Beer
A pint in a straight glass
Christopher Howse
Ullage, besides rhyming with Dul- wich, is a useful word, even though Cham- bers Dictionary prudishly calls it slang. It is the name for the beer that spills into those square little plastic drip-trays under the pumps in pubs. When conversation at the bar flags ullage is always a good standby. There is a general consensus that it is a scandal for the barman to empty ullage into your glass under the pretence that it is fresh beer; but there is seldom anyone there with sufficient confidence in his legal knowledge to rule that the practice is illegal. Whatever the case it doesn't sound very nice. For a start, all sorts of things fall into it, quite apart from kamikaze attacks by the fat beer flies that spend most of their time making short hops around the cracks in the bar counter.
Ullage derives its importance from the fact that the place to drink beer is a pub. Unless you are one of those people who eat their Sunday dinner on the kitchen table and fetch ale in a jug through the gap in the hedge at the bottom of the garden, beer is not the sort of thing you would want to drink at home. One of the advantages of the English public house system is that it provides some protection against beer bores. Beer, for such agreeable stuff, attracts a disproportionate number. They come in three main kinds: the Bellocian, the original-gravity and the alcoholic. The Bellocian roars and thumps the bar and wears corduroys; the original-gravity fetishist sports a Camra badge, goes on about Tanglefoot and has been known to carry a thermometer to check the tempera- ture of his pint (probably in a jug); the alcoholic tells his life story in a hyperbolic curve that never quite gets to the point one thing is clear, that he now drinks only beer and nothing stronger, on doctor's orders. All three types of bore have pot bellies. All can be dealt with successfully and if necessary ruthlessly by a concerted resistance-movement among the regulars.
Sane men don't make such a fuss about beer. Clearly, anything out of a can or fizzed up with carbon dioxide promises to be as enjoyable as a dentist's mouth-wash. Otherwise some favour the beers of Tad- caster (where the signatures were appended to the famous Tadcaster Dec- laration at the foundation of the People Like Us party) — others prefer the brew- age of Burton. It is well known that the width of the platforms at St Pancras station was determined by the size of the barrels of Burton beer stored in the cellars beneath. If that is not true it ought to be.
Mr Norman Balon, landlord of the Coach and Horses, kindly showed me why his Burton Ale is more delicious even than that served by Mr David Irvin Potton, landlord of the Duke of York, Roger Street, WC. Mr Salon's beer is kept in stalls like fattening prize pigs in his 18th- century cellars (where, bores note, the temperature is kept constantly at 55°F). The rolling, spigotting, bunging and all things necessary for the beer's welfare is performed by Mr Michael O'Donnell, who last week was presented with a certificate of merit by the Guild of Master Cellerman. Mr O'Donnell is also turnkey for the shelves of spirits imprisoned behind a pallisade on the other side of the cellar. It is the O'Donnells of this world who disting- uish a smartly run rig from the filthy, stinking holes which should be called pub- lic hovels, where there is stuffing coming out of the banquettes and no seats on the lavatories, kept by ex-boxers or ex- servicemen or ex-printers who ought to have stuck to their trade or taken to digging holes in the road if all they can do is serve you with a sour pint and put `Flower of Scotland' on the juke box. That is not to say that bitter beer is the only kind to be had. There is Guinness. A couple of years ago they ran a pilot scheme in the west of Ireland to sell bottled I draught Guinness. That is not as daft as t sounds, since the bottle had a little engine or device on the side of it to jolly up the stout as it came out. When I telephoned Arthur Guinness plc to ask what had become of it, they couldn't tell me. Perhaps Ernest Saunders knows. Then there is lager. When I first tried it I thought it tasted like water that peas had been boiled in. But in 1981 at the Eucharis- tic Congress in Lourdes, Stella Artois generously supplied the press there with complimentary supplies. The taste was not so difficult to acquire. There is another kind of lager entirely called Carlsberg Special Brew. This is best ordered at the off-licence in a Glaswegian accent. It IS what the winos on the bench on the way to the station drink and they seem to appreci- ate its unusual strength.
Harp has just been sending round sari.'" pies of their Premier Export Lager to journalists. It tastes like water that peas have been boiled in. That must show that my taste-buds have been backsliding and I not keeping up with their homework. might as well drink ullage. In the meantime it would seem decorous to end with some praise for beer from a literary figure. The trouble is that the best writers make it sound fairly gruesome- Patrick Hamilton suggests that it is the ideal bever for a man who wants to smash out his girlfriend's brains with a golf club, or for a girl who deserves such a fate. Flans O'Brien seems to classify it chiefly as an emetic.
Here, then, are .a few moral thoughts from Dr Johnson: Hermit hoar, in solemn cell, Wearing out Life's evening gray; Strike thy bosom, Sage! and tell What is bliss, and which the way?
Thus I spoke, and speaking sigh'd Scarce repress'd the starting tear, When the hoary Sage reply'd, `Come, my lad, and drink some beer.'
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