Roll Out the Barrel

I watched the Mets-Brewers baseball game on the BBC Red Button last night.

In the seventh inning stretch, when the crowd normally sings Take Me Out to the Ball Game, the Brewers fans sang Roll Out the Barrel. The lyrics ("Roll out the barrel, we'll have a barrel of fun") are of course perfect for the Milwaukee Brewers, and for drinking beer at the ballpark. 

They also went into the history of the song, which everyone seems to claim to have composed. I always assumed it was an English pub song (the British Film Institute once put out a DVD of short films about English pubs with that title), but it turns out to be based on a Czech polka instrumental from 1927. Czech lyrics were added in 1934, English ones by American songwriters for a hit in 1939, and then it was sung by soldiers in World War II.

Every day's a school day...

Kafka and beer

I've been re-reading in the last few days some of the works of Franz Kafka, which I first discovered as a teenager in the eighties.

As with Dickens, Orwell, Patrick Hamilton, and his compatriot Jaroslav Hasek, there are very few novels or longer short stories by Kafka which don't feature pubs, beer, or the effects of drinking, often in the opening chapter or even paragraph: the young land surveyor K. in The Castle who arrives late on a winter night at the village inn where a "few peasants were still sitting over beer"; the victim of The Trial, Josef K., who on leaving the office at nine would "go to a beer hall, where until eleven he sat at a table"; and Metamorphosis, which can be seen as a description of a hangover.

Coming from a well-off, German speaking Jewish family, Kafka felt alienated by his class, language and religion from much of the society around him in early twentieth century Prague, but there was one thing he shared with his fellow Czechs: an appreciation of good beer, still ubiquitous in his native Bohemia.

Kafka's relationship with his father was a difficult one, but dying of tuberculosis at the age of forty in a sanatorium outside Vienna in 1924, and unable to swallow much, he wrote to his parents about how "during heat spells, we used to have beer together quite often, many years ago, when Father would take me to the Civilian Swimming Pool" and recalled the same childhood memory to his girlfriend Dora who nursed him there:

"When I was a little boy, before I learnt to swim, I sometimes went with my father, who also can't swim, to the non-swimmer's section. Then we sat together naked at the buffet, each with a sausage and a half litre of beer...You have to imagine, that enormous man holding by the hand a nervous little bundle of bones, or the way we undressed in the dark in the little changing room, the way he would then drag me out, because I was embarrassed, the way he tried to teach me his so-called swimming, etcetera. But then the beer!"

I'm still hoping to go to Prague myself one day, possibly when the sleeper train from Berlin starts running there next year; I'll be sure to raise a glass of pivo to him when I finally get there.

 

Czeching out some Bohemian beers

With normal exporters Beer Dome not delivering to the UK at the moment because of Brexit-related customs problems, I had a look elsewhere for Czech beer online and found Halusky, an importer/retailer based in southwest London. Their mixed box of bottled beers includes a couple I've drunk before, Budvar and Pilsner Urquell, which I've also had on draught, and a couple I hadn't, from the Velkopopovicky Kozel brewery just south of Prague (if you didn't know already, the bearded billies quaffing beer on the labels is a fairly big clue that Kozel is the Czech word for goat).

Velkopopovicky Kozel 10° Svetlé Vycepni

Very pale/gold with a sweet, honeyish malt taste, but quite bitter, well carbonated, and a rather thin mouthfeel – a pretty basic lager to be honest.

Velkopopovicky Kozel Cerny

Again quite a thin mouthfeel, and a small white head, but an instant coffee hit very much like a stout and black in colour too – my kind of beer.

When the Covid pandemic is finally over, I really need to go to the Czech Republic and drink unpasteurised draught beer in a tankovna pub there.

 

Books of the Year

I've had a bit more time than expected for books this year, for obvious reasons; getting out into the countryside regularly for long walks also enhanced my appreciation of the rural scenes in some of the novels I read.

