The many meanings of beer
Yes, it’s just beer, but that doesn’t mean it’s not also a vehicle for ideas, or a loaded with symbolism.
“For goodness sake, it’s beer. It doesn’t have politics or mean anything. Just bloody drink it!”
That was the gist of some responses to our recent post about the politics of cask ale.
It’s an understandable instinct, to deny that things we enjoy have meaning or subtext.
The desire to keep them simple.
Stop making my beer murky with context and ideas!
But the fact is, there’s all sorts of meaning tangled up in pubs and beer, from politics to class to gender to race… whether people like it or not.
Recently, for example, someone told us that in some places, it’s considered an anti-Semitic gesture to put your glass down on the table after clinking ‘Cheers!’ but before you take your first sip.
And when we visited Budapest years ago Jess’s Polish-language guidebook warned us not to clink glasses at all because it’s associated with Hungary's former “imperial Austrian overlords”.
Watch the BBC sitcom Early Doors and you’ll see lots of examples. Like Tommy, an older man who never smiles and refuses to join in with the buying of rounds – “No thanks, I'll stay on me own.”
When people do this in real life, it often means they’re on a tight budget, or trying to control the amount they drink.
But that doesn’t stop people interpreting it as a sign of misanthropy or miserliness, as it is clearly intended to be in Early Doors.
Beer is for normals
The very choice to drink beer over other beverages has meaning.
In the UK, beer is associated with working class culture, informality and/or a lack of pretence.
Which is why, as we discussed in that blog post, it’s one tool politicians use to signal their ‘of the people’ status.
There’s a careful balance to strike, though. Remember the time French president Emmanuel Macron chugged a bottle of lager in 17 seconds to celebrate a sporting victory and everyone went, “Non, c’est too much – c’est trop laddish.”
Querying the sincerity of their liking for beer adds another layer. Angela Merkel was often pictured drinking beer while active in politics but actually prefers white wine, for example.
Does that make her a hypocrite? Or less ‘properly’ German?
Part of the problem for ‘craft beer’ as a concept, or culture, or whatever it is, is that it breaks this simple association.
When we drink beer from a stemmed glass, in small measures, at higher prices, and sniff it before we drink it… is it still beer?
Are you saying you’re too good for ‘normal’ beer?
Or that beer is too good for normal people?
The meaning of brands
Individual brands are packed with meaning, too.
That’s why global brewers spend so much time and money researching consumer feeling and marketing otherwise similar beers with different brand identities.
People who identify as Guinness Drinkers (capital G, capital D) often do so because they have Irish heritage.
But it can also be a statement of maturity, especially for younger people – or about buy-in to the marketing messages around mellowness and patience.
And decades after the slogan went out of use people will still say, reflexively, that “Guinness is good for you.”
Carling lager has had an interesting journey in the UK. Its marketing used to emphasise masculine banter – “I bet he drinks Carling Black Label!” – but in recent years has focused on provenance and agriculture.
At any rate, this beer of Canadian origin, brewed in the UK by a multinational, is what you drink if you’re English, male, and determinedly unpretentious.
The packaging even resembles own-brand supermarket lager, in simple black and white.
So, what about Madrí?
It’s from the same company as Carling.
Some say it’s brewed to something like an old Carling recipe, others say it’s based on Coors Light… and yet…
Madrí somehow means fun, sophistication, Continental chic.
Big brewers buy brands, not beers or breweries, because brand is where most of the meaning can be found.
Of course people joke about this. “Local man chooses beer based on which has the most compelling customer narrative” was one parody headline we saw just this week.
But he does, though! Even if he doesn’t know that’s what he’s doing.
Proper, real, craft
When we say “This is a proper pub” we imply that other pub isn’t.
When we talk about real ale, we’re implying other beer is false.
When we refer to craft beer, we suggest the rest is artless.
You can rage against these terms, or refuse to use them – but they’re only reflecting distinctions that people make, whether or not they verbalise them.
Understanding what’s going on beneath the surface can help us challenge or change things.
Or, if that’s your bag, preserve them.
How to opt out
Years ago, we wrote some advice on how to become a beer geek.
One important suggestion was: don’t.
It’s made beer more interesting for us. But for others, overthinking it takes away the joy.
If you don’t want to be confronted by the meanings tangled up in beer and pubs, the easiest thing to do is step back from social media.
Social media, with its constant demand for fresh content, encourages us to think about, talk about and confront the meanings hidden in everything.
On your first day on Twitter, you might have thought, “I like beer, I should follow some beer accounts!”
Only to find, a decade later, that you’re being pushed to read all sorts of things that don’t, really, have much to do with beer at all.
Fortunately, we might be at the end of the first social media era, with networks collapsing and communities scattering to the wind.
So if you want to go back to just enjoying beer, now’s your chance.
Pubs on film: Spetters, dir. Paul Verhoeven, 1980
The controversial Dutch film Spetters is about teenagers living in the suburbs of Rotterdam.
Rien (Hans van Tongeren) is a promising motocross racer and lives above a bar-café run by his father. At the start of the film Rien takes a cash advance from the till and we get a long look at the interior in all its glorious brownness.
Later, the bar is the setting for a huge fight between a biker gang and motocross fans who have gathered to watch news coverage of the motocross championships in the presence of champion Gerrit Witkamp (Rutger Hauer).
The trophy cabinets are smashed, the wood and mirrors and broken, the TV is thrown through the plate glass window.
In the end, the ruined bar is taken over by Fientje (Renée Soutendijk) and Hans (Maarten Spanjer) who reinvent it as a fun pub and disco, with a fast food counter.
This seems like a hopeful ending to an otherwise bleak film. But the made-over café looks bloody awful compared to the original.
And when you look at the location today (5 Haven in Maassluis, we think) the building has totally disappeared.
On the blog
We’ve already mentioned our post about the politics of cask ale above but we’ll add here that it prompted some discussion. And it’s always nice when that happens. Most notably, Jeff Alworth wrote about the politics of American craft beer.
We finally made it to a not-that-new pub in Portishead and enjoyed it a lot: “What was promising at The Siren’s Calling was the atmosphere on the terrace outside… The pub was covered in delightfully tacky Oktoberfest décor and there were groups of people in Alpine hats drinking lager by the two-pint Maß…”
There were also some notes on avoiding the temptation to “get into” wine which have some relevance to the stuff above about what beer and wine mean respectively: “We don’t want to overthink wine the way we overthink beer. But it’s getting harder to resist the temptation to take notice, and take notes…”
With a lot of Festbier about in Bristol, we came off the fence: “What is the problem Festbier is designed to solve? A need for something special to mark an occasion.
The desire to loosen up. And perhaps to add interest in a beer culture that prizes consistency and tradition over novelty… Festbier is not built for us.”
There were also the usual weekly round-ups of writing about beer and pubs from other blog and publications and a smattering of stuff just for Patreon subscribers, including live notes from our holiday in Germany.
That’s your lot. More in November.
Cheers,
Ray & Jess
In theory, the no clinking rule expired in 1999! - it was for 150 years after the execution of 13 Hungarian generals by the Austrians in Arad. Supposedly the Austrian generals were drinking beer and toasted and clinked after the executions.