I drank my first beer at the dawn of the new Millennium. At least, that is what my memory allows me to believe, and like a myth, any story repeated often enough becomes true in some sense. I am almost certain that this story is not literally true. Firstly, there is another forerunner for my first sip of beer: a story about when I was still a toddler, and gleefully dipped my straw into some relative or other’s pint glass, delighted at the prospect of tasting forbidden fruit. Secondly, I am not sure it was a can of beer we passed around Tom’s bedroom in the early hours of 1 January 2000, with the bright lights of the Nintendo 64 keeping us awake beyond midnight. We were seven years old, after all, and I am not convinced that a new Millennium was reason enough for our parents to throw caution to the wind to quite that extent.
New Year’s Eve is carnivalesque, a moment in which “the world stands on its head,” as the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin put it. Peasants can become kings in the atmosphere of the carnival. Children can become adults for the same brief moment, and vice versa. But giving lager to boys who were still too young to join the Cub Scouts might have been pushing it, even for an evening like this.
All historians are magpies, on the lookout for shiny facts that support their theories. Adults hunting for childhood memories can be more magpie-like still. As far as my mental image can be trusted, the warm beer we passed around was in a deep blue can. It is at least possible that the drink that made us feel like men for the night was Shandy Bass. The Tesco website tells me that Shandy Bass is now out of stock, but that it contained no more than 8% beer, and no more than 0.5% alcohol. That places it at the pedestrian end of the shandy spectrum, given that the default pub shandy is around 50:50, beer and lemonade. At seven years old, we would not have appreciated the distinction. I cannot claim to remember anything about how it tasted; the flavour was besides the point.
If the New Year’s Eve story is true, then it marks the very beginning of a long love affair with shandy, one of the least-respected drinks on the British pub menu. Our drinking culture is unkind to the shandy drinker. When I was a sixth-former, at the start of my pub-going career, it was quickly made clear that serious drinkers didn’t order shandy. I remember a Hereford man who had a nickname that had stuck with him for at least half a decade, because once, many years ago, he was overheard ordering a shandy. “OH, here comes Shandy again!” went the chorus, when he arrived at the table. “A shandy for Shandy, is it?” when somebody else went to the bar to order a round.
“Shandy” is objectively a hilarious nickname, and further proof that Hereford really belongs in Wales. The Welsh, after all, take nicknames seriously in a way the English rarely do. But it also hints at a hostility towards ‘watered down’ drinks. This is to some extent a gendered phenomenon. When I started going to pubs in the late noughties, women could order shandy, but men almost never did, unless they had an excuse: “designated driver” was the most frequent one.
Not all drinking cultures share an anti-shandy agenda. In an episode of The Moon Under Water, a sort of Desert Island Discs but for pubs, fellow shandy apologist Adrian Chiles expresses how surprised he was to find a wide selection of shandies in a Croatian supermarket. Chiles is half-Croatian, and had assumed that Croatians would turn their noses up at shandy, like many British drinkers do. But no: if shandy denialism is not unique to our isles, then at the very least it is far from universally shared.
I realised this on the Year 8 German exchange, at the same time that I realised that trends and gender norms could also be culturally subjective. It was 2006, and Germany was hosting the World Cup. Germany felt like the centre of the world, and so did I, when I discovered I could buy a little plastic crate of Radlers from the kiosk at the open-air swimming pool. A Radler is a shandy, in essence, except that it is pre-mixed, rather than being poured from two different taps, like it normally is in a pub. It literally means a “cyclist,” presumably because an undiluted pint might cause problems on the bike ride home.
I swaggered back with the Radlers to Fabian, my blonde pen-pal who was already taller than my dad. Shandy wasn’t cool in England, but in Germany, it was more than cool. He and his friends said it was “geil,” a word I learnt that summer and used excessively. Even the lads thought so.
Germany became a carnivalesque, topsy-turvy world, for me, where boys drank sweet, lemon-flavoured drinks. It was boys, too, I discovered, who shaved their armpits here, or at least, that was true of teenagers in Dillenburg in the mid-noughties. Apprehensive, but keen to fit in, I acted on this new information on the second night of my trip, and the nicks from my Bic razor stung the next day in the chlorinated pool, and itched for the rest of the week. It is not an experiment I have ever repeated.
