In defence of smug, sneering, pretentious beer snobbery

The real affectation is "performative philistinism", the ostentatious slagging off of nice things

I have never had the slightest interest in football.

I have made a few half-hearted attempts to get into it, but to no avail. I simply cannot concentrate on a football match for longer than a few minutes. My mind wanders off to anything and everything but football.

Nonetheless: I am not baffled by the fact that millions of people love football so passionately. I get it, at some level. I will almost certainly never be able to experience that enthusiasm myself, but I get why somebody would.

I am not talking about the obvious here, which is the community spirit and the bonding over football. I am talking about something else.

It is a common cliché among footballsceptics to say that football is just 22 men chasing after a round piece of leather. It is supposed to be a witty observation, but it completely misses the point. If, like me, you are not interested in football, and you know nothing about it, then of course, 22 men chasing after a round piece of leather is all you will ever see. But a big part of what makes a football fan a football fan is precisely the fact that they see so much more than that.

When a football fan watches a game, they see a million things that are invisible to me. Unlike me, they can tell the difference between good performance and bad performance. Unlike me, they can tell the difference between different styles of playing. They know how a team’s or an individual player’s current performance or playing style compares to their past performance or past playing style. They have expectations about how a team or an individual player is going to behave. They feel vindicated when that expectation is confirmed, and they feel surprised when it is not.

A football fan does not just enjoy watching football. They also enjoy talking about football. They have opinions about football, and they enjoy sharing them with the world. One football manager (I can’t remember who) once complained about the fact that everyone and their uncle seems to have an opinion about how he, the manager, should be doing his job. That must be frustrating for him, but for the fans, it is part of the appeal.

Football, like most things in life, becomes more enjoyable the more you know about it. I don't like the term "acquired taste", because it implies that these are a separate category of tastes, which are somehow different from the un-acquired ones. It is more accurate to say that tastes are characterised by varying degrees of "acquiredness". You may like a catchy pop tune the first time you hear it, but you will like it even better once you've heard it a couple of times. A Netflix series may have you hooked after the first episode, but you will like it even more when you are a few episodes in, and have a better grasp of what is going on. And so on.

At least, this is true on an other-things-equal basis. There may be factors working in the opposite direction. As you learn more about a subject, you may get bored with it, you may get saturated with it, or you may notice flaws in it that you did not previously notice. For example, I used to know a chef who could barely enjoy food anymore, because he had such high standards, he noticed imperfections that I was completely oblivious to. Maybe there's a sweet spot somewhere, where you can appreciate quality food, but where you can still enjoy Burger King and pub grub too.

But the point still stands that at least up to a point, and unless something else gets in the way, knowing more about X makes X more enjoyable. You won’t really enjoy a city tour if you just rush through it, looking neither to your left nor to your right. You need to know a little bit about the place, and pay some attention to your surroundings. There are many styles of music that you won’t really enjoy until you train your ear a little, because at first, it all sounds the same. I grew up in a wine-growing region, and I’ve always liked wine, but I only became a wine lover in my late 20s, when I decided to read up on it a bit, and learn some basics.

We can’t “choose” to be interested in something. I can’t make myself interested in football: there is no “interest button” that I can switch on and off. But at the margin, we can nudge ourselves. We can choose to give unfamiliar things an honest try, even if they don’t immediately appeal. We can choose to pay some attention. We can choose to listen when someone explains things. We can remind ourselves that “interest” is something which develops, not something which is there right from the start.

What makes pretentious things “pretentious”?

So far, so obvious.

In some areas of life, though, being interested in a subject, knowing things about it, and enjoying talking about it, is considered "pretentious". People will suspect that you don't actually enjoy the thing you claim to enjoy. It's an affectation. You're just doing this to show off. Or maybe you do enjoy it a little bit, but not nearly as much as you enjoy bragging about it. You wouldn't do this if you lived alone on a lonely island.

Our egalitarian culture stigmatises pretentiousness. But why are some things considered "pretentious", and others not? The question is not as dumb as it sounds. We all know what's pretentious and what isn't when we see it, but could you explain it to someone who is completely unfamiliar with the concept?

Nobody would describe a knowledgeable, opinionated football fan as a "football snob". Nobody would describe football fandom as "an affectation". Nobody would doubt the sincerity of the enthusiasm of a football fan. We know that they would absolutely watch football on a lonely island (provided they had a device, and could somehow get a signal there). They might even scream "Goal!" at the palm trees, knowing full well that nobody can hear them. But we are not so generous with someone who claims to enjoy operas, classical music, art or obscure indie music. Why?

In order to be considered pretentious, something has to be considered either high-brow, or hip. I realise that that’s not much of an explanation, because it just raises the question: what makes high-brow things high-brow, and what makes hip things hip? But this isn’t a philosophy blog. For now, let’s just go with that.

