In Praise of Beer

There is a regular contributor to this web site who produces well written, well researched and, most importantly, interesting articles on beer. I have enjoyed every one, but his last contribution left me a little piqued.

I lived in the Philippines off and on for three years and drank nothing else but San Miguel Light. And this guy doesn’t like it? Did he get a crook bottle? Maybe he mixed it with Coke. Always having had a tendency to self analysis I decided to examine not why he didn’t like it but why I did.  Didn’t Thomas Harris say that the worm that destroys you is the temptation to agree with our critics. To get their approval?

I was raised in a beer drinking culture; on a hot Saturday afternoon my father would send me down to the Returned Servicemen’s club with a few shillings after he had finished the yard work. I would return with a couple of bottles of beer wrapped in newspaper; the club wasn’t licensed to sell beer to be taken off the premises but my father was always president or secretary or the holder of some other office. He would pack his tools away and open a bottle and pour himself a glass. My mother who would have been preserving fruit or making jam or doing one of the many other jobs country people did in those days would come out wiping her sweaty hands on her apron and sit on the porch, verandas in Australia, and take a glass. He would never drink more than the two bottles and not every Saturday. Beer was for special occasions in our family, birthday parties, the monthly RSL socials nights and Christmas. So where did I go wrong?

When I entered the workforce I scorned beer, my generation preferred spirits with a mixer, brandy and dry, rum and coke or vodka and orange. As I grew older I moved on to more physical labour and rediscovered beer. Beer was something that waited at the end of a day’s toil. Five hundred miles in a heavy truck, ten cubic metres of concrete poured or the timber framing of a new house completed. It was drank in the front bar of a pub, the first glass going down in two or three long swallows, the second to be savoured.  It was consumed, almost as a religious rite, until someone looked at their watch, drained his glass and headed home for dinner, called tea in my part of Australia. During the war my father fought in, the pub closing times had been changed to six o’clock. Various reasons were put forward for this, the workforce did not need the distraction of  long drinking hours and soldiers might forget to return from leave. Whatever, after the war, female voters who had liked this system put pressure on the politicians to retain it. Husbands came home at a reasonable hour. A daily ritual called the Six O’clock Swill came about. The barman would call Time, or Last Drinks at about ten to six and glasses were drained and another, sometimes two, ordered. They had fifteen minutes to leave after six and it was spent drinking as much beer as possible in that time. And we called ourselves a civilised nation. It took more than twenty years for this barbarity to be scrapped and returned to the original time of ten o’clock. Other than a few husbands being late for dinner nothing changed dramatically; people only had so much money to spare for beer and they spent it in a more leisurely fashion.

After I retired at the astoundingly early age of forty eight; my employer, the State Government, having offered me what seemed at the time to be a lot of money to go away so I did. I found that jobs for forty eight year olds were difficult  to come by so I took on part time work in several fields; merchandising for a milk vendor,  a few hours a day in a garden centre and I bought a pick up truck and did odd jobs. It was an interesting life but I still found myself with time on my hands so I decided to brew my own beer. The required empty bottles were accumulated surprisingly quickly, a capping machine was bought and different techniques studied. My then wife who had long resigned herself to the fact that she had a beer drinker for a husband was surprisingly enthusiastic. Beer drank at home was better than extended hours in the pub was her line of thought.

My bulk line was a pleasant larger style brew of about four percent alcohol content. This was on a par with the commercial product and was drunk in a similar manner. After work the first bottle lasted about five minutes, then the second a little longer. As I grew more adept dark beers were concocted with a higher alcohol content, these were put away for months, improving with age like good wine. Once I found some forgotten bottles more than two years old, they went down as smoothly as slipping between black silk bed sheets.

When I arrived in the Philippines the first time I was thirsty but had been on planes or between flights for about sixteen hours. I wanted a beer badly but needed to show some self control so I could sample the other delights of this exotic new country. Some one suggested San Miguel Light and although not usually a light beer drinker, assuming it was about two and a half percent, I decided it would make an ideal thirst quencher with out inducing sleep. After half a dozen bottles in the space of a couple of hours I had a suspicious glance at the label, five percent. Fucking hell, why do they call it light? I’m still not really sure. But it was beer I had grown up on, light flavoured, effervescent and quaffable. The only short coming I could see was the clear glass bottle. Beer came in brown bottles, wine in green and soft drink in clear glass. It became MY beer in the Philippines and when a respected beer sampler gave it a D minus my large nose slipped out of joint a little.

Now settled in the Land of Smiles my brew of choice is Leo, light flavoured, effervescent and quaffable. Just like the Australian draught beer I cut my teeth on.

© Julian. All rights reserved by the author.