Well, maybe a few words of introduction. This blog will be about beer. My intention is to review a single beer per period (week? month? who knows), occasionally interspersed with thinkpieces, or op eds, or whatever you want to call them, such as the one below. Writing this has been a long-held ambition of mine. So now I’ve started – the challenge will be to keep going and not use too many dashes or semi-colons. And about me. Well, I love beer, and I have a day job as a civil servant of some description.
I have often been accused of being a beer snob. This is usually in response to disgusted exclamations, such as ‘I’m not drinking that’. Or occasionally far more reasonable requests, such as ‘can’t we go to X, they serve decent beer there’. In fact, the latter approach is often received fairly well. I think my friends are now in the habit of filing me alongside vegans, gluten-free types, and others with special dietary requirements. So be it. At least I get a decent drink.
I looked up ‘snob’ on the interweb just now. The definition is –
a person who imitates, cultivates, or slavishly admires social superiors and is condescending or overbearing to others.
Interesting. There is also a secondary definition –
a person who believes himself or herself an expert or connoisseur in a given field and is condescending toward or disdainful of those who hold other opinions or have different tastes regarding this field: a musical snob.
That sounds much more like me, but it screws with my hypothesis, so I’m going to gloss lightly over it and return to my main point.
I think the ‘slavishly admires’ bit is important. For me, snobbery is a reliance on extrinsic, rather than intrinsic, factors to make value judgements. I don’t like X’s album because I don’t like his trousers, or because somebody I admire doesn’t like him, or whatever. Nothing to do with music.
People who accuse me of being a beer snob seem to think this is the case. That I refuse to drink… oooh… Tui, because I don’t like the label, or it doesn’t fit my image or something. Wrong! I don’t drink it because it tastes of sewage.
Nonetheless, the social pressure to drink the stuff is extraordinary. I think people are genuinely resentful. ‘What, you think you’re better than us? Normal people drink it. Are you better than normal people?’. It’s actual, genuine, according-to-Hoyle resentment dressed up as friendly joshing. For the record, no, I’m actually much worse than normal people in a wide variety of ways. I have nasty habits.
Habits aside, how’s about this for an alternative way of looking at it. I am accused of thinking I’m better than most people because I want to drink something a bit nicer. This implies that most people like, or enjoy, or have to, drink something genuinely revolting. And it’s the ‘most people’ that I find interesting. I should lay out several thousand words of complex sociological norms here, but I’m going to cut straight to the chase in the interests of brevity. I think that this ‘most people’, or ‘normal people’, in the context of New Zealand, is probably poor people. Or maybe poor people in combination with the sorry but persistent notion of a ‘kiwi’ who can do things with some kind of wire and demonstrates his masculinity by herding sheep in subzero temperatures in his underpants. When it comes to beer, unlike, say, wine, or food, it seems that we feel the need to protest our connection to some shared concept of the ‘common man’ through the medium of gallons of dreadful booze.
Eh? What kind of argument is that? That good, cheery, honest, working folk are only allowed to drink crap? That the smiling peasants only really enjoy corn-syrup-infused shit and anybody who aspires to anything better is a braying toff? That the plebs only deserve the swabbings from the rectum of a dysenteric warthog?
There is something odd going on here. That we should display aspirational solidarity with the ‘common man’, or prove our resistance to the worst discomforts nature can throw at us, by drinking rubbish in large quantities. And anybody who says no is second only in the ranks of despised humanity to someone who steals dogs for a living.
Well, personally, I think that’s snobbery. I think good beer is a far too exciting and wonderful drink to be restricted to anybody of any social status. And I despise the norms and the economy that makes people think it’s not only OK, but actually desirable, to spew out sugary swill and force people to drink it for pleasure. And do you know what’s most frustrating? Good beer can actually be made cheaply. Price doesn’t have to be an object. Ask any decent German or English brewer.
So, a cri de coeur that I will probably return to again and again, if I ever write a second instalment. Everybody should drink good beer. And I’m not a snob. Well, I am, but so are you.
