"You can really taste the hops!" (draft 2)
I 've been reading a lot about drink recently.
The Guardian's Book of Drinking may be marketed as a throwaway Miscellany-style by-the-till gift book, but it's actually a very interesting collection of articles about alcohol and attitudes to it from the last 190 years.
For example, one of the persistent theories about the popularity of cocktails during and after the interwar years was that Prohibition in the US meant that barmen had to hide both the fact of the bootleg liquor from the authorities and the taste of same from the customer. Many of these barmen, pressed for work, came to the UK and spread the fad.
What is less clear, however, is how cocktail flaring started. You know, all that Tom Cruise/Bryan Brown business.
My personal theory is that there was another wave of migration to the UK bringing these skills. Working backwards, I would assume that some major country must have expelled all of its most preening, idiotic, cocksure, rapist jugglers.
On a more serious note, the politics of temperance have some interesting modern parallels. It is noted that 19th century radicals and socialists tended towards temperance and outright tee-totalitarianism especially where the poor, noble, childlike working man was concerned. The Guardian itself, it is admitted, tended editorially towards this puritanism for much of its history.
The Tories, by contrast, had amongst their ranks a good number of "Brewer MPs", with connections to the industry. They defended drink purely out of self-interest and profit, but phrased this in terms of protecting the few simple pleasures of the working man. Cf. Ken Clarke regarding smoking today.
I've also been reading up on ale, and bought a pretty comprehensive book edited by Michael Jackson (the beer hunter, not the child-catcher much-missed King of Pop and foremost champion of civil rights).
However, one thing that bothered me slightly was that the tasting notes seem incredibly repetitive. Everything is described in terms of hoppiness, maltiness, body and often "citrus".
I suppose this does make sense. Most beers within a type vary only in degrees of the same flavours. For example, most stouts can be described almost entirely on the degree to which they are: (1) smokey ; (2) coffee-ey; and (3) chocolatey.
I did think for a bit that I might be able to do better, so I sat down with a bottle of one my new favourite bottled beers, Pure Ubu.
It tasted rich, sweet and caramelly, with a nice woody or leathery undertone. Imagine eating a Highland Toffee bar in the House Of Lords.
The aftertaste kept the woody flavour, but there was a distinct chemically element that crept in. It reminded me of something specific that I couldn't quite place. But then I suddenly realised what it was: Mr Sheen!
However, after the satisfaction of realising what it actually was, I drank a bit more and discovered I'd created a problem for myself: I couldn't drink it at all without being overwhelmed by the taste of furniture polish.
It's like Cat Deeley's (very slightly) wonky nose: once someone points it out to you, you're doomed to notice it forever, putting you right off your stroke. Your mind inevitably starts wandering, guessing whether it was the result of a childhood bike accident, a difficult birth or a sudden moment of horrible violence at the hands of a much-loved cheeky ITV duo.
So now me and Ubu are stuck with the furniture polish. In all probability I may well have ruined a perfectly good beer for you too, before you've even tried it.
Next time I'll just say it's "delightfully beery", "adequately beery", "insufficiently beery" or "so lacking in beerosity, one begins to doubt whether it is even a beer at all - then one's suspicions are seen to be well-founded, when closer inspection reveals it to be a live Puffin masquerading as a pint of stout for camouflage".
That should cover all possibilities, surely.