A complete history of drinks

[imomus]

Someone anonymous (it may have been design writer Rick Poynor) left an interesting comment yesterday on the topic of globalisation and our conceptions of the exotic: "Some cultural borrowings can become so internalized that they no longer convey to the consumer an image of "the other". Back in the 60s, having an espresso at Bar Italia in Soho was an exotic appropriation of an Italian "other". But having an espresso in Starbucks on Leicester Square in 2005 no longer is, although there's a direct evolution. It's simply become a part of our globalised culture."

I started thinking about this again later in the day when I went with Hisae and Yukiko to the Japanese deli in Friedrichshain. We were drinking Kirin and Asahi beer from the cold cabinet, comparing the taste. The Kirin tasted a bit more hoppy, stronger, with a bitter aftertaste on the back edges of your tongue. The Asahi was refreshingly watery, a bit like Budweiser. The girls told me the brands tasted different from their Japanese counterparts: this wasn't "real" Japanese beer flown in from Japan, but European beer bottled for the Japanese brands in England and Germany. Nearby were cans of "Calpico Water", the Euro-version of Japanese Calpis Water (rebranded, presumably, because Calpis sounds a bit like "cow piss" to English ears and nobody wants to quaff piss).

I told the girls about the beers marketed in Britain as "exotic". In the early 80s continental bottled pilsner was the thing. I remember going to bars with members of Josef K, copying them when they ordered "a pils, please". It sounded like "pills", as if you were ordering blues or poppers or something: a lot cooler than "Half a pint of cider, please!" (my tipple at uni). Later, when I moved to London, Mexican beer was the cool drink. It was a shock to discover that Sol, the stuff I drank at Bar Escobar in South Ken with my dish of stuffed baby squid (accompanied by tequila shots from the tequila girl if I was on a date) was actually a fake Mexican brand: the Mexicans really drank cerveza Corona. Just as watery and yellow as Sol, though in a less "exoticist" bottle (Sol had a label with Day of the Dead sun motifs), Corona soon replaced the ersatz brand.

Soon Sapporo Japanese beer started to appear in London's cool eateries. The curvy non-parallel silver can, swelling generously from a narrow base to a wide brim, looked like it could have been designed by Philippe Starck. Imagine my surprise, on my first trip to Japan, to find that this beer didn't exist there! There was Sapporo beer, of course, but it tasted different and the "luxury" can was nowhere to be seen. And Sapporo in Japan was a humble third to Asahi and Kirin beers: in fact, it was Asahi who employed Philippe Starck, architect of their famous beer hall at Asakusa.

If my typical 80s hot date happened in a Mexican restaurant with whistle-blowing tequila girls and music by The Gypsy Kings, things switched radically in the 90s. The cool London restaurant became Belgo at Chalk Farm; wanton tequila girls were replaced by severe Belgian monks carrying plates of mussels. My beer taste suddenly went Dutch: Hoegaarden, a cloudy Dutch white beer, appeared and was very successful with people who didn't really like normal bitter clear beer. By the late 90s the white beer market had expanded: I remember drinking Erdinger at the Bricklayer's Arms in Hoxton. In fact, it's still my tipple here in Berlin, but whereas a bottle in Hoxton costs £2.50, here, where it's local and not marketed as an exotic "premium" product, it's 45 pence.

Non-beer drinks also had a succession of brief moments in the limelight. My childhood in the 60s was dominated by horrific chemical concentrates like Cremola Foam, a sort of agribiz fizz that became a toxic pink scum when you added water. Family holidays in France opened my eyes — and palette: a drink called "French lemonade" became my favourite, but you could only drink it in France. In Montreal in the mid-70s we drank Tang, an orange juice concentrate which had apparently been developed for astronauts to drink in space. I guess you can't get more exotic than that, although tastewise the stuff was a rather faded chemical memory of Florida groves. In the mid-80s, when I moved to the King's Road in Chelsea, Perrier water suddenly appeared. I started using my dole checks to pay for... water.

