Welcome to the Sebright Arms, dimly light and vivacious.

We arrive from Soho at the fading of a sun drenched afternoon – four pubs, six pints, four hours.

Three and a half miles later, bellies demanding meat and bread and barley, we bundle over the threshold. A table is found, pale beers ordered, burger menus devoured by hungry eyes.

It’s a young crowd, an old crowd. It’s a quiet crowd and a rowdy crowd. Some here for the pub, some hunting out the resident Lucky Chip pop up kitchen.

Smokers tarnish the air outside, drinkers slop beer inside. The buzz is accentuated by beer (it’s a thin line between that and a booze buffer between the world and our senses, perhaps?)

The burgers perspire garnish, pint glasses soon sticky with the sweat of carnivorous satisfaction. And boy they taste good!

Another beer? Of course! The night is young, and the Sebright Arms is only just getting started.

The hygge isn’t something that’s easy to adopt however as it goes against the Thursday/Friday/Saturday night out culture I was christened into in a small market town in England. Friday when I grew up = Cheap Booze = The Club = Fighting In The Street (although I tried my utmost to avoid anything beyond merely watching the latter).

Once I’d left behind the wrong-uns that were never really friends the next stop was uni and that was simply a piss up (albeit the best piss up of my life). 3 years of pre-loading on Wednesday’s and necking bottles of wine (the cheapest drink in Scream) on Fridays. The hygge didn’t stand a chance against 8 x Carlsberg for £5 before a night on lager and sambuca.

Perhaps only in the final year of uni did a few afternoon pub visits epitomise the nearest thing we had to the hygge, lazy days playing darts and kerplunk in small pubs. We pillaged the board games whilst drinking real ale, lager and the odd double rum if you dropped all the marbles or came last at dartboard killer.

Over the four years since leaving university a group of friends still meet up once or twice a year. At first these were unruly affairs that tried to recreate the Friday nights of our glory days, desperately clinging to our hedonistic youth and pretending we were back at uni with nothing to wake up for in the morning except multi-player Mario Kart and walk-of-shame-watching out the front room window.

We’ve quickly realised that these nights never resulted in any real catching up, in little camaraderie or intimacy. So the nights out have become weekends at someone’s house, lads playing keepie-ups donkey and girls chatting about, well, whatever girls chat about. BBQs roll into drinking games roll into sleeping on a crowded floor and not worrying about what tomorrow brings. Ultimately though, a piss up. A piss up of the best, most enjoyable kind.

The hygge has never really been close and probably not really desired, except during the worst of our hangover headaches. But we’ve been gradually working towards wanting it, even if we didn’t notice it. And now, me personally, I crave it. Sometimes you have to just let your hair down. But 9 times out of 10 my mind now fantasises about something better, a state of conviviality that is based not on being out of my face, just a heightened sense of enjoyment and social lubrication.

Latest attempts to find the hygge haven’t been entirely futile but my upbringing is certainly proving difficult to shake off. British drinking culture is engrained in society and runs through my blood.

Here, perhaps, starts a little hygge transfusion.

“These measures don’t go enough, if we get in we’ll raise taxes on alcopops and high strength beers.”

High strength beers? How are you classifying that? Beers that are over 2 or 3 units? Beers over 10% Anything stronger than a traditional dark mild? No mention of the simple fact that there are tons of other alcoholic drinks that can get you shit-faced a lot quicker and a lot more cheaply than even a head cracking barley wine.

Why does beer get the bad press when it comes to under age drinking? Something tells me I’m not going to see a bunch of 15 year olds (or perhaps 11 is it?!) swilling a bottle of imperial stout on a park bench. Nope, it’ll be a pocket-able bottle of methylated spirit and a few cheap cans from the corner shop. Taxing ‘high strength beer’ will have about as much chance of stopping under-age drinking as Manchester United do of winning the FA Cup this year.

I’m not jumping in with any stats – the job done by Mr PBBB is fantastic in highlighting that Disraeli’s old adage is as true now as it ever has been. Even more so the comments added to his blog and to other blogs, and the subsequent inspired posts (in the UK and beyond) has led to real, interesting debate and points of view that aren’t immediately at the forefront of everybody’s minds.

I’d rather stay clear of quantitative or qualitative data and focus a little more on the reaction to all this, the where do we go from here. Stats aside, alcohol misuse, abuse, even just plain alcohol use does cause society problems, whether in conjunction with other factors of not, and that regardless of if that’s increasing or decreasing, it would be quite nice to stop some of it and make our country a better place.

