I’ve always loved Barcelona (even though its football
team seem to love putting my football team to the sword regularly). It’s a city
in which I have always felt at ease, a place that is cool without being
off-putting, that has wonderful food (I adore that market off the Ramblas) and
architecture and now it seems to be a possibility that it might become a beer
city. At the festival, which had crowds queuing to get in, there was a mixture
of people, young, old, male, female, families, serious geeks, lads on the craft
lash, and the odd brewer; I visited several bars, including Kaelderkold, not
far from the Erotic Museum on the Ramblas, a narrow, wasp-waisted space that
was holding a tap takeover by Garage on the Friday night. A babble of voices,
all languages, beers being poured with a smile, a rock’n’roll sensibility, a
blackboard of beers that included Garage’s Merlot Sour, which was gently sour
and tart, the ghost of a wine barrel haunting the glass (and let us not forget
Napar as well).
Wednesday, 16 March 2016
Homage to Barcelona
It’s a
beer that reminds me of a mint chocolate, an After Eight perhaps, or maybe a
mint-flavoured Aero. It’s minty but not gormless in the way the mint flavour
comes through. There’s a smoothness, a spiciness, a childishness, a warmth and
a swarm of thoughts produced by this beer that I’m drinking at the Barcelona
Beer Festival, not long before I chair a tasting and conversation about cask
and keg with Brian from Stillwater Brewery and Joe, head brewer of Garage,
which is based in this city of cities. The beer? Oh it’s from Brooklyn and
something like 9.5 or 9.7%. It’s called Old Fashioned Traditional or something
like that and I actually rather like it but the co-founder of Garage, James
Welsh, doesn’t. He pulls a face and turns down another sip. Still there are
plenty of other great beers in this festival, which is held in part of the old
boatyards, where Philip of Spain (he of the singed beard) built the Armada
apparently. Up at the front of the vast arched space, on a stage, a young guy
in braces, continually updated a massive blackboard of beers and rung a bell
whenever a new one went up — expectant faces wait for this bell as if it was a
warning from the nave of beer awareness.
Then we went back to Garage’s bar, where at the back a
shining brewery and a handful of barrels announced their intention. This time I
had the Pale Ale, which had the assertive savoury scent and sensuality of its
American hops. This was a beer that said: here I am and here I am to please
you, which it did. And while we drank and talked, there was one name that hung
over us, especially as it had been written on a blackboard at the back of the
bar: Steve Huxley, a Liverpudlian who had settled in Spain years ago and set up
a brewing school and some people call him the godfather of Spanish craft beer
and as you can see from the photograph above he is highly revered and mightily missed. He died several months ago. I wish I’d met him.
Monday, 14 March 2016
Conversation on a train
On a train. Taunton to Bristol. First stage of a journey to London with a break in between in Bristol. Laptop open, searching for an opening para for an article that is already late, interviews done, theme agreed with inner manager, but searching for an opening para. Blank page in front of me, pristine white, waiting for the footprints of the muse that bite the hand that feeds it. What’re you writing mate, Scouse voice, opposite chair, big fella, bald, open face, his mate on the other hand, eyes half closed, fighter’s face, seemingly on the edge of sleep. Writing, I say, my job, trying to get it started, I tell him the theme. Why don’t you just start it with did you know or not many people know this. I smile, not really that sort of piece, need inspiration, given that I’m writing about beer, which is what I do as well as write on travel. You permanently on the lash then, innocent query, no malice. Not really, do a lot of travel, drink beer, but spend most of my time at a desk with a laptop. He speaks. You know what my favourite beer is? Hobgoblin. I love it, can drink loads of it. Went there once, to the brewery, I say, in Witney Oxfordshire, then owner took us out to taste the beer in a pub and it was off. Not really my sort of beer I say, but I don’t want to say that I feel Hobgoblin is a collaboration between the cowardly lion in The Wizard of Oz and a caramel-flavoured gush of insignificance. Why should I? He loves the beer, I don’t but we’re talking about beer, striking up a conversation about pubs and beers and then briefly and bizarrely Bicester’s shopping outlet, which I visited once and bought a reduced price copy of a book on stouts. Do you read he says, have you read Chicken Soup for the Soul? Best book ever. I say no but have heard of it. Not really my kind of book I want to say. Oh I must go as Bristol is here and so I shake their hands, wish them a safe journey back to Liverpool and leave the carriage with no opening para but instead having experienced a shining and gleaming 30 minutes of conversation that I usually get in the pub. Railway carriages are the new pub?