I can't drink coffee, it makes me hyper. I went through a brief cappuccino phase in the early 80s, again influenced by my bandmates in The Happy Family. We'd go in Paul's car to the only cafe in Edinburgh that served the stuff, the Cafe Vittorio on Leith Walk. Later, in London, I'd walk down to The Dome at World's End and sip the frothy stuff slowly, hoping I wouldn't get heart palpitations. But I'm really a tea man. In the late 70s Twinings released Earl Grey in tea bag format. Twinings was the only widely available "connoisseur" tea in Britain then, a metonym for exoticism. If I want to remember my life in an Aberdeen student hall of residence I just have to imagine Simon Artley, my nextdoor neighbour, calling "Cup of tea, Nick? Darjeeling? Lapsang Souchong?" Later I switch to cinnamon/cardamon teas bought in the Bangla supermarkets of Brick Lane, and then to sticky American chai, alternating with Japanese green tea bags, and finally to loose leaf sencha. Just in the last week I've switched to the double price high quality sencha (100g for €12) sold at my local tea store Bodea, and it's unlikely I'll ever go back to the cheap stuff. Green tea bags will never again be "the real thing". How could I have thought they were? What was I thinking?

What is "the real thing", if it's so relative, though? Is it just a position that successive products occupy one by one, none of them definitively? Are we drinking liquids or ideas? Ideas about reality, exoticism, refinement, quality, exclusiveness, the Good Other, social class, consumer power, personal ideals, wealth, self image... Do I drink to scorn my former self, that provincial buffoon? Do I drink to soak the Other, literally and physically, into my body? Do I drink to remember, or drink to forget? If I found a sticky tin of Cremola Foam, even if I knew I'd get a Proustian rush back to 1968, could I bear to add water? If my body is 65% water, who are all these exotic drinks turning me—well, 65% of me—into? More tea, vicar?

Comments

[ksta.livejournal.com]

hooray for tea. I drink every kind I can find, with the exception of the smokey ones.

My current favourite is the one with rice in it, innit.

[sarmoung.livejournal.com]

I stopped drinking Japanese beer in the UK once gave up importing it. Just as Western brands and foods are adapted to the (supposed) Japanese palate, the European version is too, well, European. I think Asahi is brewed by Branik in the Czech Republic, home of pilsner. Not that this seems to have affected the restaurant mark-up.

The "French lemonade" I can remember on holiday, with a certain Proustian edge, was called Pschitt. One of my first adventurous vending machine purchases in Japan was Purin Shake and I advise anyone to approach this one with caution. It's a creme-caramel shake with small chunks.

[rwillmsen.livejournal.com]

nobody wants to quaff piss

Now we know that's not true!

I find that a lot of German people fucking hate Warsteiner, because of its increasing ubiquity around the world.

I used to think (still do I suppose) that the subtle but constant changes in the design of a Coke can exercise a kind of brainwashing effect on us, giving us a kind of collective amnesia. Or something. Right. I need some green tea, from a bag as it happens (sometimes it just seems to involve less pissing about).

[rwillmsen.livejournal.com]

ps. Tang, the stuff you make from a powder, is HUGE in China. It's seen as really cool. Tang, apparently means 'sugar'.

Alors je me tais.

[sparkligbeatnic.livejournal.com]

Just back from Meidi-ya with 100 gms of Sri Lankan Dimbula B.O.P. and 80 gms of Indian organic Assam.

[jennvix.livejournal.com]

I don't drink coffee either; it causes me to freak out.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes, I've only just realised that my brief "cappuccino period", when I was experimenting with the stuff with my bandmates, is why I yammer and gibber like a deranged speedfreak on our album The Man On Your Street (http://www.imomus.com/index2.html). It's a coffee album, innit?

[butterflyrobert.livejournal.com]

Once you go with the high grade sencha, only dire circumstances (or the overwhelming power of whim) can make you go back! Yes, I'm certainly a fellow tea man.

teethchattering

[cityramica.livejournal.com]

i'm going through a renewed corner-of-cafe (with headphones) phase and it;s making my brain feel like an everlasting gobstobber when i need a broccoli.

i prefer beer, of the free variety, lately.

