Restrained drinking on the home front

It’s said that every cloud has a silver lining and if you look hard enough, there are one of two hiding, even under something as soul-destroying as the lockdown. So, looking back over the whole miserable experience, I did manage to find at least one positive, which I will relay to you shortly, but with no obvious end in sight to the current situation, I’m going to have to dig a little deeper to find some more.

The positive piece of news is that, even though I’m not really keeping tabs, I know my personal beer consumption has fallen considerably, and it’s all down to drinking at home. Flipping open a bottle or cracking open a can at the end of an evening, might well provide a welcome and thirst-quenching draught to look forward to, but it’s not the same as being in the pub with a group of friends, getting the rounds in, as the evening ears slowly on, and that’s the trouble.

You’ll appreciate that it’s not unusual to knock back three or four pints over the course of an evening, without really noticing it, but whilst the odd beer at home is undoubtedly welcome, it’s nowhere near the same as knocking back those pints, in the company of friends, at a good old-fashioned pub – any pub, for that matter, at the moment.

So, whilst there aren’t many evenings that go by when I don't pour myself a beer, it normally is just the one, especially on a school night. I might push the boat out at the weekends and have a couple, or even three, if I choose to have a beer with my main evening meal, but there’s something about those home-poured beers that just isn’t conducive to volume drinking.   

But is this decreased beer consumption having any positive affect on my not so sylph-like figure? Sadly, the answer is no, but it must be having some effect. The other good thing is drinking at home allows far more variety than the average pub – not always a good thing, as there’s a lot of truth in the irony of too much choice, meaning less. However, with many cask breweries turning their output over to packaged beers – bottles and cans, there’s a staggering variety of different beers out there.

There’s the additional option of buying beer in bulk, but this comes with problems of its own, such as keeping and storing the stuff, without it going off. I’ll cover this topic another time, as it’s well worth a second look, but whilst a few pints of the same beer in a pub, on occasion, can be very enjoyable, the prospect of getting through a cask of the same brew, night after, can be somewhat daunting.

None of this though detracts from the fact that I have tended to drink a lot less beer at home, than I would have done in a pub. I tell myself that, small as they are, my efforts are helping breweries, and those pubs I have bought beer from, survive the crushing effects of the lockdown. But despite this, I can’t help feeling concern over what will be left of the hospitality trade, when this whole wretched business is finally over.

One final point, my observations are proof, if proof was needed, that beer is a social drink, and one that is best enjoyed in the company of other humans. It doesn’t matter whether those humans are family members, friends, casual acquaintances, or strangers met along the way, as each encounter comes with its own unique experience. Even if that experience is sometimes lost in the moment, it shouldn’t detract from the overall happening or event, because the feelings of pleasure, joy or sometimes even sadness that go with it, cannot be taken away from us – unless we allow them to!