Mythos: requires napkins

An Ode
To Mythos

Mythical, magical,

yielding barley refreshment to raise a drooping head.

The ice cold glass dripping incessantly, myriad drops

hurrying to wet the table through. All condensation, then:

“Oh yes, that hits the spot!”

Simply perfect, as the sun beats down without remorse.

Hello, we’re back! As you can see two weeks in Greece were well spent indulging in things I’d never normally have the time, inclination or interest in doing. When I wasn’t scribbling crap poetry on the back of restaurant fliers I spent the rest of time playing ‘Yes/No’ with Sarah and finding out that I’ve been calling Barbra Striesand ‘Barbara Striesland’ my whole life. Good job I read 7 books, drank gallons of Mythos and constructed a family tree on the back of napkin, or else I’d have nothing to show for a wonderful holiday but a vague tan line!

When I’m reading on holiday (and spouting verse to rival Simon Armitage) I’m never far from a little notebook where I can jot down words I’ve never come across before. That either make me sounds like a geek or perhaps slightly illiterate, but I read a lot of popular science and it can get quite…technical.

More often than not I can guess the meaning of words from their context and a dash of arbitrary knowledge. That’s because nothing is without context, nothing exists in a perfect vacuum, and that includes beer.

Luckily it only rained once on my recent holiday to Skopelos which allowed me 13 and a half days to lap up the piercing Grecian sunshine. At 36 degrees celsius to was hard not to break into sweats just lazing around with a book.

In such conditions you wouldn’t dream of picking up the same types of beers as you would at home. No matter how much a dry pale ale is perfect with the saltiness of olives or how much a German weisse would compliment the crispiness of a Greek salad, it’s just too hot for everything.

Everything that is except Mythos.

Without meaning to labour on my love for Mythos (I actually drank more Amstel on this holiday once the sun had gone down) Mythos rightly deserves it’s name and holds a special place in beer folklore. Mythos is a mythical creature that brings with it dismay and disappointment when drunk anywhere outside Hellenic border controls, yet chilled to within a inch of it’s life and deployed at critical moments of a boiling hot day on a Greek island, it’s  powers to revive might only be bettered by a cardiac defibrillator.

Admiring the distant olive groves and drying off after a dip in the swimming pool, Mythos is just…perfect. Nothing more, nothing less.

And in the context of the above weather conditions, Mythos is the best beer in the world. Period.

Mythos: the best beer in the world. The Hellenic one, at least.

On the last day our energetic shopkeeper asked me if I drank Mythos at home in England. She was delighted when I said it’s just not the same without the sun and the backdrop of Greece. “Everyone says that!” she exclaimed, wondering how such a thing could be true.

We went to look at a house tonight. ‘Converted chapel in historic Yorkshire mill town‘ certainly has a ring to it, even if it’s probably a bit of a pretentious shrill these days. Still, our jaws had dropped at the 3 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms over 3 floors, connected with a central spiral staircase and an attic living area that holds 100 people, all for under £195k. We had to look.

Despite the en suite shower wet room, integrated sound system, gated forecourt, all-in-one central kitchen unit and 8 foot (yes, 8 foot wide!) projector system in the attic/lounge I was disillusioned at the lack of garden space. Sitting in my ‘living area’ looking down on the Victorian park through my electric skylights I’d be comfy enough, but unfulfilled. A summer beer ain’t a beer if you’re not in the garden.

“I’m not really in t’garden” says the vendor. “Spen’dya ‘ole life wurking Satd’ys t’ave a barbecue on Sund’y’s…not for me”.

Now I’m no green fingers, but I enjoyed landscaping the garden so that now I can sit and relax in it. I enjoy watering the easy-to-maintain shrubbery and even delighting at the garden lilies when they burst skyward in their orange, yellow and angel white glory. A sweep of the patio in the morning, a few weeds pulled up here and there – it’s all in the aid of that perfect evening sat with a beer, watching the sun fall behind the neighbours trees and the line of semi-detached gables turn orange and then rusty brown.

It’s not like I give up every Saturday. And when I do have to delve into the garage for my rake and strimmer, an afternoon in the garden means tops off, skins on and organic debris everywhere. Working up a sweat means ham and cheese on soda bread and a bottle of cold beer to cool down.

