It’s all fun until someone loses a Coffee Porter

Sometimes you’re having harmless fun and then some clown takes it a little too far and then everyone suffers when Mum and Dad crack down and ban everyone. It’s a theme that I’ve returned to a few times of late, what with distillers who couldn’t confine themselves to crappy sweetened distilled alcoholic beverages, deciding they would be better off making flavourless beer and then adding sugar and raspberry flavourings to it so they could sell the same tasting slop but cheaper. (It was obviously mature and responsible adults that they were targeting these sweet, fizzy alcopops to.) Of course, this just meant that the Federal Government changed the definition of beer to stop the practice and in doing so made it difficult for centuries-old styles of beers – ones that aren’t sweet or ‘sessionable’ – to be brewed.

(And to deviate from that theme for just a minute, it may be an old-fashioned view, but shouldn’t taste like the source from which it is derived? Shouldn’t wine taste of grapes? Beer of malt, hops and yeast? Once you get to the stage that you’re just making alcohol in the cheapest possible way and masking the flavour to make it easy to drink – you’re not drinking, you’re just consuming alcohol. The marketers can put it in fancy bottles and call it ‘Something-Something Platinum’ but it is just flavoured alcohol. While the advertising and marketing of these things portrays attractive 20-somethings in a chic nightclub being sophisticated, the reality is it should be a vagrant in an alley drinking metho and milk – because the approach to drinking is just the same: “I don’t care where my alcohol is from and what it tastes like, I’ll just mask the taste and drink as much as I can for the effect it brings.” But I digress…)

Another example is what’s recently happened in the States where the Federal Drug Administration has sent letters to 30 manufacturers of alcoholic beverages with caffeine in them asking them to prove that the combination is ‘Generally Regarded As Safe’. There is plenty of discussion of the issue on many of the US beer writers’ sites – as usual Jay Brooks has one of the best round ups – but the upshot is there is a risk that caffeine can be banned in alcoholic beverages. Now, when some of the drinks covered by the FDA letters include such classy beverages as Liquid Charge, 3Sum, 3AM Vodka, Vicious Vodka with Caffeine and Slingshot Party Gel, I can understand why they come under the scrutiny of the government. But as always the government would impose a blanket ban rather than just dealing with the problem ones and so because a couple of hyperactive kids with sticks who don’t know when to stop whack kids in the heads with sticks until they cry, there is a risk our parents will ban the rest of us from having fun recreating Star Wars light sabre fights with sticks too.

Now, if the logic is applied in Australia, Meantime Coffee Porter (there aren’t many locally made versions, though Brad Rogers did Crema  while he was at Matilda Bay) – which is definitely a one-beer-a-night-with-a-nice-dessert beer could be banned all because of a we-put-caffeine-and-guarana-in-a-vodka-drink-cos-the-kiddies-think-they’re-cool-and-can-stay-up-all-night-drinking-them drink.

Coffee and porter or stout are an almost perfect combination – blended together for flavour not for effect, but we could lose them because some kids just don’t know how to play right and take it too far.

Duty of care

Publicans across Australia will be breathing a sign of relief today. In a fascinating (if you’re into that sort of thing) judgement, the High Court in the case of

C.A.L. No 14 Pty Ltd v Motor Accidents Insurance Board; C.A.L. No 14 Pty Ltd v Scott [2009] HCA 47

has ruled publicans have no general duty of care to protect patrons from the consequences of getting drunk..essentially not duty to protect them from themselves.

It is predictably being hailed as a victory of common sense, which in many ways it is. However, it would also seem to raise considerable problems for the Responsible Service of Alcohol schemes that operate in many states.

The Court found that there is no general duty of care, saying…“outside exceptional cases, which this case is not, persons in the position of the Proprietor and the Licensee, while bound by important statutory duties in relation to the service of alcohol and the conduct of the premises in which it is served, owe no general duty of care at common law to customers which requires them to monitor and minimise the service of alcohol or to protect customers from the consequences of the alcohol they choose to consume.”

While emphasising the “important statutory duties in relation to the service of alcohol”, the also highlighted the problems in policing these laws.

In Queensland the Liquor Act makes it an offence on licensed premises to (my emphasis):

• sell/supply/provide liquor to an unduly intoxicated patron
• allow another person to supply an unduly intoxicated patron with liquor
• allow an unduly intoxicated patron to consume liquor.

