Rich and pour: A fond and beery friendship
A golden memory or two by way of my, ahem, friend. First published in The Saturday Age.
A friend of mine loves a good beer. But he'll settle for a bad one if he has to. And, like many of us, he’s found and lost himself in many a beery situation over the years. Some good, some bad. He knows it’s all his own work. The beer, every gorgeous golden drop, is entirely innocent. Unlike him.
There was one night, back in his student share-house years, when my friend was led further astray than usual by beer. Quite a lot of beer. He and his housemates lived a few doors down from a pub. They could barely afford to drink at the place, or any place for that matter, but still, it was nice to know it was there.
On this particular evening the smell of lager was drifting in over their backyard as heady as ever, warm as a lover’s breath. Besotted, my friend gathered up his coins and headed pubwards, to sip his single pot at a glacial pace, and pray the pool table might grant him a free game.
But when he got there the pub was closing up, for good. Men were hauling sheets of tin out of a trailer to hammer them across windows and doors. When my friend asked what was going on, he got a one-word reply from a man with galvanised nails between his teeth: “Liquidated.”
My friend wasn’t sure what this meant. As far as he could tell the pub did very well on the liquid front. Another hammer-wielding man filled in the blanks: “Owners went broke and skipped town.”
The men and their trailer were soon gone, and my friend moped home the back way, surprised to see the pub’s rear hadn’t been boarded up. Glinting in the moonlight behind the thinnest of wire gates were great slabs of Victoria’s finest.
“Liquidated,” my friend, muttered.
An emergency meeting was called in the share-house kitchen. Ethics and morals were discussed. Consciences were wrestled. In the end it was decided that this would not be stealing. Not really. It was more like an open-ended student loan. The details are sketchy but one thing is certain - a student share-house generally bereft of beer became, overnight, awash with stuff. Instead of milk crates, six-packs and slabs now doubled as futon bases.
In no time, word got around and a soggy string of parties ensued. Friends and strangers alike shared in the bounty. Stocks soon dried up. But not before the household got a handyman in to fix the leaking pipes that the landlord had long ignored. The handyman was paid in cold hard cans.
Not surprisingly, my friend has come to regard beer as a great provider. Some of us, he likes to point out, would not even exist were it not for the warm glow and joyful abandon that a few ice-breaking ales have brought to a courtship ritual.
Beer, he notes, is also prudent. It giveth, it taketh away. Behold the brewer’s droop, he says. That's your wise ale’s way of saying give it a rest.
In my friend's opinion, beer is unfairly associated with over-indulgence when in fact, it cautions against too much of a good thing. While it gets on dangerously well with curries and noodles and all kinds of deep-fried excesses, it does draw the line at chocolate. Beer and chocolate just don’t go well together. It’s as if the self-respecting brew is saying “Am I not enough of a treat as it is? Chocolate as well? Are you serious?” Seems beer is proud that way.
Beer is also an enduring mystery. This is amply demonstrated by my friend's father-in-law who, despite a background in applied sciences and 50 odd years of producing mighty fine homebrew, will happily admit he's still learning the dark art of beer-making.
This only adds to the magic of beer in my friend’s eyes. Despite evidence to the contrary, my friend insists beer has qualities that enhance our memories.
All sorts of fond, beery thoughts have settled themselves in his mind over the years, like fine sediment, or the gold dust he collected in a tiny jar on a primary school excursion to Sovereign Hill that time. They rode a red rattler there and back, sleeping in bunks. He vividly recalls poking his head down the long carriage corridor after lights-out to see his teachers at the bar in the dining car raising a round of beers to each other, the setting sun bouncing off gleeful smiles, their hands full of sparkling liquid gold.
As a younger boy, my friend spent occasional weekends collecting empties in a Port Melbourne pub where his mum worked in the kitchen. Coming from Canberra, as my friend had, the pub was quite a culture shock. Coming from Canberra, any culture at all was quite a shock. He’d never seen or smelled anything like a pub before, let alone rows of regulars tenderly nursing glasses of icy amber. And he’ll never forget the anguished cry and lunge of the old bloke whose glass he’d tried to collect when it still had half a mouthful of froth left in it.
Froth, my friend quickly decided, is rarified stuff. Only our most hallowed liquids are topped with froth. Beer, coffee and the sea.
When my friend was old enough to savour beer for himself, he felt the love. Almost to a fault. A family member he hadn’t seen for a while frowned disapprovingly and told my friend's teenage self that he was getting a “beer face”. The two words thrown together like that intrigued and appalled my friend who, after learning what the term meant and peering anxiously at his features in the mirror, decided it might be a good idea to temper his love a little.
A few years later, as a backpacker, he wandered the streets of New York in search of a bar that might sell him a stubbie of Coopers ale. It seemed like a good idea at the time. And ridiculous though it was, it got him discovering a lot of New York. The little brown bottle from Australia, when he finally found it, tasted fine, but he had to admit it was wasted on him, since he was already drunk on one of the world’s great cities.
Returning home, my friend worked his way through shitty jobs and university. Beer settled in beside him as the quintessential cheap and cheerful worker’s friend. As one of the big ad campaigns of the day noted, the beer really did taste better when you’d earned it. You couldn’t cheat, my friend learned. Beer knew proper hard work when it saw it. And it favoured old-fashioned physical labour, toil that got you breathing fresh air, getting dirty, and preferably standing back at the end of it all as a team and declaring a job well done. The harder you worked, the more sublime that beer tasted.
Combined with camaraderie and aching muscles, a good chilled beer would take on mythic proportions. It was as if the nectar of the gods had been slipped something extra by the gods themselves, who clearly approved of wholesome exertion, just rewards, and fermented hops.
Somewhere along the way he read about the symbolism of breakfast. The theory was that we like our orange juice and our fried eggs for their sunny orange glory. If that was our morning symbols covered, then beer surely captures the best of the afternoon and evening. A tall glass of ale may as well be the liquid gold light of a beautiful late afternoon itself. The clean white froth on top like a bank of clouds. That’s how my friend sees it, anyway. He may even be right.