Drink It Up Men, It’s Long After Ten

We’re a big fan of succinctness in beer reviews, despite the fact it’s something that none of us seem particularly capable of actually doing…

Twitter offers the opportunity to try 140 character tasting notes, but equally impressive is the beer praising found in song. With St. Patrick’s Day approaching, and me inspired by Liam Clancy as interviewed in Scorsese’s No Direction Home (which I was engrossed in on Sunday night) our attention turned to digging out some of those Irish folk songs that we heard on our family holidays over the Irish Sea.

Take The Dubliners, clearly big fans of Dublin’s most famous stout:

At the pub at the crossroads there’s whiskey and beer,
There’s brandy and cognac that’s fragrant but dear;
But for killing the thirst and for easing the gout
There’s nothing at all beats a pint of good stout.

As as beer reviews go, I’m not sure there’s a better social commentary cum positive beer tasting than the lines:

Some folk’s o’er the water think bitter is fine
And others they swear by the juice of the vine;
But there’s nothing that’s squeezed from the grape or the hop
Like the black liquidation with the froth on the top.

And of course Guinness is good for your health, naturally.

In the course of listening to this song and researching the lyrics we couldn’t make out we came across a few variations. These seem to make the most sense although I’ve told that the cognac line may be something to do with it “ageing for years”. If you think differently let us know. I’d ask my mum (born and bred in Longford) but she’s a) not a drinker anf b) rubbish at singing