a lot of time in pubs on my own and enjoy the experience.
One of these lone customers, I will call him Michael, starts his day with a pint of beer. Michael doesn’t find life easy, after a lifetime of suffering from anxiety he finds solace in keeping his days structured. There are those who would write off anyone drinking beer for breakfast as a problem drinker. Well, most days that pint will be all Michael drinks, some days he returns mid-afternoon for a further half. The routine of a morning pint when the bar is quiet helps Michael structure his life. He has problems but drink is not one of them.
I must not and do not shy away from the negative things that can flow from the produce of my labours, but in the same way that I am resisting turning this column into a dispatch about why hazy IPA is wrong, I will leave such negativity for others to write about.
My great-grandfather was a brewery drayman delivering beer from a London brewery to its pubs. I have other ancestors who ran a Devon alehouse that serves pints to this day. In 2019 I visited the pub in question and dined and drank in the presence of my ancestral ghosts. While they didn’t pull up a pew beside me, the experience did drive home that my continuing of the family line feels like destiny.
To play a part in this coming together of people, to bring a spark of joy to people when all seems grim, to help bring about this communion — well that is very special indeed.
Main image / AI-generated