Tuesday, 1 March 2016
Rather a beer than a biscuit
Like most people I know, I
have never been able to plough my way through the pages of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance
of Things Past. To me it’s too dense,
too self-indulgent and too microscopic in its attention to the mind-numbing
details of Proust’s life (though this doesn’t mean I’m a dolt: Ulysses has been my favourite novel for three decades). I do
agree that it’s a classic of 20th century literature and the world
would be a bleaker place by its non-existence, but sadly I’ve realised that I’m
never going to finish it before I die and that there will be other much shorter
books that I can dowse myself in (this bittersweet realisation is reminiscent
of that pivotal time in one’s life when for instance you realise that a game of
five-a-side football is something you cannot take part in anymore or that the
offer to train with the local rugby club’s veterans is 10 years too late).
On the other hand…
Like many people the one
thing I do have a clue about, regarding the three million words that the
lugubrious-looking novelist put down on paper in his cork-lined bedroom, is
that somewhere in the book the narrator dunks a biscuit into a cup of tea and
sets off a whole chain of what would be called involuntary memory (hell there’s
even a Wikipedia entry for on this subject). Hold on a minute though, a biscuit
in a cup of tea? That hardly seems the style of an aesthete and a man who seems
(from the perspective of a century later) to have the personality of an exhausted
oyster who’s taken to its bed for the rest of its natural life, while
breathlessly (in his case literally) picking through the minutiae of the social
lives of his upper class pals. He’s not exactly Joe Sixpack or whatever the
biscuit eater’s equivalent of a blue-collar beer drinker is, is he?
The truth is that the
narrator (who is supposed to be Proust) delicately (he’s always going to be
delicate) dunks a Madeleine in a tisane of lime flower (herbal tea in other
words) and then starts remembering his young pampered life. This Madeleine is
more of a soft, sweet sponge than a biscuit but somehow it’s designated a
biscuit over in France (the same problem exists in the categorising of beer —
Black India Pale Ale is one that gets the purists going). Meanwhile the cup of
tea is something someone looking for a dairy- and caffeine-free attitude to
passing through life would order — think fruit teas and you’re there.
It’s all very genteel.
This involuntary memory not
only ended up in Wikipedia a century later but it often looked like it had
crystallised or set in stone a literary process that has encouraged writers to
use all sorts of items to suggest time travel back to when they were children
(or even further if they’ve read Tristram Shandy). And of course the word Proustian is used to
describe such a process (I hold my hands up — I’ve done it many times).
However, it’s not such an
absurd proposal. I’ve been returned to my early 20s and the hopeless crush I
had on someone when smelling a similar perfume to the one that my object of
love wore during a long ago summer. The whiff of this bathroom-fresh, slightly
soapy fragrance never fails to take me back in time. For instance, the smell of
this perfume helps me to re-imagine the clack of balls on the snooker table in
the bar of the Ancient Druids, a pub in Cambridge that has long been knocked
down (it existed in an area called the Kite, which was levelled to provide a
shopping area called the Grafton centre; the band I was in used to rehearse in
a squat a couple of doors down). I can even remember the crush at the bar on a
Thursday when the dole cheques for those who were living on people’s floors
were handed out — this money would then fuel a night’s binging. The perfume is
almost like a step terrace of remembrance, with one aroma leading onto a memory
that leads to another memory and so on. The aromas of perfume, wood smoke,
barnyard, ripe bananas and — perhaps somewhat more radically — electric fire
all can reach backwards into the past and grab a day for our consideration.
Yet it’s Marcel Proust and
his soggy biscuit (sorry I mean Madeleine) that blew the starting whistle for
how the smallest of sensations can trigger a rash of memories. He has been
inducted into a psychological hall of fame where his precious Madeleine is
perhaps the only sustenance or foodstuff that is best for recovering the data
of our lives.
