Belonging #Fullers

You start going to a pub, which you call your local, even though you might have to get a bus or a taxi or cycle to it, or just walk around the corner, but you start to belong. You start to get to know people, you start to get to know which ones are the bores, the ones you say hello to quickly and move on, straining to avoid talking about the news or whatever sport they like or even the weather; you get to know the ones who are drunks but quite funny until you get bored (and worried you’ll become like them and sometimes think you have become like them); you get to know the belligerent ones who dislike the fact that you might have the wrong kind of voice and haven’t lived around here long enough and that their hard-earned friends are pally with you and sometimes, much against your better judgment, you try to make friends with the belligerents and eventually do; you get to know the beer experts (and keep your mouth shut); you get to know the drinkers who like dogs, who comment on the book you are reading, who ask you what football or rugby team you support or whether you like cricket (‘sorry mate, bores the pants off me’); you get to know the wastrels, the wasted, the strait-laced, the frayed and the afraid whose eyes widen when you tell them that once upon a time on your travels you drank a 25% (or thereabouts) beer — ‘not in pints mind, gold-flecked thimbles’; you get to know the dead ones, whose photos (or sometimes boots) hang on the walls or in alcoves; you get to know who is in at which time of the day and doubtless if someone else is keeping count you are time-checked and put on the rota. 

You belong, beer and pubs make us belong, maybe not make as that sounds like a three-line whip, but beer does help us belong, in the way you tip the glass and say cheers to a complete stranger who you will never see again; or the conversation in between swigs of Gold with the man in the paint-stained overalls who hears you mention a town you (and they) used to live in; then there are the brewer’s parents who are keen on what you think of their proud prodigy’s pints; beer helps us belong, engage in confidences about sport, business, the weather, the street you live in and also agree that religion and politics have no place in the bar (unlike that loudmouth over there); you become a fixture, as immovable as that stuffed owl under a bell jar that old Cyril (remember him?) claimed to have found by the side of a road when he came back from the Korean War (or was it a stint with ENSA?). 

You belong. Beer helps us belong. 

Which is why I felt sad about Fuller Smith & Turner’s demise as an independent brewery. I’ll get over it, we get over things us adults, and after all as long as ESB, London Porter (in keg for me), Vintage Ale, the wisteria, the brewery yard across which hundreds of workers have ambled and gambled on a life in beer and that tumble-down dusty room of bound brewery archives exists I will feel I belong. But if it changes and the seas of corporate ways take the brewery into a dark sunken valley of a different landscape and a memory of what once was, I won’t belong. Until then…

Ever fallen in love with a beer you shouldn’t have?

We fall in love with the wrong people, the destructive people, the people who want to shine in the flames of ruined towns, the people who want to lock the door and never allow anyone in ever again, the people who don’t actually know you exist, the wrong people. Do we fall in love with the wrong beer? Is that possible? Should it be possible? What is the wrong beer? If I fall in love with a pale barley wine and drink far too much of it tomorrow and the day after and the day after and eventually I find myself rummaging through bins in the big city in the search for food having spent all my money on this beer, is it the wrong beer? Or am I just the wrong person in the wrong (or even right) place? What about that beer that confers on me the sainthood-like confederacy of being joined to something that I swell with pride about or that I feel makes me walk a bit faster and a bit taller? Is this the wrong beer? Is this the sense of pride? Can the beer that you have fallen in love with and shouldn’t have be the wrong shade in the glass, a chestnut brown that gleams like Bruce Forsyth in his prime, or shimmers like a dream that you are desperately trying to return to at 5am, aware that the alarm will soon be barking in your ear like the dog you had when you were a child and sometimes still miss? There have been moments when an exemplary Best Bitter has been that beer, a hangover, an old makeover, a bothersome beer, though it doesn’t do as much for me as a Franconian lagered beer with its layers of flavour and pleasure and recognition that beer can be something more than this sin of wrong-doing. Should it be a beer that everyone drinks, a beer that screams and howls like a crowd-pleasing guitar solo, but you really know that you feel a little bit smaller on drinking it, letting yourself down, letting your friend down, letting the person who used to get excited about artisanal and smallness down, like a stricken Zeppelin falling to earth, Wagnerian in its fire and fury? A duplicitous DIPA, all flails and fury, stripping the tongue like a barbarian in training, gilding the tonsils with illustrious hails of hop curiosity and after far too much glasses of good-natured insobriety toppling the Gulliver of a drinker you have become. Have you ever fallen in love with a beer you shouldn’t have?