Accent on Living

WILL anyone join me in a convivial complaint against most of the present-day beer and ale?

The worst beer I have ever tasted came from a porcelain-stoppered bottle served in a roadside estaminet some fifty miles north of Bordeaux. It looked and tasted like citrate of magnesia with lemonade tendencies, and I was astonished to learn that it was produced by a local brewery rather than the apothecary. Fiercely carbonated, its head consisted of a few large bubbles which vanished almost immediately, and its alcoholic content would have begun at the third decimal place.

The best beer in my experience came in the fall of 1938, at The Blue Ribbon in New York, when the proprietor of the restaurant went through its bar distributing small cards announcing the arrival of what was merely called October beer, without designation of the Munich brewery which produced it. Dark orange in color, with a delicately bitter flavor which reached the palate almost as an afterthought, this was a draught beer, drawn to perfection, strong yet subtle.

For a lighter brew, the pre-war imported Pilsener was, on draught, in a class by itself. In much the same bracket is the dark or light Wuerzburger on draught at Luchow’s and a few other restaurants around the land, and there is one Boston brew — known as Wirth’s Special Dark and available on draught at Wirth’s restaurant —which seems to me a creditable domestic bid for slightly inferior status.

As to ale, the finest I have known, domestic or foreign, was a case which a celebrated American producer bestowed on a New York advertising man as a Christmas gift. My recollection tolls me that each bottle was stamped to indicate a truly fabulous interval — as much as six or eight years — of aging between brewing and bottling. My expectations were high when the recipient poured me a glass of this grandly accredited ale, and they were fully realized by the ale itself — heavy, fullbodied, powerful, bitter, and possessing a vitality more usually found in draught rather than bottled beverages. This brewer’s ordinary product bears no resemblance to the ale which I mention. But fully comparable, a kind of companion piece from overseas in taste and effect, is the beverage — which I first encountered only recently— called Bass & Co.’s No. 1 Barley Wine.

A London publisher introduced me to barley wine in a wonderful old bar in the Strand, the Yates Wine Lodge. British beer and ale had seemed to me just as meaningless as they are in this country, but barley wine is something else again — dry yet possessing a hearty, bitter-ale flavor to a degree I had never tasted before. The importer who later procured for me some additional samples in Boston tells me its alcoholic content is 9 per cent, and that the tiny 6½-ounce bottles — the only size in which barley wine is shipped — will be fairly expensive. I gather that barley wine is not widely sold in Britain, and not at all in this country, but I believe it could pick up a following in short order. It is not, of course, a wine — an antique term in this case — but an ale, and as something to go along with a slice of cold roast beef or a bit of cheese, barley wine is unique.

But most of the beer and ale in our own country has become so insipid as to be quite meaningless for any occasion. Here and there a brewery has tried to resist the trend. One, for instance, advertises its product as “real” beer, which shows how far off the track some of the others must have wandered.

There was a comfortable interval in the thirties after Repeal when American breweries, as they sought to discover the public taste, were offering a variety of attractive, even interesting brews. It may be that the shortage of cereals during the war contributed to the decline of quality that followed; and another possibility is that the brewers came to believe that if beer and ale were weakened considerably, the customers would drink more.

Certain preposterous theories about public relations and the psychology of mass markets may have muddled further the brewers’ conception of what their product should be: beer was advertised, by implication, as an all but nonalcoholic drink, or a kind of “health” adjunct like yoghurt, or a high-toned competitor of champagne. Why should beer be like champagne?

At the moment, some brewers are asserting the nonfattening virtues of their beer, a “low calory ” beer if you please, as if by drinking enough of it one would quickly become slim as a greyhound. It is worth noting that the most flamboyant diets expounded to the obese by the picture magazines are usually based on an eat-all-youwant appeal, and now comes the same reasoning in behalf of beer: beer is fattening; most Americans don’t want to be fat; therefore, we’ll give you a nonfattening beer. And similarly: beer is intoxicating; intoxication is bad; therefore, we’ll give you a beer that you can drink in vast quantities without feeling it in the least.

The only trouble is, it isn’t beer, and the ale isn’t ale.

Is the brewing industry, on the present basis, finding a cold front anywhere among its customers? It would be a singular thing nowadays, in many households of which I have knowledge, if the host were to offer his friends a glass of beer of an evening. These same households did, in former days, use a fair amount of beer and ale, and so did my own, but this is no longer the fact.

With neither flavor nor kick, beer and ale are still doubtless a hygienic and inexpensive cold drink, but so is iced tea — and so, indeed, is ice water.