There are other ways don’t
you know.
As someone who writes and
talks about beer for a living, I would argue that beer is as good as or even better
than any biscuit when it comes to bringing the past to life in the context of
day-to-day living. If Proust’s Madeleine allied itself with a tisane to bring
back the past, then a glass of beer’s ally is far stronger — the pub and beers
we drink within its walls and the people we drink with.
And this is what Rather a
beer than a Biscuit is all about.
Pause a moment though, let me
gather some thoughts and try to make sense of what I have just written. What is
a biscuit, for instance? It is a commonplace piece of edible sweetness, a
diurnal treat, a tooth crunching, tea- or coffee-dipping confection that comes
in all sorts of styles. Something that children look forward to and infantile
weight-obsessive adults devour on what has is known as their ‘cheat day’ (it
basically means a day when they gorge themselves silly on biscuits and cakes
and the next day it’s back to the latest diet until the next ‘cheat day’, it
all sounds gratuitously infantile and celebrities love to endorse it as if it’s
the most sinful thing they ever do, which of course we all really know isn’t).
The biscuit can be both
egalitarian and elitist (so can beer for that matter). It’s a matter of great
concern to some folk. To use the language of the rabble-rouser on both left and
right: those people who might be deemed posh are commonly thought to have their
biscuits delivered to them on a tray, while the rest of us make do with the
packet. Such hardships we poor folk suffer. On the other hand there are posh
biscuits in funny wrappers with more than a touch of Downton Abbey about them,
which non-posh people can get from the local Co-op. Snobbery and nobbery seem
like ideal handmaidens for biscuits. I wonder what literary history would have
remembered about Proust’s theme of involuntary memory if he’d dipped a couple
of Gypsy Creams or Hob-Nobs (or whatever late 19th century France’s
mass-market biscuits would have been called) into a cup of Tetley’s tea (or
whatever passed for Tetley’s in his part of France). I’m not sure we would have
been regaled so much about memory though I believe that the whole idea of
involuntary memory would have been picked up just as fast by another writer: I
imagine Hemingway during his time as a war correspondent in Spain in the 1930s
rhapsodising about the surrounding smell of cordite that would have been
transporting him back to the First World War battlefields in Northern Italy,
where he came up with his glorious novel A Farewell To Arms. Then there was
Orwell who recalled the smell of wartime Britain (and the BBC in which he
worked) and managed to conjure up the deadliness of 1984. And I speculate on
all of this because of biscuits and I have even got to beer yet.
My personal history with
biscuits took in all the usual suspects when I was a child: Bourbons were ideal
to dip into the milky, thin, skin-topped coffee that was served at the Liberal
Party coffee mornings my grandmother sometimes took me to. Mark & Spencer’s
Golden Crunch was another favourite: a small round syrup-gold biscuit with a
rough, sandpapery top reminiscent of the cracked surface of salt flats in the
Americas and a smoother, but still pitted base. They were delicious. Chocolate
digestives were pretty cool as well, though the oats in them meant that teeth
soon became gritted with bits. These childhood favourites then gave way to soft
flexible chocolate cookies or Wagon Wheels, which as I remember were chocolate
coated biscuits, round of course, with layers of spongy marshmallow. As I grew
older, I wanted a room at the top and started to eulogise the more sedate and
genteel Bath Olivers and selection packs at Christmas (from M&S of course)
— biscuits were cool and luminous in the attraction they had to me. On the
other hand I didn’t like Rich Tea, which seemed to suggest long boring Sunday afternoons
when it was raining outside (so bourgeois, so boring, so redolent of the UK in
the 1970s), while Fig Rolls just seemed unpleasantly medical with a suggestion
of roughage and regular stools.
