Today three of us went out for the best burger I have ever had at London’s best meat restaurant. After such heady heights two of us thought a beer was in order; we trekked past Spitalfields Market and finally found a boozer with seats and real ale on offer. Not just any old real ale, but Timothy Taylor’s Landlord.

I’ve blogged about this beer before, it is one of my very favourite Pale Ales. At its very best Landlord is a refreshing, lively beer of floral hoppiness and vibrant bitterness. However, like all real ales it is a fragile flower and needs to be treated with care and respect if top condition is going to be maintained. This boozer hadn’t quite taken enough care; to me it seemed a tad flat on the palate and there was some dirtiness to the nose. My drinking chum Peter thought I was being overly-critical, but then he often does.

That being said, it still had most of the desired complex hoppy aromas and even if it did lack a touch of life it was reasonably refreshing and easy to drink. It seems that some things are so lovely that even when they are not so good they can still be good enough.

I enjoyed our little trip to the boozer. Whenever I share a pint with someone civilised I recall a trip to an Oxford boozer many years ago. A lady of rather advanced years was sitting at a bench with a boy who must have been about five. Suddenly, the woman fixed the little boy with a look of serene tranquility and asked him, “There is nothing like spending the afternoon at the pub, is there?” The child’s answer, clearly derived from much experience, was a simple, “Oh yes granny!”.

Regular readers will perhaps not be surprised to read that my drinking buddy at the Union earlier was my close personal associate ‘The Kid’ Peter, we wanted an unpretentious lunch and some top beer. Our sandwiches were perfectly edible, whereas the beer was of the very highest quality.

We started off with a pint of Meantime London Pale Ale. When we were served our pints we were both surprised by the colour of the beer. It was very pale, the colour of lager, we are used to it being darker than this. Any doubts we had about the beer were instantly dismissed as soon as we tasted our pints: these were the best examples of the London Pale Ale we had ever tasted. The beer was bursting with vivid life with brilliant floral hoppy flavours and an extremely pleasing bitterness. This was totally invigorating and refreshing, our pints just begged us to keep drinking them. Timothy Taylor’s Landlord, if it has been well kept, is probably a better pale ale, but this was a serious contender.

Next up were some fruit beers. Peter had a bottle of Boon Kriek; Belgian lambic beer with cherry juice added. It had a strong cherry character, so strong some might think it over-whelmed any beer characters. I like Boon lambics because they are usually pretty dry and have great acidity, properties this example also had.

I think I did rather better with my fruit beer, a Meantime Raspberry Grand Cru. This is an old favourite of mine, a beer with flavours as livid as its red colour. It bursts with fruity vivacity and yet is totally dry with plenty of refreshing acidity. This clocks in at 6.5% but it doesn’t seem in the slightest bit heavy or thick which some beers of this strength can. I tell you, this is a really serious drink. Fruit beers are not just for people who don’t really like beer, this had what it needed where it needed it.

Our final drink was the quite mind-shatteringly fantastic Meantime India Pale Ale. This scores highly in the heroism stakes being 7.5%, and this alcohol level gives the beer some richness. However, it also has an array of dense, layered, hoppy bitter qualities which give this real complexity. These flavours give the palate a slightly savoury character which I find extremely pleasing. This was a truly brilliant beer for bold people who are not afraid of powerful tastes and getting a bit drunk.

If you want some extremely compelling beers and Greenwich is within easy reach then amble up Royal Hill and install yourself in the Union for a couple of hours of quality beer imbibing. Oh yes, the sandwiches are quite large, come with decent chips and are made from high-grade ingredients.

Last night at Hawksmoor I drank one of the most compelling cocktails I’ve consumed in my life. I’ve had other attempts at this cocktail many times in the past, but few people have risen to quite this level of invigorating, mind-warping booze action. The cocktail? A Zombie:

Because the grail/glass was about a pint in size, and it was filled up with a remarkably broad and generous selection of rums, I’m afraid I cannot remember the recipe terribly clearly. I do remember that this cocktail bludgeoned my poor, harassed and generally rancid mind right into the correct mood to nosh on top quality meat. And I like sticking quality meat in my mouth. The bar rules allow just one Zombie per person, alas. Yet I can see where they are coming from; if I had 3 of these I would be floridly incoherent and would find the comparatively simple task of standing up to be quite beyond me.

Get down the bar at Hawksmoor whenever you have the opportunity; their cocktails are rarely beaten.

Many thanks for the picture, Dan.

