Way out West (incorporating Way up North)

wind and dined

As I write, I have a glass of the designer beverage 'The beer to dine for' in front of me, I have to say, it is not unpleasant, it is, however, not very anything. It is pitched as a beer to accompany meals, and if anything, it tastes like cobra lager (the lager you get in indian restaurants in enormous bottles), only flatter. It's quite strong (5%), and bottled in 750ml bottles, I think if I wanted an alternative to wine (unless I was having a curry), then fizzy water would be preferable.

As a replacement for wine, I think it's a bit of a non-starter, it has none of the good points of proper beer, and I suspect, all of the bad. So, you get an insipid drink, and fart like a demon all night.

I'm sorry to return to an old obsession, but the image of the real ale drinker complete with beard, halitosis, sandals with socks and copious wind, like so many cliches is true. The brewerys have tried making proper beer attractive to women (by selling it in 1/3 pints in long stemmed glasses), I know plenty of women who happily drink pints, and accept the side effects. In my teens a night out was not dissimilar to the beans scene in Blazing Saddles, as I no longer go drinking with teenagers, I can't comment on what current thoughts are on the subject of wind. 'Better out than in' is a phrase that strikes dread into the conjugal bed in my experience, whoever says it.

What's to be done? You can't force people to like the sometimes subtle experience that proper beer offers; a generation raised on the bland, sweet and totally predictable flavours of coke, ribena and sunny delight is unlikely to embrace the unpredictable, difficult and complex flavours beer can offer. I note with amusement the protests from certain quarters that Youngs bitter has been taken off the menu at the strangers bar in the Houses of Parliament and replaced with San Miguel (a spanish lager brewed under license in the UK). I won't even bother to do more than note that the occupiers of the Houses of Parliament have always been able to drink right round the clock, and some of our distinguished legislators were (and remain) unaware that different conditions apply out here in the real world.

In conclusion, heaven help us from marketing men (and women), this year, I have sampled 'blubena' and the beer described above, in both cases I think the failure of the product owes more to the inability of the marketers to identify what was good about the original product and capitalise on that; so we get a new 'flavour' fruit drink, with a flavour that nobody in the UK would be expected to recognise, and an impeccably brewed beer from an excellent brewery that tastes like Indian lager. I rest my case.

posted by Lampy @ 12/05/2005 10:11:00 pm