That’s my relationship with
the biscuit, but what about the history? Whilst beer has a heritage going back
to the Sumerians and the Ancient Egyptians what about the biscuit? When did the
biscuit come into being, when was it called a biscuit, when did it become part
of the day to day incentive for good behaviour and sitting in the bay window of
life, watching all the world whiz by? Why do most of us have memories of
biscuits, of biscuits of different kinds, whether it’s those domino-shaped,
chestnut-coloured, sugar spotted Bourbons, sickly infantile, ridged, powdery
custard creams, pink wafers (more controversy, some people regard them as
cakes), Hob-Nobs or Gypsy Creams? It’s anarchy out there in the world of
biscuits.
First of all then it seems to
me that I should comb out some crumbs from the table that hosts the history of
the biscuit. Drum rolls please. Apparently we owe a great gladiola-waving sweep
of thanks to the Italians for the origins of the word biscuit as it comes from
the Latin panis biscoctus, when
means twice baked or double cooked. And it was during the Middle Ages when the panis
biscoctus emerged. ‘Twice baked’
suggests that the biscuit’s dough would have been as hard as Conan the
Barbarian on a Friday evening with too much beer within him; unless it was
soaked in water rather than the beer that Conan was chucking down his neck.
Pliable it would not have been. Given the state of most people’s molars during
the Middle Ages I wonder why people distended their mandibles over these panis
biscoctus. I can hear the sound of
broken teeth tinkling down through the centuries. This digression on hard tack
biscuits brings me to another digression: ship’s biscuits, which were made to
feed sailors on their long journeys to find other worlds that were rumoured to
exist. At the same time the Scots had oatcakes, about which Jean Froissart
eulogised in his Chronicles (he’s welcome to oatcakes, for in my modern
experience without a stinking Stilton or a molten Pont l’eveque spread upon the
oatcake’s unyielding Calvinist surface it is about as much fun as winning first
prize in the hunt for a human coconut shy). Elsewhere across the world, I have
no doubt that various people were thinking up various different styles of
biscuits, all with the raw materials of flour, water and whatever provided them
with sweetness, usually honey (bit like brewing in the Middle Ages really, when
various herbs provided the bitterness that hops would eventually come up with).
Down through the centuries
the biscuit has evolved to become the sweet treat that keeps dentists wealthy,
healthy and wise to this day. And as I am ostensibly writing about biscuits and
beer, I find it fascinating that when I started writing about beer one of the
words used to describe the taste of a beer was its biscuity character. What
that means is the malt character, the sweetness, the graininess, the crunchy
texture and the dryness that you will find in plenty of beers, especially of
the old school bitter style. Biscuitiness is good in the evaluation of beer,
but when I was editing and writing 1001 Beers You Should Try Before You Die I was told that instead of using biscuity I should
used cracker-like, which meant something more to American readers. Biscuits and
beer seem to keep rubbing each other up the wrong way.
Now for beer, my great
passion, my great receiver (and sometimes when a flashy label turns my head,
the great deceiver), the drink and the culture about which I have weaved my
life around in the last few years, in a way that no one could have done with a
mere biscuit (or maybe they could have— the world is full of surprises, for
instance some people like the colour purple). What is it about beer? Why does
it play a much larger role in people’s lives than a plate of biscuits? On the
other hand how important is beer beyond its capacity to liven up an evening’s
socialising or provide a refreshing glass of cold liquid with which to
accompany a viewing of a football match on the TV?
I’ll try and answer by going
back in time. When I first tasted beer I was 12 (or was it 13?). I would sniff
the glass of Mackeson Milk Stout that my father accompanied his Sunday lunch
with at his mother’s back-to-back when my brother and I would see him at the
weekend. I tasted it a couple of times and down through the years and I can
still recall my recoil at what I now know was its roastiness (though I also now
know that Mackeson’s roast character is a pretty mild creature). My grandmother
enjoyed a glass of Guinness with her beer and Yorkshire pudding though its
acridness would put it totally beyond my pale until I went to Dublin in 1985.
Then there was Double Diamond, which I only encountered in a way that didn’t go
down well with my mother.