In honour of all this I've used a lovely photo of some empty beer glasses to highlight the issues surrounding binge drinking... (thanks Julie!)

A few things strike me. One, that alcohol (or should I say the effects of abusing alcohol) is, like anything, intrinsically linked to behaviour and attitude and that isolating it as the sole cause of a specific misdemeanour or health issue seems, statistically, difficult. Anti-social behaviour (vandalism, crime, assaults), health issues (liver disease, injuries from being drunk) and other consequences (drink driving, loss of productivity) are all affected by numerous things – and many of the stats communicated to us by the powers that be seem to ignore this simple fact.

Secondly, it strikes me that there aren’t that many answers in the Great Alcohol Debate of 2010 and that’s not a criticism – it’s a delicate and complex matter. But what have the people sitting in Westminster done about this? Slammed producers of alcohol², branded publicans as irresponsible³ and patronised responsible drinkers who have continental, liberal attitudes⁴. Furthermore they’ve devised simplistic, slapstick tactics planned, from where I see it, simply to trick the public⁵. Banning dentist chairs? You really are out of touch with reality folks.

Two of the simplest points of all that undermine much of the policy makers outbursts have been made what seems like a thousand times (in one way or another) in the last 12 months but get little airplay with any major media outlet.

If people want to get drunk they will.

If an alcoholic wants a drink they will go to Tesco or the corner shop, they will buy a bottle of screw top wine/screw top vodka/ring pull cans of lager or bitter and they will head home, drinking them on the way most likely. If an alcoholic is hiding their problem from their family they will slip the bottle in their jacket⁶. They will hide a bottle under the sink⁷, in the toilet cistern⁸, in the greenhouse⁹.

If a young person wants to be the hardest bloke in town and wants the respect (fear) of everyone that heads out on a Friday night, he will get pissed and start a fight regardless of the price of a vodka red bull. If a young girl wants to throw spirits down their neck every evening and not have a job and shag around and stick two fingers up to society, they will. The price off alcohol won’t put them off.¹⁰

Alcoholics will find a drink if they want one. A simplistic view, yes, but one that my experience suggests is pretty accurate. Pic: phogel (not suggesting this chap is dependent on alcohol!)

Supermarkets sell alcohol cheaply yet legislators have been reluctant to go near the off-trade in this way. Picture: sergis blog

If people want to get drunk cheaply, they won’t buy fine wines or artisan beers

Yep, they’ll head for the offy, for the stack-em-on-the-floor-stack-em-high bargain outlets, for the supermarket. They’ll find it a lot more conducive to forgetting about live if they throw own brand vodka, aluminium beers and £1.99 white wine down their necks than ordering a Tokyo*, waiting 3 days for delivery and watching £17 (including delivery) disappear from their bank account.¹¹

There are lots of other ‘personas’ I can stereotype and situations I can try to second guess, some I have experience of some I don’t. I don’t have all the stats, I don’t have all the facts. But I know some of the psyche of both binge drinkers and alcoholics. I’ve lived the small town mentality of ‘going out’, ‘heading up the club’ and ‘getting smashed’ not that long ago. I matured and went to uni, I ‘got smashed’, I stayed out late, I missed lectures, I made friends for live, we did silly things. But fundamentally my attitudes towards society means that I consider myself a ‘law abiding citizen’, bar some breaches of copyright via music cassettes and being a month late with my vehicle tax. Oh and I owe the car park man £3.50 from last week and I haven’t reminded him on two occasions I’ve seen him since¹².

Some people are going to abuse alcohol, some people are going to abuse the goodwill society shows them and the opportunities they are presented with. Some people don’t have as many opportunities as others and this affects their behaviour in life. Some people have bad starts in live that I wouldn’t wish on anyone, and those bad starts result in bad endings (of course many people start this way and end up ‘just fine’ as well). Some people have the best opportunities, great jobs, loving families, and fall into a downward spiral of disease that ruins their live). My point: you can change how you measure alcohol, you can faff about with pricing, you can ban adverts, ban references to alcohol, ban sponsorship and tell everyone alcohol will kill you. But you are never treating the problems.