In reaching their decision three judges, with whom a fourth agreed, stated (again, my emphasis):

Expressions like "intoxication", "inebriation" and "drunkenness" are difficult both to define and to apply. The fact that legislation compels publicans not to serve customers who are apparently drunk does not make the introduction of a civil duty of care defined by reference to those expressions any more workable or attractive. It is difficult for an observer to assess whether a drinker has reached the point denoted by those expressions. Some people do so faster than others. Some show the signs of intoxication earlier than others. In some the signs of intoxication are not readily apparent. With some there is the risk of confusing excitement, liveliness and high spirits with inebriation. With others, silence conceals an almost complete incapacity to speak or move. The point at which a drinker is at risk of injury from drinking can be reached in many individuals before those signs are evident. Persons serving drinks, even if they undertake the difficult process of counting the drinks served, have no means of knowing how much the drinker ingested before arrival. Constant surveillance of drinkers is impractical. Asking how much a drinker has drunk, how much of any particular bottle or round of drinks the purchaser intends to drink personally and how much will be consumed by friends of the purchaser who may be much more or much less intoxicated than the purchaser would be seen as impertinent. Equally, to ask how the drinker feels, and what the drinker's mental and physical capacity is, would tend to destroy peaceful relations, and would collide with the interests of drinkers in their personal privacy. In addition, while the relatively accurate calculation of blood alcohol levels is possible by the use of breathalysers, the compulsory administration of that type of testing by police officers on the roads was bitterly opposed when legislation introduced it, and it is unthinkable that the common law of negligence could compel or sanction the use of methods so alien to community mores in hotels and restaurants. 

To me they are also saying that it is almost impossible to adhere to the responsible service of alcohol requirements that Governments require them to adhere to.

As the publicans are saying today (as reported in The Australian):

But the AHA and individual publicans hailed the ruling as sending a strong warning to drinkers to take responsibility for their own actions.

Which as a general principal I agree with – people should take responsibility for their own actions. Except that there is a significant section of society that doesn’t. Even though drink driving laws have been around for a generation, there are still f*ckwits around who think nothing of driving with a skinfull. If taking personal responsibility meant that they were the only ones killed by their actions, all would be good. But these people share the roads with me. They are just as likely to kill me or my children as themselves.

I don’t know what the solution is, but it is a lot more complicated than any one of the groups with a vested interest would have us believe. I’ve been doing a of of writing about this lately, soon to be published, that I suspect makes me sound like a wowser or a card carrying anti-alcohol crusader. Believe me, I’m not and I know I’m not because all of this thinking about it is driving me to drink!

Ban glasses?

I have been thinking a lot about drinking lately (as opposed to beer), primarily fuelled by the intensity of the debate about ‘binge drinking’ that has rapidly been deteriorating into farce and hysteria. The most recent example of this came over he weekend when the Courier Mail ran a story headlined, “Woman on assault charges for glassing and punching” after a women threw a glass at a bloke. I don’t mean to make light of it, but is this a ‘glassing’? Call me old-fashioned, but even last week wasn’t a glassing when you would break a glass and slash someone with it, or break it over them cutting them in the process? This story is just a garden variety assault, not the extension of the terror on our modern streets. I’d even settle for that old favourite ‘alcohol-fuelled violence’ over ‘glassing’ in this case. When the media has the bit between its teeth there’s no stopping them…which is why the hotel and alcohol industries need to look carefully at their backyard. Alcohol is a cause célèbre at the moment and every media-worthy incident just sharpens the spotlight on alcohol and pushes the government harder to act – and the government has no ability to act precisely. Anything the government does won’t just affect the worst clubs and pubs, it will affect everyone. This was amply demonstrated when the Federal Government responded to malt-based alcopops by changing the definition of beer. Because one section of the alcohol industry wanted to act in a way that was clearly contrary to the excise laws, the brewing industry has been subjected to a change of the very definition of beer. Of course, it’s not a change that will hurt the big brewers – but it was a chance that will affect the small brewers who don’t have the ability to assay their bitterness or their sugar content, or just face greater compliance costs to prove they meet the requirements.

Returning to the Courier Mail story, forcing pubs to use plastic glasses wouldn’t have prevented this assault I suspect. If she wanted to hit someone, she would just as likely have thrown whatever was in her hand – even a plastic cup, used a pool cue or her bottle of vodka cruiser (I’m guessing here…call it a stereotype, but I’d be willing to bet that most pub assaults by women are caused by alcopop and cheap cocktail drinkers. I can’t remember the last time that a saison or robust porter was implicated in an assault).

Still, I have no real problem with the government mandating the use of plastic in places that have a demonstrable problem with alcohol-related incidents. I don’t think the plastic will do much – there are more problems caused by blokes getting into a fight and kicking each other in the head – but maybe the threat of having to use plastic and the potential loss of business that may come of it will get a subsection of irresponsible publicans to actually enforce the Responsible Service of Alcohol, rather than pour cheap, flavourless alcohol down their patrons throats and count the cash afterwards.