As was common with many boys
of my age (early teens) my younger brother and I would hang out with a bunch of
other lads of roughly the same age on an open sports ground that was fringed
with trees (I remember the crab apple tree and how I made a face when I bit
into one of these apples). Throughout the holidays this was the place where
lads put their coats down as goalposts and indulged in a frenetic game of
football (one of the lads who turned up one day went in goal and I couldn’t get
the ball past him — about 13 years later my late father called me up to ask if
I was watching the FA Cup Final between Everton and Manchester United; the boy
whom I failed to kick a ball past was playing in goal for Everton: Neville
Southall). There was a cricket club pavilion at the top of the field, a
decrepit, falling down building that was often burgled, while attempts were
made to set it on fire as well. Next to it was the scoring hut, which also
suffered the attention of those with a mission to vandalise. The reason that I
tasted Double Diamond was that someone had broken into the clubhouse, dragged
out a full crate of the beer, drank it on the spot and left the dregs for me
and my brother and a couple of friends to drink. Which we then did. All I can
remember is that it tasted like the smell I used to breathe deeply of when
passing the pubs in town (and when I was growing up pubs were forbidden territories,
places where grown-ups gathered, places whose engraved, opaque glass kept the
world outside, including us kids, from observing) — it was a smell of beer and
tobacco, though beer had its own unique smell that later on I came to recognise
as a mixture of sweet barley malt and spicy, even floral hop. At the time it
was just beer to me.
And the reason I got into
trouble was that as we were drinking the dregs from these bottles a policeman
turned up and questioned my brother and I about the theft of the bottles (the
two friends were free to go — their father was a policeman). As this
interrogation was happening, friendly but firm, my grandfather, an ex
policeman, passed by and was told what had happened. When I got home my mother
was livid and made the two of us drink a glass of salty water — she said in
calm tones that it was not a punishment, but a concern that we might have been
poisoned and that the salty water would make us sick and bring up any toxins in
our body. We weren’t sick.
As I got older, other beers
passed through my life: Long Life, a canned lager that was, as the name
suggests, meant to have a long life; there was Ansell’s Mild, an insipid kind
of beer and nicknamed the skinflint’s ale by us lads in my local in Llandudno,
North Wales; Greenall Whitely, Stone’s Keg, Wrexham Lager. Later on in college
I enjoyed Greene King IPA though not Abbot (it gave me a ferocious hangover)
and Courage Director’s; I also loved Holsten Diat Pils (I could drink a lot of
it and still come up smiling the next day); and then a genuinely delicious
beer, Ind Coope’s Burton Ale, a golden-coloured beer with a fluffy meringue of
a head, something that my friend Keith and I hoovered up with great glee
whenever we met in the King’s Head in Llandudno.
In the mid 1980s cask beer
started to become important, but life changed forever when it came to beer
after reading Michael Jackson in the Independent and being given his New World Guide to Beer for Christmas. The whole world of beer was opening up
to me with Bavarian wheat beers and bocks, Czech Pilsners, Belgian strong
golden ales, barley wines from the UK and the USA. It was like poetry and the
list of beers that I wanted to devour before I shuffled off the mortal coil was
getting larger. And then about 10 years after this epiphany of sorts I decided
that I wanted to ease my way into writing about beer, it was something that
fascinated me, it was something that I felt I could say something about,
uncover something, bend the language to write about beer in a way that Jackson
was doing. I wanted to become a beer writer.
That was my relationship with
beer, but what about people’s connection with beer?
As might have been suggested
by my experience, beer both fascinates people and fashions itself around their
lifestyles, which is something you do not get with the biscuit. During the
great days of mild consumption, working men in the industrial areas of south
Wales and the Midlands drank pints and pints of their chosen ale, in their own
clubs or community pubs, roistering, reckoning on their lives’ work and
readying them for the day after tomorrow. Beer was a part of their daily life,
as common as bread and butter, steak and kidney, bacon and egg or the rent.
Beer also encourages debate.
Everyone who drinks beer seems to believe that the beer they enjoy is the best
and they will take to websites, social media and heated conversations in pubs
to prove the point. On a more parochial rather than confrontational level,
others believe that the beer they used to enjoy was much better in the past, as
I discovered at http://www.retrowow.co.uk/retro_britain/keg_bitter/60s_and_70s_beer.html.