Gardening should be leisure and that’s why you can take your intercom and your walk in wardrobe; you can shove your separate laundry room and guest bedroom floor; I’m not fussed about the lights you designed yourself or the remote controlled garage door. I’m happy looking in through your high arched windows and knowing that I’m walking home to my garden. And hopefully a glass of beer.

Life's simple pleasures: a beer in the garden (in a fancy oversized wine glass)

If any of you London folk are still speechless at the price, I advise you to move up North. The nearest local pub to the ‘house’ we viewed sells Sam Smith’s bitter at less than £1.30 a pint and local butchers Wilson’s do the world’s best all meat pork pies for 85p. The North’s where it’s at folks 9as long as you can find a beer garden).

Just what beer do you take to a summer music festival?

With Glastonbury only a few days away there’s a big supermarket trip around the corner to stock up on all the liquid lunches we’ll be needing over the 5 days we spend wallowing in mud, Carlsberg cans and the reverberation of  thumping speakers.

But what is the perfect festival beer?

What's the perfect festival beer?

At Glastonbury you can take what you want. Unlike other festivals, once you’re in, you’re in, and you may freely waltz around with your chosen tipple without fear of eviction. Last year one chap had 3 cans of Stella strapped to each limb with duck tape. He was never without a beer.

The perfect drink has to be light. Multiple car trips are not good so you need to be able to pack it in a rucksack, pop it under your arm or balance it on your head for the long walk from car park to chosen pitching ground.

The perfect drink has to be refreshing. If the sun comes out it needs to revive; if the mud rises up it needs to make you feel fighting fit to grapple through the bodies and lost wellies.

This enigmatic tipple mustn’t be too strong. No-one wants to miss the single unmissable act of the day, not drink too much and earn themselves an early retirement to the tent. You want to be up from 11am until 4am, with perhaps a mid afternoon nap in a quiet folk tent near the tippees.

You need to be able to drink all day and never feel under the weather.

And this magic beer (or other alternative beverage) must be passable, nay even enjoyable when warm.  In a perfect world it will chill quickly too and never warm up, if nature or some fancy technology (aka cool box) gives you the opportunity.

We could try lager. Widely available in lightweight cans of various strengths. It’s refreshing when hot which ticks an important box, but crucially though, it’s a bit rubbish when not ice cold.

So in case of warm conditions perhaps we should take some ale. Bottled conditioned is an absolute no-no, and even simply bottles are a bad idea. Stone’s Bitter or Tanglefoot anyone? A choice between garish orange or red, unless you want to risk Smoothflow, of course.

Then there’s the alternative solution, cider. Before you conjure images of vagrants and teenagers on a park bench, just remember the criteria.

Lightweight.

Not too strong.

Easy to carry.

Drinkable warm.

Suddenly Strongbow seems more appealing than ever…

The usually quiet fields of Pilton in Somerset are normally full of cows and green, green grass. But for a few days they'll be home to us and 140,000 other revellers (as the meeja like to call festival folk).

Once upon a time Britain was an industrial nation. The population were manual workers, skilled or miners, all contributing towards the rise of the Empire.

Nowadays we work at screens, behind partitions, “in services“.

Those grey, growing gas stores, the vast warehouses, the corrugated factories; they’re alien to much of Britain; a spec on the landscape, an irritation to an otherwise green and pleasant land.

These gunmetal structures, whilst reduced in their visibililty, still make up the backbone of everything we do. Power stations are an enigma, distribution centres an eyesore and factories an unkown quantity to sneer at from incoming city-link trains.

Sneer all you want but you wouldn’t be accessing Twitter on your long-haul commute without them.

Industrial wonder: Coors Maltings Stores

A clear Saturday morning in Burton. We wander across triple-lane roads and past B&Q Warehouses that litter the centre of Burton. Up ahead, the looming Coors logo peers down as if we were lowly peasants. Security protocol looks like it could be a nuclear power station, just without the armed guards.

Inside we’re treated to the red carpet tour, in and out of industrial doors, dodging machinery and fittings. We see the huge grain stores, Acme-esque towers to keep barley dry and stable. We are led on an ascendancy to the top of the maltings and a view over Derbyshire and beyond. A power station sits on the horizon, and breweries and industrial units dominate the immediate foreground. People, like ants, wander amongst a very untown-like town.

Beer bloggers contemplate becoming malt bloggers...

“There’ll be a bit of a gust” Graham informs us as he levels with the lever of the kiln door. I make a bad joke about a back draft and then am almost knocked off my feet by the blast of hot air.