The Train Was On Time by Heinrich Böll 

I read this short novel, about a young German soldier travelling by rail towards the Eastern Front in World War II, and what he thinks will almost certainly be his death, after hearing it recommended on Radio 4's A Good Read.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Another novel about a young soldier in World War II, an American prisoner of war who experiences the Allied firebombing of Dresden, as did Vonnegut himself.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe 

I read this novel about life in a postwar Midlands factory and the terraced streets around it after watching the film based on the book, part of the new wave of social realist film and literature by working-class actors and writers.

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

This had been on my bookshelf waiting to be read for a while. It combines time travel and gender switching in a very postmodern way for a novel written in the late 1920s.

The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles

Another postmodern novel which I read after seeing the film adaptation of it, starring Meryl Streep as the title character and Jeremy Irons as the upper middle-class fossil collector who meets and falls in love with her while walking along the shoreline near Lyme Regis on the south coast of England (and which I might just get to return to the still closed public library almost a year after borrowing it).

A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe 

I don't need to tell you why I read this in March. Some of the parallels with the current pandemic are uncanny: people shielding in their houses, or being confined to them, while wealthier families bribe officials and escape London to their second homes in the country, thus spreading the disease there, cash being seen as a potential source of infection, wild rumours and theories about the causes and origin of the plague sweeping through the city.

Summer by Albert Camus 

A short essay about Camus' native Algeria, famous for the line "In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer", a sentiment that seems particularly apt this year.

The Mill on the Floss/Scenes of Clerical Life by George Eliot 

A mill on the bend of a river outside a small town on the Lincolnshire-Nottinghamshire border and the flat land around it are the settings for a tragic story about a brother and sister growing apart until finally reunited in death. The second book is a collection of three short novels, the first volume of fiction Eliot published, about Anglican clergymen in the Warwickshire countryside of her childhood.

Black Dogs by Ian McEwen

A dark novel which switches between the emotions sparked by  the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the disturbing legacy of wartime German occupation in rural southern France.

The Scorpion God/Envoy Extraordinary/Pincher Martin by William Golding

The first two are novellas set in the ancient world, and the last a short novel about a drowning sailor in the North Atlantic in World War II, in which Golding served as a naval officer, whose plot is almost impossible to describe without revealing the twist at the end of it.

 Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne 

This rambling shaggy dog story about a young man and his battle recreation-obsessed uncle, complete with lengthy diversions, diagrams and squiggles, was considered unfilmable until a screen version starring Steve Coogan was released in 2006.

Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

I read this Trumpian tale of a self-made American businessman after seeing this, banned by Amazon, review of it.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall/Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë 

The two novels by the youngest and least known of the there literary sisters both deal with the position of women in mid-Victorian society, one the estranged wife of an alcoholic gentleman and the other a farmer's impoverished daughter forced to become a children's governess.

The Good Soldier Sjvek by Jaroslav Hasek

I picked up this long comic novel about the wanderings of an eternally cheerful soldier through the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I after seeing this article by Adrian Tierney-Jones (I finally got round to reading A Time of Gifts, the first part of Patrick Leigh Fermor's account of his walk across interwar Europe, from Rotterdam to Constantinople via Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, for the same reason).

When the weather is warmer, and the virus has been suppressed, the vaccine proved effective and travel restrictions lifted, so probably in the spring of 2022 now, I plan on finally making my own trip to Austria and Bohemia and, as Richard Boston said of his visit to Prague on a mid-sixties rail holiday through Central Europe in his book Beer and Skittles, spend a few days "going from place to place drinking this wonderful beer and feeling more and more like the good soldier Sjvek".

I'm A Union Man

I've finally got my hands on some beer from Manchester Union, the microbrewery founded a couple of years ago to brew Czech-style lagers (their head brewer is well known in Manchester beer circles, and to me personally as the mate of one of my brother-in-law's ex-colleagues).