The BBC reports that a bunch of neo-prohibitionists are complaining that a Welsh language festival is planning to start serving alcohol.

Selling alcohol (with food) seems a good idea at a mass festival, you’d have thought, but the Welsh council for alcohol and other drugs are, quite unsurprisingly, bitching at this reasonable move. They’ve started a petition to try and stop people from having a bit more fun whilst visiting the Urdd eisteddfod.

Chief executive of this fun-police organisation Wynford Ellis Owen tells us:

Evidence suggests that children and young people are more likely to become drinkers and heavy drinkers the more society normalises the use of alcohol - which is exactly what the Urdd is doing by introducing alcohol to the eisteddfod site.

We know this to be absolute bollocks (see here and here). We also know that children are drinking less than ever in the UK. This is just another example of some hideous neo-pro trying to interfere with people’s lives in a feeble attempt to justify their own whining, pointless existence.

The Welsh assembly’s view on this, “This is a matter for the Urdd.” Quite right! Not for anyone but them to be concerned with.

Edit: I’ve been pointed to an even more odious article about this on the BBC News website. Apparently, a loony Christian organisation have also complained about the possibility of over-18 year olds having a bit more fun. Their best argument is, "It's been shown that the availability of drink is a known factor in alcohol abuse. By making alcohol more available the Urdd is contributing towards the problem." Alas, their complaint could not be considered because they are not local to where the eisteddfod is happening. Good. This group has complained about the general availability of alcohol in the past; Shut up and piss off you bunch of interfering swine.

*Especially a festival in Wales, otherwise how could I stand them terrorising me with their close-harmony choral singing? These people look ready to terrorise me, alright:

At this years event they will feature some Mozart opera translated into Welsh and creative headgear competition for year six children. I need that drink now. I didn’t see Padlockigami in the program, alas:

The neo-prohibitionist’s favoured uncritical press-release reporter, the BBC News website, tells us we are drinking less. The amount of people buying alcohol from an off-license in the past year has dropped from 37% in 1998 to 27% in 2009 and we are drinking less in pubs and bars. If it were an enlightened reporter writing this story he/she would be bemoaning the state of our dwindling off-trade industry and decrying the sadly dying pub industry. However, instead we must worry about a less than 1% increase in the number of nebulously-defined alcohol ‘related’ deaths (it takes a few years for this number to track a decreasing alcohol consumption level) and be told, once again, that the government is planning a new anti-drink advert.

I was pleased that the story reported that the average consumption of alcohol by manual workers (10.6 units a week) was less than for professional workers (13.8 units a week). We are normally told, in quite patronising terms, that drinking is disproportionately a working class problem. This data would suggest that it is not so much a class problem, more a problem for a tiny sub-set of the whole population. It is these people who specifically need targeting rather than demonising all drinkers and attempting to de-normalise alcohol for the majority of healthy drinkers.

Whilst I would certainly agree that teenagers should not drink to excess, this piece of scare-mongering propaganda in the Telegraph can be neatly summed up by two quotes (one by an arch neo-prohibitionist) it contains:

We’ve seeing (sic) a slight decline in the number of children who drink – Don Shenker, total arse and Chief Executive of pseudo-charity Alcohol Concern

I am pleased that these statistics show a decline in the number of young people smoking, drinking alcohol and taking drugs - Children’s Minister ‘red’ Dawn Primarolo

Edit: The excellent post on Pete Brown’s blog rips the Telegraph’s alarmist article to shreds.

Sometimes you find yourself in possession of a really filthy bottle of Champagne and it is always a conundrum as to whether you can face drinking it. The key, of course, is to make cocktails with it and tonight’s extremely decadent fizz-based cocktail is the Olympique.

It is very simple, just pour a shot of yellow Chartreuse into a glass and top up with four shots of some woeful Champagne that you have probably been given by someone who doesn’t know any better. The cocktail should be a beautiful golden colour thanks to the Chartreuse.

I have very happy memories of this drink (and, if I am honest, this cocktail has also deleted some memories). When I finished my final undergraduate exams I was met outside the exam hall by a lovely girl who was to become my ‘taller lying down than standing up*’ girlfriend. She presented me with a bottle of minor Champagne but refused to join me in drinking it with my wine friends in the post exam piss-up they had arranged. As luck would have it, one of my wonderful friends had brought a bottle of yellow Chartreuse along to the event and we mixed Olympiques. A very dissolute cocktail, and quite delicious too.