Inside temperature controlled grain spreads out in perfect symmetry, gently changing, evolving, turning into brewery friendly malt.

We’re in a cylinder, a metal polygon within a box. People drive by, oblivious. And all they see is a square brick tower. When I drive past all I see is wonder…what could they be doing in there…?

They’re making malt, malt for beer, malt for the Carling you’ll drink at the weekend, mate.

And none of the ants blink an eye.

Many thanks to Molson Coors for an interesting and very geeky tour of the Shobnall Maltings, Burton.

Tonight I went to 3 pubs I’ve never been to before. I’ve lived near them all for over 3 years, but tonight was the first time I’d ventured over their thresholds.

I’ve long believed that much more than the smoking ban has caused the British local to wither to it’s current state. I’m right as well, I know it. I don’t doubt the smoking ban has exasperated problems that some pubs faced, but there are many more issues that have led to bars, clubs and people’s living rooms beating pubs to share of wallet.

Tonight is a micro example, a tiny embodiment of how things have changed yet not changed in Britain. I will write about this another time and in greater detail, but to summarise my thoughts, the demise of British pub is finite, it’s a numbers game and it won’t end in extinction, merely a change of nomenclature and form.

The first pub we visited tonight, I will never go back to. It was rubbish. They promote local music and serve local people, which should be applauded, but it smelt and the music was shite (it may keep me up all night, up all night…) The band played Van Halen and Bon Jovi badly.

The second pub looked twice as good from the outside. It was lively: impromptu darts and possibly impromptu karaoke thrived. There was a nice lounge but a decrepit bar. The bar staff were downright ignorant. We felt completely unwelcome. Newcomers? How dare they come in here and spend money.

The third was the liveliest of the establishments, with a full on disco visible only when you hit the front porch. Remarkably, it was the most amendiable to conversation. Perhaps we’d just warmed up, lubricated with two pints previously. Or perhaps signs of human life simply woke us up. And possibly the bar staff, who were all remarkably attractive.

On a less positive note, midway through our first pint of cooking lager, my good friend was told “I’d nut you, but I can’t be arsed.” We drank two pints each there and chatted enthusiastically between us. Apparently that’s enough to piss off some of the twats that live in this country.

If you think I’m being snobby, at one point police officers were called to quell the increasingly tense mood. Just prior to this, 6 chaps had left the pub in a particularly argumentative moment, and only 3 came back. I can only presume the other three left with broken pride if not broken noses.

The British pub is alive and well in many places. Despite probably 1/3 of pubs around my area being boarded up, the ones that aren’t are doing a fine trade. There’s little in the way of cask ale, there’s little in the way of customer service, but the people love and hold dearly these locals that are their preference over heading into the city centre.

These locals won’t die out soon, but they will diminish in numbers. And the reason? They are bloody horrible places to go to. Increasingly they will serve a smaller audience, and, unfortunately, where better pubs could historically do well, the image of worse pubs will mean that the public house is an inferior alternative to the modern living room.

I’m sitting at in front of a my flat screen monitor, head buried deep in pencil squiggles, crossings out and Excel formulas. Square eyes set in hours ago and everyone else left the office at home time. “What the hell am I doing still here?” I ruminate to myself. With that I’m running for the 20.54, a potentially mythical bus which the various timetables disagree on the existence of. It arrives, albeit a different route number. My demons always start with a bus journey like this…

Home and tired, half a pizza pings in the microwave and I’m just in time to crack open a Saltaire Cascade as Dimbleby open up the Beeb’s election proceedings. It seems like a lifetime ago since I was in the polling station before work. Sarah’s gone to bed, I’m staring straight through the TV as the country peers in on itself from little boxes and social networks.

Cascade is all lemon flavour eco-friendly washing up liquid and digestive biscuits. It disappears before Sunderland’s first ballot boxes are returned and a second beer follows quickly. The Kernel Brewery Centennial Pale Ale wows me. It’s the refreshing tonic I need, it’s Um Bongo aroma cuts through my zombie-like state. Ribena, oats, not too bitter: it’s perfect.

Little do I know it but control of the evening has long since slipped away. It was always heading this way but as always, I didn’t realise until much later. Lack of sustenance and a fragile state of mind soon lead to self-reflection, self-doubt and self-pity.

