Beer: the ice-cold truth
You know when someone gets asked to name four people – living or dead – they’d like to have as dinner guests and everyone says Nelson Mandela, John Lennon, Gandhi, JFK, Mother Theresa... Well how about four people* you’d like to have a beer with? I thought about this in the wake of Anthony Bourdain’s death last month. To be honest, he wouldn’t have made my guest list but I figured I should have had a pint with him – if only to have put him right about his beer choices.
A food writer and TV presenter with a sense of humour as sharp as paring knife, Bourdain was quick to call out gimmicks, fads and pretence. After he died, his withering take-down of craft beer from 2016 was revisited many times in online beer communities.
He once said his angriest critics were beer folk who slammed him for drinking whatever cold beer was available. People expected him to care about beer as much as he cared about food. ‘‘They see that I’m passionate about food, why am I not passionate about beer? I just ain’t. I’m just not… You know, I haven’t made the effort to walk down the street 10 blocks to the microbrewery where they’re making some f…ing Mumford & Sons IPA. People get all bent about it. But look, I like cold beer.’’
And originally that’s why I wanted to have a beer with Bourdain – I was one of those people getting all ‘‘bent about it’’. I wanted to tell him ice-cold is the beer equivalent of well-done steak, which he hated, passionately. I wanted to ask him why, when he would go out of his way to eat street food from independently owned and operated vendors, he preferred green-bottled beer made by conglomerates.
But… the thing is, Bourdain was true to himself. He loved mass-produced fast food as long as it was made with care and tasted good. He also begged restaurants to give up making their own ketchup for hamburgers because they could never match the plain old supermarket variety. And he’s right – the flavour profile of Wattie’s tomato sauce, for example, is so ingrained my sensory system that any other is but a sad imitation.
And in that light, I get where he’s coming from with his ice-cold beer love – it’s a flavour profile that drills deep because, for a while, it defined beer, especially in America. If Tony Bourdain liked mass-produced, ice-cold beer the way I like Wattie’s tomato sauce... who am I to argue?
If it’s my round, I’ll get Tony his freezing cold whatever. But me? Just as Bourdain was passionate about independently owned and operated food vendors, my preference is for independent breweries.
I’ll have that Mumford & Sons IPA, thanks Tony.
* The four people I’d like to have a beer with? My late parents and my two brothers. After all, it’s who you’re with that matters.