[klasensjo.livejournal.com]

I haven't had my daily espresso for two months because of health issues. Didn't get withdrawal symptoms, but I have to walk by the espressomaker just to smell the scent of the coffee. That's enough for me...
A real turnoff (and a cultural clash) is the way they serve coffee here in the U.S. Oversized "to-go" cups with lids. I mean part of the experience is watching those beautiful images that will appear from the crema in an appropriately sized cup. That's part of the otherness, I suppose.

[andypop.livejournal.com]

I can't drink coffee either. It makes me literally shake, and not in a good way. Regrettably, tea also doesn't agree with me any more, and as for most herbal teas, blechh. Oddly I'm finding that what I drink most of nowadays (apart from wine - beer is also a no-no, too bulky & fizzy) is soya milk - even the unsweetened types which an old friend of mine used to refer to as "cardboard juice". Funny what you can develop a taste for.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The Japanese call it hikari sencha, "brilliant green tea"! The best is from Shizuoka.

breaking news: "pure water" overrated!

[kaipfeiffer.livejournal.com]

well, i run on tea and wine almost exclusively for many years now. almost never drink water, juices very rarely (apple, orange ...).
i switch between darjeeling and high quality green tea: sencha, genmai cha, de-ichi, oolong. no teabags allowed. drinking an average of 5 liters of the stuff per day. unfortunately, the water quality in berlin isn't the same as in vienna, which has very "smooth" water, therefore the legendary quality of its coffee. i'm just too lazy to filter the water.
many people will tell you that green tea has a "dehydrating" effect, but if this was true, i'd have died a long time ago. on the contrary, as for the "piss": the last time i had my urine checked the doctor told me it was "practicaly pure water" - which i am still quite proud of. nonetheless i like that in vienna, you always get a glass of water with your coffee. and coffee is what i'm drinking when in a café, because hardly any of them seem able to serve a decent cup of tea.
as for the wine: i always envied beer drinkers for the possibility to rely on their prefered brands. simple and easy for the bar owner to order, whereas the wine has to be choosen out of an endless variety of small producers, and the quality might change any year. and, in an overcrowded bar, the red stuff will inevitably get warmer and warmer, no bartender seems to know that red wine should be served at 18 C max, so i'm forced to switch to white wine, which has the right to live in the fridge - next to the beer ...
to conclude with an anecdote from my fellow comic artist david b. from paris, who is totally into japanese food, and, like me, drinking exclusively tea (but no alcohol): he went for a very good and extremely snobbish tea shop in paris, where he, a rather distinguished looking man in his fourties, asked the shop owner about the various different kinds of oolong tea they sell. the good man invariably concluded his answers by telling david "but this is a very expensive tea", giving him a look that says "you couldn't afford that, young man". when david then, for a joke, said so then he'd have 50 gr. of every tea they sell (hundreds), to "break the ice", the shop owners face froze ... (at last, he managed to get some smll bags of the stuff, leaving about 120 euro at the store).

TEA

[daliojowetico.livejournal.com]

Tea!!!
Yeah I have had tea,lots of tea,Indian tea,and biscuits...
If it's good enough for The Rutles,then drink on.

A drop of Irish in ye

[liliski.livejournal.com]

I moved from Northern Ireland to Brighton to study and ended up working in an off-licence to supplement my income, just at the time new ranges of 'Irish' ales and beers such as Caffrey's, Kilkenny's and the like were being launched. I used to be morbidly embarrassed at both the English consumers for buying into this Oirish schtick, and at Irish brewers for flagrantly flounting any sense of the quality of Irish drinking culture for the sake of a quick punt. Theme bars were bad enough, but for this postmodern froth to be willingly imported into boozers' homes frankly took the barmbrack. And this in a town where I had been threatened by strangers in clubs for sheer fact of being Irish ~ apparently I might have been responsible for the Brighton bombing and dear old Margaret Thatcher nearly pegging it, y'see..