The pale ale is gone all too quick. By the end the first few seats are announced and a huge Tory swing looks likely. I’m pondering on my vote, on the country’s votes, mulling over the issues that really matter. I ponder over work, over the numbers still swirling in my head. 95% of what I’ve done won’t get used during tomorrow mornings meeting. C’est la vie!

The evaluation that began on the bus journey continues, and Moor JJJ IPA is an enthusiastic catalyst to soul searching. What am I doing sat drinking alone, how will this help me in the morning? I sniff the pungent liquid in the glass, simply to justify the drinking of it (and not admit I’m drinking to get away from the world). I jot down some token phrases – ‘fruit pudding’, ‘peaches’, ‘robust alcohol’ and even ‘aniseed’. ‘This is no IPA’ I add. Just like my job isn’t real marketing… Like my blog isn’t real writing… Like the Lib Dems popularity won’t translate to real votes…

In a flurry I scribble lots of things down. A book idea, a vision for a greener earth, a world without borders, a few illegible words on the beer I’m drinking, a song lyric that will never be put to music… The country are musing on their future, beer bloggers are looking inwards in order to start writing outside their comfort zones, I feel at a crossroads in many different aspects of my life and something is compelling me to make a change, or a difference, or a stand.

It all feels pretty insignificant. My grand designs are a fallacy. It’s hard to accept that you simply aren’t prepared to make the sacrifice needed. There’s a certain irony as MPs who’ve decided to do just that are rounded upon on the television. Democracy at it’s best and worst.

What can a man do but open a Thornbridge Halcyon and settle for life’s simple pleasures. As I do everything feels better and for the first time in 48 hours I feel relaxed. My attentions turn away from my inner sanctum, away from utopian dreams. I knock a big swig of beer back (passionfruit, pineapple, dashes of peaches and strawberries, Halcyon is an Innocent Smoothie on acid). I daydream of promotion celebrations on Saturday and smile under the weight of a happy memory. A Lib Dem seat comes in. I slump into the sofa content and let my brain turn off.

Waking up with the lights on and TV blaring at 5.05am that euphoric feeling wore off a bit. Especially as I looked at the grim blue constituency scene overlaid on the familiar map of the UK. It’s weird how all those weary, slightly inebriated thoughts disappeared too, only to come flooding back in the shower a day later. Sometimes you can look too deep, and sometimes not look inwards enough. Sometimes you just need a beer to see the wood not just the trees.

“Mark from Morley has texted in” said Adam Pope, and he proceeded to read the whole of the text message I’d sent to BBC Radio Leeds (all 500+ characters of it) word for word, live on air. I burst into tears, full blown streaming tears, soaking my chin and my shirt and blurring the M621 in front of me.

Fuck, it really happened. It really fucking happened.

I’d known since early that Friday afternoon it was happening. On my lunch I’d walked up to Leeds City Square expecting a handful of local reporters and desperate supporters outside the grey, charmless building of the administrators that were deciding the fate of Halifax Town AFC. But there was nothing but disinterested office workers and recruitment consultants in ill-fitting suits wandering around aimlessly. Back at my desk I didn’t do much work that afternoon, between refreshing BBC Football and repeatedly pressing F5 on the Halifax Evening Courier sports pages.

That long motorway drive, listening to my own words read back to me by Pope’s familiar tones, was two years ago, and my tears did little to stop Halifax Town disappearing from the face of English football. I welled up at the sound of my own desperation and slammed my hands against the steering wheel in a mix of anger and despair.

Tonight, however, my beloved Shaymen fought back.

FC Halifax Town¹, the phoenix from the flames of the team that had played at the famous Shay stadium since 1921, recorded a historic point that secured the Unibond Northern Premier League Division One North title. 99 points and 107 goals were enough to fend off the challenge of Lancaster City’s Dolly Blues and confirm Town’s status as champions. The long road back to Conference and League football is a step closer.

Tonight there are no pathetic tears, no pointless despair. Tonight’s celebratory beer is pure, unrivalled, pride.

This beer helps drown all the joys and sorrows of missed play off finals and the unparalleled relief of staying up on the last day of too many seasons. This beer is for the years, the heroes, the woodwork and the bulging net.

This beer is for Steve Norris, Jamie Paterson and Geoff Horsfield; for Lewis Kileen and Chris Wilder. This beer is for Neil Apsin, all the people who resurrected the club, and the fans who trudge to the ground each week.

