BEER DRINKING AND DRINKERS.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume XV, Issue 883, 7 February 1907, Page 22

BEER DRINKING AND DRINKERS.

S’nce the days of the Tudors, beer, good and very often bad, has never gone out of fashion as the standard liquor of Britain. The influence of Puritanism—which clipped off the noses of some saints,

which caused the fine arts to hide themselves in dark cellars, and the names and glories of the Globe, and the Fortuna to be almost forgotten, and which sent the sprightly Coranto, the Saraband, and the Gavotte flying across the Channel—never had power sufficient to banish the “black jack” from the table ,of the then suffering Briton. The Lord Protector, himself, was an open ale-drinker. “Good, singing beer,” as different from the sweet, sickly forms of mead of an earlier. date, began to be universally popular throughout the length and breadth of Europe during the days of Wallanstein, Tully, the Piccolomini, and their comrades or enemies ; ndeed, there was always something of military sentiment about this taste for beerdrinking. Our dandy Guardsman, even at the beginning of the present century, although he could rough it on a fowl and a bottle of champagne, would have nothing to do with the foaming pewter. Powder patches and macaroni bucks of the Byron epoch left beer to the “masses.” The fashion for ale-drinking, although Trumpington and Adruit still flourished at the seat of learning, never became really popular among the better-to-do until it was exported from our Indian Empire. Wea’thy nabobs, returning to spend their declining years in Hanover-square redbricked, narrow-windowed mansions, brought back with them their taste for East India pale ale. The liquor, which was once on’y drunk by the Anglo-Indian, soon became the drink of the Anglian pure and simple. To the lower middleclass, also, there was a smack of “quality” about this pale ale drinking which he ped to make it peculiarly attractive. In some of the earlier Dickens’ sketches a naughty young cousin is assumed to be aim’ng at the reputation of a man about town, from the fact that he is given to drinking “pale ale.” Within the last few years, however, the gentility of “bitter” has somewhat waned before his rival lager. There is a foreign air about this lager-drinking, a look of the citizen of the world about it, which is highly attractive to the youth of the middle class. It smacks of cheap tours on the Continent. With a glass mug. of it before him, and an indifferent Havana between his teeth, the humbler apostle of swelldom recalls the glories of the “Biergarten”— its officers with swords stuck between their skirts; its band playing, in smart time but brassy tones, the latest of Strauss or Kela Bela. Yet we, on the other hand, have no right to be angry with our continental neighbour for having foisted his new beer trade upon us. There is hardly a decent cafe in a capital town in Europe where “Scots whisky” —good, although io or 15 years ago 75 centimes a petit verre was by no means thought to be exorbitant. As to English,

Irish, and Scotch bottled beer, the corks can be heard popping from the Bucharest boulevard to the Winter Gardens at Moskowa. English beer and English drinks can more than hold their own on the Continent. With regard to beerdrinking, there is no doubt whatever that its popularity among the well-to-do classes has decidedly increased, rather than decreased. To drink beer is certainly not vulgar. We I’ve in an age when many members of the highest classes openly boast that they ride second-class, because there does not happen to be a third. Good beer is better than cheap claret, infinitely better than bad claret. Again, the od tradition about beer being invariably bile-making has altogether exploded. The man who takes plenty of smart exercise never need fear, any more than his ancestors did, whether Cavalier or Roundhead, the terrors of the “Black Jack.” —“The Aus ralian Brewers’ Jourr.al,”