An ad for ITV News juxtaposes happy images against a cold hard 'fact'. Unfortunately the visual representation highlights how easy it is to tarnish everyone with one brush

So, I urge I urge politicians, journalists and all those in the business of selling alcohol (whether on- or off-trade) to take a read of what is being said online this week and listen to a broader spectrum of opinions than less-than-independent-bodies¹³ and the scaremongering press releases¹⁴. Then not just consider, but actually try to do something about the real issues. Education, anti-social behaviour (for which alcohol is often a catalyst rather than a cause), alcoholism. Stop putting your nation of drinkers in one big basket promising to tax the high hell out of everything in easy-target-quick-win PR stunts. Tax where appropriate; tackle the attitudes that cause people to not give two flying fucks about anyone else around them and smash up our towns and cities when intoxicated; find help for victims of alcohol abuse before they fall into an A&E ward; encourage respect for alcohol, respect for the communities we live in and appreciation of the slog, the climb, the rewards of life rather than the quick fix, the instant gratification, the I-want-I-get attitude that underpins society today.

How do we, as a country do that? If I knew I’d be Prime Minister, or the next famous philosopher or anthropologist. But for a start, try being honest about alcohol rather than spinning data into PR-able facts. Be open about alcohol, don’t hide it behind closed doors. If I’m getting really adventurous I’d say let’s spread altruism across our schools and teach our children that they will be rewarded for helping others not punching others. Let’s nip anti-social tendencies and prejudice in the bud early on and encouraging people from a younger age to have a broader ‘group’ mentality. My youthful visions of utopia might not be realistic, but where else do we start?

And start by trawling our blog roll for blogs that have written superb words on the subject this week too…

¹ Me included.
² As an example, BrewDog Tokyo* on which you can find multiple online sources of ridiculous outrage at this beer and it’s potential to either cure binge drinking  or cause a beer based apocalypse, depending on your bias…I mean point of view.
³ Branding the whole industry as irresponsible is a bit harsh, many other sources I’ve read have made clearer distinctions.
⁴ I refer mainly to discussions with drinkers, beer bloggers and friends who feel like they have already adopted a responsible approach to drinking and that policies seem to neglect that and penalise their drinking habits with little effect on the problems they set out to solve (e.g. increasing taxes).
⁵ Such as this reported today in The Times and other media publishers
^{6, 7, 8 and 9} Seen them all done.
¹⁰ That’s my opinion, based on my growing up and drinking experience in Banbury, Lincoln, Nottingham, Leeds & more (and isn’t restricted to young people)
¹¹ That’s a fact that doesn’t require a footnote and I’ll retract it statement if anyone can argue it’s not true.
¹² Which I thoroughly intend to pay him after pay day!
¹³ I refer here to Melissa Cole here who I trust!
¹⁴ Read any newspapers websites over the last three months and the same article and stats are reported verbatim with little or no questioning. And I will blog on my digital marketing blog about this worrying trend in the next few days at http://digitalmediamonkey.co.uk

I imagine that very little thought is given by touring Brits to the repurcussions of their actions in Amstersdam yet the legality of these actions does not necessarily mean that they are not without victims. There will be very few young girls, in Holland or any country, growing up with the aspiration of becoming a prostitute. Rather they are victims of circumstance. Similarly a great number of people every weekend in the UK ‘binge drink’ with very little regard for themselves or the people they come into contact with. The vast majority of these events go unreported.

Every now and then we hear of something so extreme as that the perpetrator is held to account. A recent example is the Hallam student who woke up to find that he had urinated on a War Memorial. As a member of Hull University Hockey Club I could have been found twice a week for three years waking up with very little knowledge of how I’d got to where I was and frankly with only good luck and good friends away from probably being in court myself. I’m sure many can say the same. I believe it’s customary for people looking back on such times to say that they wouldn’t change a thing but I can assure you that there is plenty I would change and, with honest eyes, most people would admit to wishing they had ‘just had one less’ on at least one occassion.

How is this little essay (and it is an essay!) related to Real Ales Reviews? Well yesterday I read the following article in the Metro…

Binge Drinking Survey Published in the Metro 23 Nov 2009

Under a very familiar looking headline the British obsession with binge drinking is once again ‘evidenced’. I am going to highlight 12 words from the article that purely astounded me.  ‘There is some good news. One in five Britons claims to be teetotal’. What an arrogant turn of phrase from the author Miles Erwin to suggest that the 80% of the nation who chose to have a drink are ‘bad news’. I agree wholeheartedly that the binge drinking culture in the UK is not to my taste. but is this a problem casued by the entire 80% of people who are not teetotal? Of course not.

