A Compendium of Irish Pints: The Culture, Customs and Craic by Ali Dunworth, illustrated by Stephen Heffernan, looks at the whole culture of going for a pint in Ireland, and everything that surrounds it.
Ali Dunworth, who contributes to The Irish Times and Food & Wine Magazine and also curates and hosts numerous Irish food events and festival stages, delves deep into the culture.
The book covers etiquette, expressions, pints for celebrations and pints for commiserations as well as festival pints, old man’s pints and everything including the only relatively recent acceptance and even legality of women drinking pints.
You must be pleased with the longlisting for the André Simon Food and Drink Book Awards..
“Yeah, it’s amazing.
“It’s funny because I had to go into a few shops and ask them to move it because they put it in the humour section and it’s really not.
“It’s funny, some of it but I think what most people don’t realise is how much like weight is in it, how much actual research and I suppose cultural commentary there is in there.
“It’s really cool then for an award like the André Simon award to recognize that.
“Just to be in the long list for that is recognition enough for me that someone’s thinking of my book the way I want it to be thought of, which is really exciting.”
What moved you to write this book?
“I always say, I’ve been researching it for probably 30 years at this stage.
“I love pubs.
“Whenever I meet up with friends or anything, I never want to go to a wine bar or a cocktail place.
“I’m always like, ‘We’ll go to a proper pub’.
“I always loved the conviviality of it and how you get to really talk to people.
“I had written a few articles about the changing pub scene in Ireland.
“I think that was on my mind and then I was at another book event and it was a fancy cocktail party and in the corner of that party, there was a Guinness tap.
“There was just one lad serving pints and I was like, ‘That’s where the craic is. You know the best people are over there and that’s where the party is, the proper people.
“I think I kind of went on a bit of a soliloquy about pints and how amazing they were and why pint drinkers were the best.
“And Kristin Jensen (Nine Bean Rows publisher) said, ‘Do you think there’s a book in this?’
“And I was like, ‘I think there is’.
“It just went from there.
“She said, ‘Oh, send me an idea of a table of contents’.
“I don’t think she expected four days later, I had 20 pages done and that was pretty much the table of contents that ended up being the book so it was there the whole time.”
What was the biggest surprise along the way for you in your research?
“When I was writing I was like, ‘God, women have not written about this subject. Women aren’t referenced. Women are not really in this world’.
“There’s loads of books written about pubs and pints in Ireland but they’re all from a similar male perspective.
“I suppose I hadn’t really thought about why that was because I started drinking in the late 90s and I never thought twice about drinking a pint.
“And it was only when I looked into it I was like, ‘Okay, so if I had have been born 10 years earlier, I might not have been a pint drinker, they weren’t the norm’.
“I might not have even been able to go into some of the pubs that I drank in and drink in.
“To think how quickly it changed in Ireland.
“In the 60s and 70s, women were not in the pub.
“They were not drinking with men.
“That only changed in the 80s and 90s in Ireland but to still think that what I was drinking even in my 20s that I never really comprehended: There’s places here where I’m not supposed to be, these spaces are not supposed to be mine, they’re not built for me.
“People aren’t marketing the drinks to me.
“Go back over Guinness advertising and you notice in the last decade how they changed and all the advertising is now really diverse, but for decades and decades, it was just men.
“It was men’s story, men’s drink, men’s places.
“I don’t think I realised that that had been so recent in my lifetime, that was a shock.
“Until the 2000 Equality Act legally changed in Ireland, it still technically would have been legal for someone to not serve me because I was a woman.
“It still happens to this day.
“I was there recently, my friend drinks a half and I drink a pint.
“They’ll always give him the pint and me the half.
“Or if it’s a Guinness and something else, they’ll always give the Guinness to the man.
“Those things still happen but I think until I wrote it down and wrote those chapters and thought about it that I thought about it and it was eye opening.
“It’s interesting to learn the history of the pubs like Grogan’s.
“The history of why Grogan’s is so loved was amazing because that was one of the first places that encouraged women to come and drink in there.
