I don't drink a lot of beer. When I do it's either summer or, paradoxically, because I'm on a wine trip.
There's nothing like a cold beer after a hard day's wine-tasting. It salves the beaten-up taste buds and fills your bladder to make sure you get a good night's sleep.
These statements might rile hard-core beer aficionados who will demand to know why I have the temerity to write about their favourite beverage. A couple of years ago, I ventured a couple of statements in this annual Ode to Ale column that were insufficiently pious toward the amber god. I brought down on my head a reaction worthy of the most appalling wine snob faced with a philistine who professes a liking for screwcaps.
But wine and beer have this long and interweaving history, as I'll show in a book (a world history of alcohol) that I'm finishing this year. Both originated in the same part of the world -- the Middle East where, paradoxically, prohibition has been most successful -- and both have long co-existed as alternative drinks. Both have been used in religious ceremonies, both have been related to companionship, conviviality and sexuality. And both have been condemned as wicked and socially harmful.
At the same time, there have been tensions between them. With rare exceptions, wine can be made only at one time of the year and therefore has scarcity value. Beer can be made year-round and is therefore always available.
Wine, less common and more expensive, quickly became associated with the elites in many places -- although we should never underestimate the volume of beer the elites guzzled, too.
Then, Christianity gave wine extra cachet. Wine is the most commonly mentioned drink in the Bible. There was the miracle of turning water into wine (who wouldn't want a guest who could do that?) and the role of wine in Christian communion, where it represents Christ's blood.
In the first centuries of the Christian era, giving up beer for wine symbolized conversion to Christianity.
So beer has this history that's longer than wine's, and at least as rich, although records of beer aren't as good as records related to wine (those elites, again). It's more widely consumed in demographic terms, and it's associated with individual countries just as much as wine is.
Today I've tasted four beers from my own history. I got through a fair bit of Steinlager when I was growing up in New Zealand, and I still like it. Castlemaine saw me through an unforgettable (yet strangely unclear) afternoon in the Rocks, in Sydney, when I learned all the beer-glass sizes current in Australia: middies, schooners, and the like. Tuborg was my favourite beer when I was an undergraduate.
And, finally, Heineken. I was drinking Heineken and she was drinking Sam Adams in a bar in New York City, 10 or so years ago, when she asked me if I wanted to marry her. We were killing time before seeing a performance of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband. There are liquid memories here.
Four beers for Canada Day.