According to Mickey, who
wrote in November 2012, ‘I was a teenager during the early/mid 1970s and was
“weened on” Double Diamond & Watney's RED barrel and still miss drinking
those beers in 2012! Pubs in England since the 1990s only sell ''real ale'' and
it tastes TERRIBLE so i don't bother going into them anymore, i wish i could
still buy a nice pint of Double Diamond or Watney's RED barrel!’
A suitably energetic response
emerged on Boxing Day a month later from Kez of Challacombe (incidentally a
village a few miles from where I live, whose pub the Black Venus I have written
about).
‘Mickey (24/11/12) You are
very much off your head, the very reason the keg beer of the 1970's have all
disapeared is because it was tasteless fizzy bilge. There are now over 1000
breweries in this Country, and the CASK ales produced are by far the best ale
this Country has EVER had. The quality, the strengths, the diversity, and now
Real Ale is here to stay because it is simply the best. I remember drinking
Trophy Bitter, Tankard Biter, Worthington E, Double Diamond, Albrite etc, they
were just awful.’
Look at that exchange of
words and the undercurrent is CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, the consumer
group that was formed in the early 1970s and is generally seen as the saviour
of traditional draught beer. The arguments their members waded into were epic:
for instance, Watney’s, so beloved of Mickey as quoted above, was reputedly so
stung by the nickname Grotney’s in CAMRA’s newspaper What’s Brewing that they allegedly felt that Red Barrel — their baby,
their big time Charlie, their blockbuster — was fatally undermined by the
constant use of the name in the cartoon. Other breweries would voice their
displeasure, but years later, providing they were still in existence, would be
holding hands with CAMRA attempting to stem a new tide of problems.
I’ve never heard about
anything similar for the biscuit, whatever its variety. Though, if you had the
strength to do it you could consider the biscuit’s class nature. Was it the
well-dressed sweetmeat on the sideboard, only to be brought out with the best
china or like beer did the variety of biscuit have a different time, a
different place and a different mood to be used? If beer was a reward what was
the biscuit — a show of wealth, a pretension to social advancement, or was it a
reward as well? Which then leads to another contrast to beer and the biscuit —
beer is undoubtedly an adult aspect of our lives, it can make you drunk if you
drink too much, it has an adult taste (well the bolder flavoured beers do), it
can mark a rite of passage in a life like going for the first pint with your
father or mother, it is drunk in the company or other adults. Hold up a glass
of beer in the air and toast a friend, a sporting occasion or just the joy of
life and you are an adult. On the other hand, as I have mentioned before, a
biscuit is positively juvenile, it is a treat, a reward (‘who’s a good boy
then?’) that dogs as well as humans get and in the case of yo-yo dieting
celebrities a sin and a well-deserved treat, that is not without some element of
danger or sin.
Sin is something that few of
us are aware of. We are in a post-belief age, a schizophrenic-like age where
people profess disbelief but also like to pronounce themselves as spiritual.
The clued-in beer-drinker, if pressed on their immortal soul, will mention
beers made by Trappist monks and English beers that have been fermented and
matured for seven days and thus blessed on the Sabbath, or maybe they will talk
about the magic of fermentation. Beer, unlike the biscuit, can have a metaphysical
life.
When
we talk of beer, we talk of lager (which then divides into a variety of
sub-sections including Dunkel, Helles, Marzen, Pilsner, Bock, Schwarzbier and
so on), a bitter (or pale ale), a mild, an IPA (though some would say that this
resides in the bitter camp), a stout (and a porter), a lambic, a Weissbier, a
Gose and so on. In the manner of an ancient shape-shifting god, beer displays
many faces to the world; it’s Joseph’s bible story in that it has a coat of
many colours; in the way we humans categorise the ages of our dogs beer crosses
a wide spectrum from soft and sweet to bitter and bracing to dry and dusty to
wild and sour. Yet there are differences. A Czech Pilsner (or svÄ›tlý ležák in the Czech demotic) such as Pivovar’s Dobranska
Hvezda 12˚ has sweet toasted grain, a slight pepperiness and delicate
Saaz-derived floral notes all vying for attention on the nose. The palate has a
hint of fruit pastilles, a slight sweetness and a long lasting dry and bitter
finish. On another level, let’s have a taste of Pivovar Kácov’s Hubertus
Premium 12˚: the nose pulsates with expressive Saaz lemony notes alongside an
undercurrent of grain. The palate is fresh and elegant, with an expressive
lemoniness chiming with a grainy, cracker-like firmness. The finish is crisp,
dry and bittersweet. Both beers come under the same style umbrella but they are
different — one has a bittersweet character and the other is drier.