Related to the above, things can only be pretentious if there is a non-trivial chance that someone will be impressed by it. If it is obvious that nobody will be impressed, impressing people cannot be part of your intention, and the thing you are doing cannot be pretentious.

Pretentiousness is time-specific in place-specific. In Britain, it is considered pretentious to pronounce a foreign word correctly. This is because Brits are so comically useless at foreign languages. They think getting the pronunciation of a foreign word right is a big deal; they think that you must be putting a lot of effort into this, and they think that someone might be impressed by it. From which they deduce that that must be the reason why you’re doing it. In contrast, where I come from, absolutely nobody will be impressed if you can pronounce a French or an Italian word correctly. Since nobody thinks that this is impressive, nobody will think that you’re trying to impress them. That possibility won’t even cross people’s minds. So in that context, pronouncing a foreign word correctly cannot be pretentious. In a British context, it can be.

(This context-specificity can lead to misunderstandings. I know someone who gets annoyed every time I pronounce “entrepreneur” in a French way, because he is convinced that this is an affectation, and that I am just doing this to show off. The truth is that I encountered the word “entrepreneur” in written English long before I ever heard a native English speaker say it out loud, and before I realised that native English speakers brutally anglicise foreign loanwords. In my mind, it has always been a French-pronounced word, and it would feel completely unnatural to me to start anglicising my pronunciation of it now.

I will never convince him of that. He is, however, completely fine with the fact that I pronounce German loanwords in a German way. Nobody is going to be impressed by the fact that a native German speaker can pronounce German words correctly, so it cannot be my intention to impress people. When you have no intention to impress, your behaviour cannot be pretentious.)

Perceptions of what is pretentious and what is not can also change over time. Which, after an intro of more than 1400 words, finally brings us to the actual topic of this article: the concept of the pretentious beer snob.

Pretentious beer snobbery

If it’s not clear what I’m talking about, let’s start with a quote from the ever-annoying Brendan O’Neill, whose brand of prolier-than-thou aggro-egalitarianism makes him a recurring villain of this Substack:

“I will never forgive the hip for what they’ve done to beer. They’ve spiked this most democratic drink with snobbery. The craft-beer movement, manned by middle-class pseudo-blokes who would rather go to Raqqa than step foot in a Wetherspoon’s, has brought the fussiness of the wine-sipper into the unfussy world of the beer-drinker.

Beer snobs are easy to spot. […] They will convulse if you say, ‘Let’s have a Bud.’ […]

There’s been an explosion in wackily named craft beers. Arrogant Bastard Ale, anyone? [Yes, please! – KN] A bottle of Hoptimus Prime? [Absolutely, and completely unironically.] […]

They really do sip their beer. [You bet.] […]

The basic combo of starch, yeast and hops that kept humans happy for centuries isn’t enough for the beer snob. His beer has to be fruit-flavoured or nutty. There’s a Doughnut Chocolate, Banana and Peanut Butter Ale. [Good.] Not making this up. Imagine ordering such a poncy concoction in a normal pub — your face would be as likely as your Instagram feed to be decorated with a bottle. [Ooooh, you’re hard!] […]

[T]he craft-beer irritant really wants to distinguish himself from Them: ‘ordinary people’ who eat at Maccy D’s, shop at Primark and — brace yourselves — drink Stella Artois. That Stella is referred to as ‘wife beater’ tells you all you need to know about beer snobbery […]

[T]hese weirdly consumerist critics of consumer society seek […] exclusivity, the feeling of belonging to a switched-on gang who, unlike the rest of us, can resist the lure of the chain pub and its cheap pish. To drink Maple Bacon Coffee Porter (seriously) is to say: ‘I’m better than you.’ [Well… what if I am better than you, Brendan?]

I hate this snootiness because beer is the everyman drink”.

Similarly, on his Uncommon Discourse blog, the writer Chris Gaffney published a piece with the self-explanatory title Why Craft Beer Snobs Are The Worst:

“Today’s beer drinkers are obnoxiously pretentious. […]

We went from throwing darts and playing pool to having intellectual conversations about our beer’s yeastiness […]

My rule of thumb is to instantly walk away from a conversation if I hear the words barley, hops, or yeast. It’s not a conversation. It is just a performance […]

Beer is just a drink. Drink it.”

Meanwhile, Thrillist magazine ran an article with the title The 19 Types of Beer Snobs, Ranked by Obnoxiousness. (I can’t quite decide which of those types I am. Or maybe I can, and this is just another pretentious affectation: look at me, I’m so SPECIAL! I don’t fit into your predefined categories! Bet you’ve never debated someone like me before!)

A novel concept

The first thing to note about the concept of the pretentious beer snob is how novel it is. The oldest articles on the subject I have found are from 2014. Granted, there is always a bit of a time lag between the emergence of a new social concept, and the first time somebody puts it into writing. But it’s fair to say that if you could travel a decade and a half back in time, and describe that concept to people then, it would not make sense to anyone. People would tell you that beer cannot be pretentious. You can be no more a "beer snob" than you can be a sausage roll snob or a fish fingers snob. Wine can be pretentious, expensive whiskeys can be, upmarket cocktails can be, but not beer. At most, there can be small variations in degree, with some beers being a bit more upmarket than others.