Having only been available as a draught beer in the pubs that stocked it, and at the brewery tap, a railway arch behind Piccadilly Station in Ardwick which opened on Saturdays before lockdown, the pandemic has prompted them to crowdfund a canning line and sell their products online.

The brewery's flagship beer is a golden Pilsner-type lager, but they also now brew a dark lager with a dense white head and fruity nose. At 4.5% and 4.8% abv, they would probably both be classified as a 12° Lezak if they were brewed in the Czech Republic.

Buddy cheek

Anheuser-Busch InBev have lost their legal bid to stop the Czech brewery Budvar using the name Budweiser in the UK with the Supreme Court ruling that Budvar can continue using the name here alongside AB-InBev's beer (in the US, they have to sell it as Czechvar).

I think the best word to describe AB-InBev's legal attempts to stop Budvar using the name Budweiser is chutzpah. Front, nerve and brass neck too. Budweiser means "from Budweis", the German name for České Budějovice, the Bohemian city where beer has been brewed since the 13th century.  Adolph Busch started brewing his Budweiser beer in St Louis in 1876.

It's not as if anyone is going to confuse the two, certainly not if they drink them.

Auf Wiedersehen Deutschland

This time last week, I was on my way back from Germany.

My flight from Düsseldorf to Manchester took off at half past three so as usual I arrived at the airport just after midday. Düsseldorf Airport is actually quite a pleasant place to spend a couple of hours buying presents and having one last beer (the bar has bottles of Frankenheim Alt and Radeberger Pils on draught: I chose the latter).

In the last three years, I've been to Germany quite a bit: Düsseldorf and Cologne, Munich and Bamberg. I've  been following in the footsteps of other beer enthusiasts who showed me the way to some wonderful drinking expereiences, notably Michael Jackson and his World Guide to Beer and Ron Pattinson with his invaluable pub guides. I've now got the unexplored beer lands of Belgium and the Czech Republic in my sights. And I really must get to Salzburg one day.

Prohibition in Prague

The Czech government has banned the sale of  alcoholic drinks over 20% after nineteen people died drinking illegally distilled vodka to which industrial chemicals had been added.

The ban seems out of proportion to me. Why not just crack down on the people selling the lethal stuff? And I also struggle to see how it will work. Will international hotels in Prague stop serving visiting businessmen whisky in their private bars? Will stag parties no longer be able to order rounds of shots in clubs? Maybe. But what of the Czechs themselves? Surely those who can will simply drive over the border into Germany, Poland, Slovakia or Austria to buy their spirits. Others presumably will start bootlegging bottles across the border. And as the ban is on the sale of spirits rather than their production, will rural policemen be in a rush to stop small village distilleries selling their hooch, especially if they are given a few free samples?

Politicians and beer

When politicians are photographed drinking or pulling a pint, the motive is normally to appear "of the people" and attract votes. None of the charlatans above actually enjoy drinking beer as far as I know: Blair as PM drank whisky, Johnson as an ex-member of the Bullingdon Club is surely a champagne drinker and Livingstone in an interview last year admitted that his enthusiasm has shifted over the years from Newcastle Brown Ale to wine.

With the ex-Czech president Václav Havel who died yesterday, it was surely different.  While he doubtless benefitted from a beer drinking image given the Czech Republic has the world's highest per capita beer consumption, like politicians across the border in Bavaria I'd guess he actually liked the stuff too. 

The right-wing Labour chancellor of the 70's Denis Healey once criticised Margaret Thatcher for having no hinterland, that is interests outside politics (his were opera and photography).  Václav Havel's hinterland was pretty extensive, encompassing beer, politics, drama and poetry.  One of the most famous photos of him was taken in 1994 by Jiri Juru in the Prague pub U Zlatého Tygra, alongside the US President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and fellow writer and regular Bohumil Hrabal.
















h/t to White Beer Travels for reproducing the photo.