But I did carry home a newfound love of shandy. A few years later, I learnt to love bitter in The Barrels, a magnificent pub in Hereford. I soon realised the immense potential of the bitter shandy, which is only lightly sparkling, and has more of a complex taste than either a lager shandy or a pre-mixed German Radler. Shandy and I had a brief hiatus during my first years at university. But in my final year, beer and lemonade forgave me, and welcomed me back with open arms.
After I came back from a year in Italy, many of my friends on shorter courses had finished university already. The received wisdom was that now was the time to get serious, and to save the college bar for special occasions. I am convinced that ignoring that reasoning was my saving grace. Every day during my final exams, I walked down the sticky, plastic steps to the underground bar, and spend £1 on a pint of shandy: a pint, for a pound! My life has never been improved by working after dinner, and at least this way, I could partake in the sweet, cosy atmosphere of a half-full bar before the Big Night Out crowd descended. I asked for my pint to be made weak, mainly lemonade, so there would be zero risk of light-headedness during an exam. Sometimes — but less often than I might have liked — sticking to shandy gave me a competitive edge on the quiz machine.
I now live in London, and still indulge in shandies from time to time. The last in a long line of painful blows delivered to shandy-drinkers here is the increasing use of predatory shandy pricing. Especially in the city’s bad pubs, and now even in some good ones, a pint of shandy costs the same — the same! — as a pint of lager, although lemonade, which makes up half the drink, is far cheaper. This summer, I spent quite a while in a local pub I dislike, for the simple reason that it has air conditioning. The new barman, who was chatty and whom I liked, asked the manager how to put a shandy through the electric till. “Is it just half of one, half of the other?” he asked. In full view of me, and without a modicum of shame, the manager said: “No, we just put it through as a pint.” Silence. “Sorry, mate,” the new barman told me, and I believed that he was.
There is every reason that this should be a minor city-wide scandal, but only an arsehole would order half a lager, half a lemonade, and a separate pint glass. Or would they? I haven’t done it, but if inflation continues at the current rate, I may have to reconsider.
My relationship with shandy now ebbs and flows with the seasons, but most years, usually in summer, I go through a ‘shandy phase.’ My most recent phase started with an ice-cold Peroni Limone that Diya and I bought from a truck on a roundabout, next to the Appian Way in Rome. It reached its zenith a few weeks ago, when I realised that the Polish supermarket on our road, stocked a very, very bitter shandy. It’s rare to find a pre-mixed can in the UK at all, and even rarer for it to have a pleasant, sharp bitterness. Even better, I discovered this on the hottest day of the year. After half an hour in the freezer, there are few things I would rather drink in forty-degree heat.
I have not quite lived a Life in Shandy. But shandy is nonetheless a constant in my life, a thread that ties together both formative moments and perfectly banal ones. ‘Life-changing’ drinks — a good champagne, or a special-occasion whisky — are not always the ones that give us our most memorable sips.
This week I have been reading:
Small Fires by Rebecca May Johnson of Dinner Document, for a second time, because now I can’t stop wondering about all the ways that cooking is not just like thinking: cooking is thinking. And because I have spent much of the past few weeks making various kinds of tomato sauce in London and in Sicily, and tomato sauce is a main character in Rebecca’s book.
London Feeds Itself, edited by Jonathan Nunn of Vittles, and with essays by so many of my favourite authors and thinkers about food: including Rebecca May Johnson, Claudia Roden, Amardeep Singh Dhillon, Ruby Tandoh, and Melek Erdal. I am just scratching the surface.
Lessico famigliare, by Natalia Ginzburg, and some other bits from Ginzburg’s back catalogue. I am struck by something new every time I read this book. It is a slow-burning ‘quiet classic,’ which has acquired new readers in the twenty-first century, now that so many of us are hungry for literature about domestic life. Perhaps English-speaking readers are also more inclined to read Italian writing in translation, in the wake of ‘Ferrante fever,’ although that would not explain Ginzburg’s recent popularity among the Italian public too. I am getting ready to teach Lessico famigliare to undergraduate students in Modern Languages later this year.
Previous issues of Pit Magazine, because I am excited for the forthcoming “Sauce Special,” and am very proud to have an article in it (on Dolmio sauce). You can pre-order it here.