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.

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.