Drink is a political issue where I come from, clearly

[kattullus.livejournal.com]

Do you know Melrose's Tea? It's a Scottish brand, and very good. The only black tea in bags I can stand drinking. The one culinary thing I'm dreading about going to the US that I'm dreading is that it seems remarkably hard to find good black tea in bags. I'd stark drinking loose leaves tea but in the morning, when tea is most necessary, I barely have the mental werewithal to pour milk on cereal. But anyway, yes, I think Scots have one up on the English there, or anyone else for that matter.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Never tasted it! It's probably marketed where you live as the quintessential Scottish tea, and completely unheard of in Scotland. The usual thing.

[freddster.livejournal.com]

tea is my favourite tipple. jasmine, green or darjeeling. nothing beats it.

[kattullus.livejournal.com]

Actually its not marketed as quintessentially Scottish, it's not marketed at all... it's a sort of weird thing. In Iceland there used to be this extremely large monolithic behemoth wholesaler (which started out as an organization of co-ops, incidentally) that decided to import Melrose's as the only tea so in Iceland Melrose's is sort of the baseline normal tea. Icelanders are usually shocked to find out that this brand is virtually unheard of anywhere else. But there's a tartan motif on the boxes, but it's not marketed as anything in Iceland. It's just the tea that people drink.

Luckily enough it's a really good black tea.

It's got an interesting history because the Melrose who its named after was the first guy to sell tea after the East India Company's tea monopoly was lifted.

Since its manufactured in Edinburgh I was sort of wondering if you'd heard of it.

[featherframe.livejournal.com]

am a coffee addict, but i wouldn't say no to a cup't anytime either.

incidentally, there's also a difference between the export version of Thai beers (e.g. Chang and Singa) from their counterparts at home. probably just a marketing ploy to delude folks into thinking that they're still lazing around in the tropical heat on Khao San or Phra Athit.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It's amazing, there we were thinking we were so sinful, burning up kerosene and destroying the polar ice caps every time we swigged our imported beers... but it turns out that, thanks to the deceptions of the companies slapping exotic brand labels on what's basically the same old domestic beer, we were actually being model citizens all along, consuming local produce!

[instant-c.livejournal.com]

I have been obsessed with turkish tea lately. I was taught by a friend to use a drop of rosewater in the brewing. Typically though my mainstay is a simple Hojicha, Tuocha, and as a treat I'll make some matcha(which either puts me to sleep or has the effect of a pint of espresso). Have you found any particular prejudices or preferences towards types of green tea in Japan?

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

I've always preferred stronger fare than beer or wine. I especially like intensely aromatic herbal liqueurs and elixirs like Green Chartreuse (alpine notes, 130 ingredients) or M.P. Elisir Roux (more earthy, less sweet).



I could always procure home brewed concoctions from some distant relations, but I like my eyesight as it is.

Aversion to coffee and Momus fans

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

I can't drink coffee either without shaking uncontrollably, panicking and feeling as though my brains are seeping out of my head. I thought I was alone in my strange reaction to the stuff until I read today's entry and it's replies: I wonder whether there is any correlation between coffee-sensitivity and a liking for Momus recordings?

Maybe you should double your website as a support page for those with adverse reactions to cafeine (and simultaneous predilection for exotic teas, apparently - I like Chinese flower tea, for instance, even though I am basically consuming over-priced, shrivelled chrysanthemums in a bag). The public empathy resulting from your coffee-related revelations (nice alliteration there) might really drive up album sales figures, perhaps leading to a talk show ("where celebrities talk about their coffee nightmares") or at least some more tabloid articles ("My Coffee Hell," by Nicholas Currie). Damn, even the thought of coffee is making me babble...

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

Ah, Green Chartreuse - I remember a friend buying me a gigantic bottle of the stuff as a birthday present once; its taste was so overpoweringly horrific (sorry!) that we ended up mixing the merest drop of Chartreuse with large quantities of orange juice - though it was still enough to turn the juice a murky, deep green... It is no wonder the monks who make it are celibate. I don't remember Green Chartreuse being at all sweet, however: which causes me to doubt my memory (which was considerably addled by the monks' monstrosity) and then, in its defence, wonder whether USA Chartreuse is in fact the same as the French horror. Where do you get your Chartreuse supplies from?