A great number of people in the UK drink regularly and do not create victims because of the manner in which they consume their alcohol. We recently attended the Saltaire Beer festival where somewhere near to 100 people exceeded their weekly recommended allowance of alcohol units and had a bloody good time without (to my knowledge) any detrimental effect to anyone at the festival or any nearby residents. Similarly my parents regularly get together with their friends and exceed the unit allowance (3-4 per day for a male, for context 1 pint of Old Speckled Hen, 4.5% is just over 2.5 units) without any anti-social behavior that I know of.

Alcoholism is a serious issue and I would not for a second be trying to imply that it is not (and to show that we take the health issues that can relate to drinking alcohol seriously we will be adding the Drink Aware website to out list of links). But it is crazy to consider that drinking four pints on a Friday night should not be considered to be a binge.

Is binge drinking a serious issue? Yes. Should it be used to alienate the millions of social, responsible drinkers in the UK? No.

So what solution would I propose?

1. Firstly the voices of these responsible drinkers (and rational people) needs to be heard, even if it seems that none of the people who make such decisions are listening – I am sure that the majority who do not make the decisions continue to hear these voices and argee with what is being said. I recently read a brilliant article from The Lighter Side of Beer regarding the beneficial factors of moderate beer consumption, a side of the argument that we do not get to hear all that often.
2. Secondly the authorities must take decisive action against people who use alcohol, use the time when it is ‘accepted’ to be out of control through drinking alcohol, as an excuse to act inappropriately. Whilst punishment is not always the solution I believe that the authorites have lost sight of the fact that it sometimes is. I am not a policy maker and am not going to propose changes, I just recognise that the continued existence of alcohol related anti social behavoir means that current policy is not working.

The threshold for what is considered to be binge drinking is set too low in my opinion (less than two pints of a moderate strength real ale). People who drink 4-8 pints on a Saturday (which I and nearly everyone I know does) are being tarred with a brush that draws images of city centre brawls, upturned wheelie bins and vomit strewn pavements. This is plainly not fair. For me binge drinking and anti-social behavoir, two undoubtedly serious issues facing the nation, need to be seperated. The boundaries for binge drinking should be redrawn with the people who need held being treated. People who engage in anti-social behavoir would then not be able to hide behind the excuse of a binge drinking culture and could be punished appropriately.

Only then will the responsible majority stop being The Scapegoat for the inability of the authorities to address the social problems currently being faced by the nation.

His claims are based around the idea that anyone that wants to get inebriated will turn to stronger beers (such as his brewery’s 6-unit, 18% ale) and appreciate the flavour so much that they will not need to turn to “mass market, industry brewed lagers that are so bland and tasteless that you are seduced into drinking a lot of them”.

Of course, this is patently untrue – and it is more than likely that Mr. Watt knows this.

BrewDog, in its brief two-year existence is quickly becoming the rock n roll star of the micro-brewery world. As reports this week have reminded us, the company has previously flirted with controversy over a name given to one of its products that refers directly to drug-use (apparently; I wouldn’t have known said term if the BBC hadn’t informed me!)

But all publicity is good publicity and this is clearly the case here. BrewDog are now probably the most discussed brewery in the country and that can’t be a bad thing for them. I personally, love their manifesto. The aim is to target the younger market and turn them on to quality Real Ale and away from the cheap, common lagers popular amongst this demographic. In terms of Real Ale popularity, it is great achievement that such a young company, run by two clearly enterprising individuals, is taking the corporate alcohol producers head-on.

What they have also done with these statements is to highlight an issue that has plagued Britain for years; we don’t know how to appreciate alcohol consumption, certainly beyond the high-culture of fine wines.

We have never had the ‘café culture’ found abroad, where alcohol is consumed in a more respectable manner, and it is this side of the BrewDog argument that is strong. Growing up in the UK, drinking beer, wine, spirits and so on, is often more focused on quantity as opposed to quality. Although specialist bars and ale houses are growing in popularity, much of the city centre remains dominated by low-standard, low-priced alcohol which has ultimately become the norm.

Therefore, if companies like BrewDog are brewing special ales, such as Tokyo* – a run of three thousand units, of which only one thousand will be sold in the UK exclusively on the firm’s website – is this really such an issue?

All this debate has done is to highlight the country’s insecurities about its own drinking culture. BrewDog won’t change that, but at least it is putting the control back in the hands of consumers to try new and innovative ales, no matter how strong they may be.