Of course, if you want to be really flash you can mix your Olympiques with the truly excellent VEP yellow Chartreuse. This is Chartreuse which has been aged for an unspecified number of years in large casks before bottling. It is smoother and more mellow than the standard stuff. A great drink but sadly quite pricy.

Green Chartreuse is a more alcoholic, fiery drink. When you feel the burn as you swallow you know it is doing you good. It is not really suitable for this cocktail, it is powerful and heady, and lacks the smoothness that the yellow version brings to Olympiques. Green has its place: for example, when you need to be invigorated to deal with lesser people it can really perk one up; a veritable command to go out and dominate inferior forms of life. Once again there is a VEP version of Green which is slightly less fiery and more refined. Great treat to have a bottle of this in one’s home, ready to charge one up should a lack-of-booze-style emergency occur.

Before I finish with Chartreuse (I still have some of my Olympique to finish) I should recommend Elixir Vegetal de Chartreuse. This is only sold in small (100ml) bottles, and described as a pick-me-up that will leave you feeling on top of the world. As well it might, having an impressive booze-quotient of 71%abv. This actually makes it bloody hard work to drink the stuff, but you can mix some with hot water for a warming winter drink, or put a few drops on a sugar cube just to enjoy its herbal flavours. You can also spray a mouthful between your pursed lips when holding a flame close your mouth and watch the impressive ‘fire-breathing’ effect. I am yet to try a few drops of Elixir Vegetal in fizz, it might well work a handy sub-interest Champagne-improver.

*If you are confused by the description of this lovely girl being taller lying down than standing up I shall simplify it: She was extremely well titted-out.

I mentioned the article on Velvet Glove, Iron Fist about the real history of binge-drinking in a tweet earlier. It is well worth reading, lots of interesting data there, and good criticism of the BBC News website’s latest bit of anti-drink propaganda. It makes the point very clearly that the moral panic over binge drinking is driven by pressure groups with the assistance of the press who are only too willing to uncritically report scare stories. There is some clear data in the article which shows the massive increase in the frequency of using the term ‘binge-drinking’ in the press has driven an increase in the use of the term by politicians. This has resulted in them being convinced we have a major binge-drinking problem and that ‘something must be done’.

There are three different terms being bandied about which refer to problem drinking, each with questionable definitions, and all using the same flawed interpretation of source data.

“More than 10 million ‘drinking at hazardous levels’” – Daily Telegraph

Apparently, a quarter of adults are hazardous drinkers. This alone makes it obvious that something is dodgy.

First, let’s see where the data comes from? It turns out that all data derives from the Office of National Statistics General Health Survey. This asks people how much they drank on the day in the last week they drank the most. This piece of information is then turned into weekly alcohol consumption, by multiplying the number of units by seven. This is a staggeringly duplicitous use of statistics.

If this laughably derived number is more than guideline maximum number of units a person should drink in a week (which we know are meaningless numbers just plucked from the air) then they are a hazardous drinker. Since the partner and I shared a bottle of light red wine today, we fall into this category.

Then there is ‘harmful drinking’. This is defined in the HSC report and by the BMA as “A pattern of drinking alcohol that causes harm to a person’s health or wellbeing. The harm may be physical, psychological or social.” They then go on to ignore the actual incidence of harm as being too difficult to know, and instead use the ONS GHS numbers as a proxy. They decide that anyone who consumes over 50 units a week regularly (35 for women) is a harmful drinker.

Given the absurd way the totals are calculated, this means that if my partner and I had decided to share a bottle of 8% German Riesling, in addition to the 12% red wine we had, we’d suddenly have turned into harmful drinkers, even if we had not had anything else to drink all week.

Finally, there’s binge drinking. That is defined in the UK as having more than 8 units a day (6 for women) on at least one occasion in the last week. That’s a bottle of weak wine, or three pints of Stella. That meaning is quite different to what was considered binge-drinking 10-15 years ago.

Whenever reports appear in the media on how we are drinking ourselves to death, it is important for as many people as possible to challenge the dodgy figures being used by anti-drink campaigners in a blatant attempt to de-normalise alcohol. It is also an insult to anyone who has ever lived with someone with serious alcohol problems, or themselves drunk enough to give them health or social problems.

So, next time you read something alarmist, claiming that a quarter or third of people are misusing alcohol, don’t be shy to point out what the figures add up to in the context of real alcoholic drinks, not difficult-to-visualise units. Who knows, that may persuade at least some journalists to use their own judgment rather than recycling hysterical nonsense press releases.