In a world that seems to make less and less sense as I get older, there are still occasional moments of crystalline sanity. One such occurred recently when I learned that Manchester’s only alcohol-free bar, Love From, was going out of business after eight months. A bar without beer, I thought when it opened a year ago – had the world gone mad? But then the planets rotate, the Earth moves and things return to some kind of harmony again.
It’s not just non-alcoholic bars though. In recent years we have been deluged with products aimed at adults who don’t drink. But the public remains to be entirely convinced. The maddest moment came earlier this year with the launch of White Claw’s non-alcoholic hard seltzer. A hard seltzer is essentially fizzy pop but with alcohol. So this is an alcoholic soda… without the alcohol. Clever!
Such nonsensical drinks are a sign of desperation in the alcohol industry. Even the mighty Diageo, the company behind Guinness and Johnnie Walker, is feeling the pinch and has seen its share price tumbling in recent weeks. The problem, I believe, is that their customers are ageing and dying off. Meanwhile, the younger generations, damn them, aren’t drinking as their parents did. Then there’s the rise of neo-prohibitionism in institutions like the Who with the apparent aim of treating alcohol like tobacco. All in all, it’s a worrying time for the alcohol business and parasites like me who feed off it.
I’m hopeful though that alcohol is going to prove far more resilient than cigarettes. Whereas Europeans have been smoking for a little over 500 years, mankind has been enjoying alcohol since before the dawn of history. There are theories that proto-humans came down from the trees specifically to gorge on fermenting fruit. And it’s not only people: animals such as elephants, monkeys, and fruit flies have long enjoyed that funny-tasting fruit that makes them shake off their inhibitions and get down. Nobody, however, has taken to intoxication quite like man. Unlike other primates, we have evolved to process alcohol, and its effects enabled us to binge on food so we can put on fat in times of plenty.
In fact, one reason agriculture may have developed in the first place was to provide grain to make beer. In other words: without beer there would be no civilisation. And in Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization, Edward Slingerland argues that alcoholic intoxication itself is vital to the functioning of society. Shared drunkenness was vital in building trust in large groups, breaking down barriers and getting our creative juices flowing. Without it, our brains, which are wired for working in small hunter-gatherer groups, would have struggled to get on with so many strangers around. In every great culture alcohol has played a part, from the ritualised drunkenness of the ancient Egyptians to Kingsley Amis, the laureate of the hangover. As the American philosopher William James noted: “The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature.”
Young people seeking the profound benefits of good old-fashioned alcoholic intoxication are facing some challenges at the moment, especially since the ubiquity of smartphones – who’d want to get drunk at university knowing that you stand a very good chance of ending up on TikTok? But rather than stop drinking entirely, our habits will adapt as they did in the 19th century, where drinking moved from being more or less constant to an activity confined to leisure time, thanks to industrialisation.
Let’s not forget that alcohol has faced greater adversaries than a “sober curious” generation in its long and complicated relationship with humanity. Despite Islam’s prohibition on alcoholic intoxication, the Muslim world produced two of the greatest poets on the joys of wine: Abu Nuwas and Omar Khayyam. More recently, at the 1976 wine competition known as the “Judgement of Paris”, California was judged to be producing wines that were better than Bordeaux and Burgundy – and nine of the 11 judges were French! The alcohol business is nothing if not resilient.
I can’t help thinking that the current trend for sobriety is just that, a trend, and one that the closure of institutions like Love From seems to show is buckling. There’s going to be some pain for the drinks industry, but man’s ingrained need for alcohol will continue. In his Short History of Drunkenness, Mark Forsyth quotes a Sumerian proverb from around 2,000 BC: “Not to know beer is not normal.” Let’s raise a glass to normality.
[See also: The teenage Messiah is no more]
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