This beer is for Tom Baker, because his 87th minute goal – which made me erupt with emotion in the presence of 1,932 strangers – is why I’m not in bed yet and instead, still up late, on a school night, drinking beer.

¹ See what they did there?!

In a world of Top 100 lists and a thousand and one books about 1001 things you’ll never be able to afford to do, us Homo Sapien types often lose our perspective. We had caught up in the whims of our tiny, insignificant lives and convince each other that we are more important than we really are.

If I was compiling a list of photographs that you must see before you die, there is no doubt that Pale Blue Dot would be somewhere near the pinnacle of my list. The photo, taken by NASA in 1990, illustrates just how insignificant our little Blue Planet is in the vastness of our solar system. The image of a small dot – less than 1 pixel wide – does not even illustrate what a microscopically tiny part of our galaxy the Earth is, let alone the Universe.

Carl Sagan, at who’s request the photo was taken, summed this up beautifully. He cooly points out that every life, every birth, every death, every war, every fight, every breath, every human thought, all took place in this infinitesimally tiny piece of rock amidst an infinity of rock, gas and nothingness. And that includes every pint in every pub.

So, in the grand scheme of things, beer really doesn’t matter. All the beer ever brewed, ever drunk and ever dreamed about amounts to a relatively tiny bundle of charged particles, given energy by the star we call our Sun and ultimately delivering intoxication to a teeny bunch of people who are doing their best to put their everyday lives and strifes behind them.

One day, that same Sun will eat the Earth in a mind boggling display of unstoppable solar bravado, dwarfing it’s heavenly subjects as it accelerates towards it’s ultimate fate, collapsing under the weight of the universes’ weakest force and destroying, potentially, all the life that there ever will be or has been.

So in some ways, human fate is ultimately doomed. There’s no point to anything we do, we may as well drink, get fat and fuck off, leaving a dead planet behind to rot and burn.

But, as we all know, size isn’t everything.

Our human lifetimes which flash by in an instant are a speckle on the astronomical time line, but to each and every one of us, those moments when we breathe, think and drink are all we will ever have. They are our own personal time-constrained eternities. We will never have any one elses moments, we will never be able to see everything in the world. We will spend our lives missing out on everyone elses moments and clinging desperately to our own.

There are times we come together and share in our (utterly pointless and insignificant) lives. We celebrate the fact we have each other. We celebrate our health and happiness. We counter our grief and illness by coming together and offer our company to those in despair.

And during these moments, at these good times that we remember (and often at the bad ones we can never forget) many of us have beer as the focal point of our communion.

Beer is touted as the most social of our tipples, a drink for the masses, for all of the classes, with simple, earthy ingredients, served in community centres  for the local people, ‘public urban boundary systems‘ where people come together and network, socially, without the need for technology nor pixels.

Beer is arguably no more important than wine, than vodka, whiskey or cider. It’s rarely shared in the same way as the sambucas that you set on fire or the tequilas that we neck along with salt and lemon. It doesn’t have the shock and headfuck kick of a jagerbomb.

It is though, the most popular of all the alcoholic lubrications¹. There are beers of various different levels of potency. There’s a beer for every occassion. A gueze to share, a kriek to start a party. A bitter after a long walk, a porter to sit in front of an open fire with. There’s a beer to cool you down in summer sun, a beer to warm you up after a cold winters day.

There’s a beer for a chat, beer for a session. Beers to knock you for six and beer to stay up all night with. There’s beer for drowning our sorrows and beer for celebrating milestones. There’s beer for beer geeks and beer for John Smith down the local WMC.

Arguably no other drink shares this diversity – no other drink can match beer for depth, diversity and refreshment.

‘Nothing ever lasts forever’ sang Echo & his Bunnymen. Not even the sun, this Earth or maybe even time. But in each and everyone of our worlds, our lives are our eternity and to us, everything matters. If beer matters to you, then beer matters.

¹ So says a source on Wikipedia, and who am I to argue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer#cite_note-1

The Daily Mail song

I couldn’t resist posting this video, and not just for the line about ‘English ale’. ‘The Daily Mail song’ sums up nicely why everything that you read in the beer community’s favourite paper is of course, completely and utterly true*.

Enjoy!

*Not. ‘The Daily Mail song’ can be found on YouTube and the chaps performing are Dan & Dan