The social drinker

When you read this, I’ll be on holidays in northern Germany. There are many reasons I keep coming back to this part of the world —the lovely Baltic, nostalgia, forests, decent weather without the risk of sunburn, and the local beer, Flensburger. There is probably a crate of the stuff on my kitchen floor right now.

There’s not much point in singing the praises of this beer, because you can’t buy it in Ireland. You could; there was a wonderful period when Aldi stocked it. There was a time when even my local pub in Dublin sold it, but those days are over. No Irish distributor now imports this wonderful beer, which is a great shame, but not really the point of this column.

The point of this column is to celebrate strong, distinctive local champions. Smithwick’s used to perform this function in Kilkenny. A beer made by hundreds of local people for tens of thousands of local people, with a small following elsewhere. A beer with a taste so unusual that almost anybody could recognise it blindfold. A beer that made Kilkenny people proud. But one day, not so long ago, Smithwick’s was sold to Diageo, and a few years after that, the brewery was closed, and Smithwick’s became a brand rather than a proper drink rooted in a community.

Flensburger, the German local beer I mentioned above, is still made in the city of Flensburg, and drunk in prodigious qualities by locals. Now it happens to be very good and popular elsewhere, but it is, first and foremost, a local beer, in the same way that the local paper is local, and the local handball team is local.

I’m writing about Flensburger because I hope that one day soon, at least a few Irish counties will have their own beers. Not hipster beers for hipsters, but beers with strong local followings. Beers as distinctive as the local GAA team or newspaper. Brexit happened, in part, because the British do not have enough authentic local drinks and foods. It could yet happen here, for many of the same reasons.