“They wanted them to come in because that was all the rag traders around there.
“There were loads of women working around there.
“They were one of the pioneers for allowing women to drink whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted.
“I have a story about Neary’s, when Nell McCafferty went in there and they wouldn’t serve a pint. They ordered 30 brandies and a pint, he wouldn’t serve the pint so they drank the brandies and then they left without paying.
“To learn all those that social history, about the pubs I love, I love all those stories.”
How else have customs changed?
“What’s funny is, it hasn’t.
“When I wrote the chapter about the price of pints, there’s stories that go back decades with the same headlines. This is the final nail in the coffin. How everyone’s going to stop going to the pub.
“Every time there’s a price hike, it was the same story printed.
“I think what’s interesting is to look at all the big moments in the pub history the last decades as well which were the smoking ban, the drink driving ban, the super pubs, and all those things that were seen as the end of the pub, and they haven’t been so far.
“It’s been interesting to learn that even though there’s been big changes, it evolves. It keeps on evolving because we still love the pub for the same reasons, because they haven’t.”
After decades of it looking less and less stable as a trade, what place do you think the Irish pub is in?
“It’s definitely in a good place in parts.
“I think the city centre pubs are thriving.
“The Irish pub outside of Ireland is thriving.
“The rural pubs are not and that’s sad to see, the fact that pubs would have been passed on from generation to generation.
“That’s not happening anymore because who wants to take it on?
“You see more people run a pub as a passion project or maybe they have another business and then they have a pub on top of that.
“But to just run a pub, if you have a family or a household to look after, is a really difficult thing to do so it’s worrying in that capacity.
“What I liked about writing this book was talking about the pub and pints as culture.
“You have to try and find a way to save or preserve the pub scene.
“It’s very worrying, I think, especially in rural Ireland.
“They’ll be gone and It’s a big part of our culture just disappearing.”
You mention that social media page that we’ve all seen, sh*tlondonguiness where people are shown up for not serving our national drink the correct way..
“Obviously Guinness has been having a moment around the world for the last couple of years.
“I do think that what he did with that Instagram is a big part of it because we had those two, three years where we couldn’t go to the pub and everything else we could do at home: We could learn how to make cocktails, we could buy nice wine, we could get craft beer. We couldn’t pour a good pint of Guinness.
“By the end of lockdown, that’s what you were looking for.
“Everyone was gagging for the Guinness and he started his account around that right time as well.
“I think Guinness have a lot to thank him for because I think he did a lot to put that in front of people.
“As Irish people we always, straight away, can see what’s wrong with a pint of Guinness.
“It was interesting to see the differences of how outraged people would get or not.
“I think that it made a lot of people go, ‘Why are people getting so upset about this pint of Guinness?’
“He has another page called Beautiful Pints which doesn’t get half as much interaction.
“It’s a real anomaly for me to be like, ‘Oh my god, I love this hugely commercialised drink’, which we all do.
“It’s like we ignore the fact that it’s not even owned by an Irish company, we still treat it like as if it’s one of our national flags.
“Murphys and Beamish are having a bit of a moment now thanks to Guinness.
“I know recently Gibney’s in London put Beamish on for one day only and they were sold out within a few hours.
“And I know there’s certain pubs in London that only serve Murphy’s,
“I think it’s interesting that Kneecap are Beamish boys through and through and yhey will never be seen with Guinness.
“If they talk about drinks, they talk about Beamish.
“I believe they drink Beamish in Maddens in Belfast.”
What sort of reactions have you got to the book?
“I wouldn’t say it’s like a eureka moment, it’s things we all know.
“But I think that writing a chapter on what funeral pints are.
“We all know what that is but I didn’t know anyone who’s ever written a few pages about having a pint at a funeral and how nice that can be.
“I think it was more recognising everyday moments and putting them down on paper that people were like, ‘God, I never thought about the airport pint being so specific and brilliant and good and why it’s so great’.
A Compendium of Irish Pints: The Culture, Customs and Craic by Ali Dunworth is available from Nine Bean Rows. Follow Ali Dunworth here.