Bolder
flavoured beers also have their differences. Colorado Ithaca Imperial Stout
from Brazil is as dark as a moonless night and topped with an espresso-coloured
head of foam; the nose marries bubblegum, sweet apple and toffee, while in the
mouth there are notes of berry fruit, toffee and milky coffee plus a creamy
mouth feel and an assertive bitterness in the finish. On the other hand
Emelisse Imperial Russian Stout, which comes out of Holland, is also as dark in
the glass though it has smoke, roastiness, smooth alcohol, mocha and soot on
the nose; the flavour is a multi-layered adventure of smoke, ripe plums,
chocolate, coffee, soya sauce while there is a bracing bitterness in the finish
that also has some sweetness.
Can
the same be said about the biscuit? The only change in taste is when different
ingredients are added, such as chocolate or spices (and of course different
shapes are made). For a start a biscuit, whatever shape it is, always possesses
an element of sweetness, a variable texture of crunchiness and the ability to
dissolve when dunked into a cup of tea (or tisane of lime-flower if that’s your
bag). I’m leaving savoury biscuits alone here — they are totally different
creatures, made to have slivers of cheese and bumps of pate deposited on them
and certainly not dunked in cups of tea.
However,
where biscuits have the edge on beer is in the real 3-D world — biscuits come
in all shapes and sizes: some the same size as a medallion that men with too
much back hair wear around their necks, others such as cookies are large enough
to cause pain if flipped into the face of a misbehaving adult. In-between we
have chocolate covered biscuits, round in shape, but lumpy in the face they
turn to the world; biscuits with small holes in them, which are sometimes
filled with a synthetic jam-like sweetness; then there are biscuits with larger
holes in the middle (which always set me off considering the Greek word Omphalos, meaning the navel of the world, and in turn brings
me a memory of Buck Mulligan using the word in the early pages of Ulysses);
square biscuits; multi-layered biscuits; triangular biscuits and ones shaped
like letters now and again. However, no matter what their shape, they have a
uniformity of sweetness that they cannot escape from. One last thing about
biscuits though, something that you cannot do with beer: they are
collaborationists, quislings, willing to transform their material being and
shape, which is what you do when you dunk them in tea. Which once more brings
us back to Marcel Proust and his memories and the infuriating hold that the
biscuit has on the memories we have.
But I, sitting with a glass
of beer in my hand, or glancing at one standing alone, gleaming and burbling
its bubbles to the world, on the well-polished table in front of me, would much
rather have a beer than a biscuit. This glass of beer, whether being drank in a
hobo bar next to a country railway halt in the middle of Europe or a northern
English pub where last night’s football result still smarts or a Pacific coast
brewpub where the klaxon call of sea lions on the dock outside add their own
sense of cacophony, is more important to me, more suggestive of what I have
experienced in my life, more elective in how I would choose to spend my life,
than a biscuit, whatever its shape, sugariness or absorbent qualities when
dipped into a cup of tea like a suspected witch in early modern England. This
beer and the atmosphere in which I consume and contemplate it has the power to
shift time, tilt time, take me back, take me forwards, rake up the still warm
embers of remembered moments, remove me to towns and cities that I visited,
call up faces and voices of those with whom I talked, and best of all the
flavours, the colours, the contours, the entourage of taste, smell and
sensation that a glass of beer brings with it. All of which is why I would
rather, any day, any time, anywhere, have a beer than a biscuit.
And with that in mind, I must
admit I have to feel sorry for Marcel Proust; it must have been murder in that
cork-lined room with only a biscuit and a tisane for company.
If you have got this far congratulations, this was meant to be part of an essay on memory and beer, which may or may not be expanded on in the future for a Kindle essay, but for now here it is.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)