This is not because there were no beer connoisseurs in Britain before the early 2010s. It is not that before then, everyone just gulped down their Fosters, and nobody ever used words like “hoppy”, “floral” or “nutty”. Far from it. The Campaign for Real Ale (originally called the Campaign for the Revitalisation of Real Ale) has been around since 1971. Their magazine What’s Brewing? dates back to 1972, their annual Good Beer Guide to 1974, and the predecessor of what is now the Great British Beer Festival to 1975. In the late 2000s, CAMRA had 100,000 card-carrying members, and to that number, we have to add the fellow-travellers.

CAMRA types display almost all the behaviours that irritate the critics of beer snobbery. They are very fussy about their beer choices; they are judgemental about other people’s beer choices; they sip their beers; and they have an extensive vocabulary to describe its taste.

So why were they not considered beer snobs? Why did nobody suspect that the behaviour of CAMRA types was just a pretentious affectation, and that when nobody is watching, they would secretly drink Carling?

I’ve already given the answer. As mentioned, things can only be pretentious if they are considered either high-brow, or hip. Before the early 2010s, being a beer geek was neither. It was associated with CAMRA types, and while CAMRA is a fine organisation, even their biggest fans would not describe them as hip or trendy.

Related to that, things can only be pretentious if there is a non-trivial chance that somebody will be impressed by them, and before the early 2010s, absolutely nobody would have been impressed by the fact that you know things about beer. You might as well have tried to impress people by talking about your stamp collection, or your model railways. Again, if there is no chance that somebody will be impressed, impressing people cannot be your objective, and thus, your behaviour cannot be pretentious.

The big change of the early 2010s was the hipsterisation of beer geekery. It suddenly became hip to drink the right beers, to know things about them, and to have the vocabulary to describe its taste. Once something is hip, it can be pretentious. If hipsters had got into collecting stamps or building model railways instead, those hobbies would be considered pretentious today. "There's that annoying stamp snob again, bragging about his hip stamp collection. It's such an affectation! Bet he secretly hates stamps. He's just doing to show how cool he is. Oooh, look at me, with my edgy Twopenny Blue stamp!"

The real affectation: performative philistinism

The backlash against beer snobbery is not a standalone phenomenon. It is a subcategory of a much broader phenomenon, which has been variously described as "reverse-snobbery", "performative philistinism", “aggressive peopleism” or “conspicuous Gammonism” (the latter two, admittedly, only by myself). You may not have come across any labels for it, but you have definitely come across the behaviour. You have seen people performatively slag off things that some might consider a little bit fancy (or, sin of sins, “middle-class”), with the intention of presenting themselves as “laddish”, “blokeish”, down-to-earth types who are in touch with “real people”.

Maybe that behaviour is not new, but I did not really notice it until the post-Brexit Culture War, the political realignment, and the politicisation of cultural preferences.

Substacker and author Ed West talks about a “tendency for right-wing politicians to dislike nice things, because they’re associated with the Radio 4 class.”

Niall Gooch laments:

"You can be a non-liberal and still like nice things. Disagreeing with the Guardian/BBC Industrial Complex doesn't mean you have to pretend to only like Stella, Big Macs and football."

(Gooch uses “liberal” in the American sense, i.e. “left-wing”.)

Charlie Peters adds:

“Still stunned by the amount of inverted snobbery among rightwing commentators since Brexit. So many pretending to love crap things in order to be retweeted by anonymous boomers. All while enjoying middle-class niceties. Baffling.”

Or to quote myself, from August 2020:

“Aggressive Peopleism is when you pretend you only eat beans on toast, and find everything else posh and pretentious.”

A great example of the genre would be Richard Tice, the deputy leader of Reform UK, who tweeted that “Reform is the real party of workers, who’ve been abandoned by “cafe latte” Labour”. It is a great example for two reasons. Firstly, Richard Tice is very obviously not someone who only eats Greggs sausage rolls, and drinks Carling. So this is very clearly an act, and not a convincing one. Secondly, it does not even work on its own terms, because the idea that latte macchiato is “fancy” is at least two decades out of date. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long for someone to respond with a photo of a Reform party stand, where party activists were drinking what appeared to be a latte macchiato.

The irony is that slagging off presumed middle-class or hipster affectations has itself become an affectation. More, the anti-affectation affectation is far more of an affectation than the original affectation it defines itself against. How often do you see Guardian or Independent readers tweet about their great taste in craft beer, and their disdain for Stella drinkers? Not very often. They may well think that way, sure, and they may well say it in private, but they don’t shout about it on public platforms, in the way people on the political Right shout about their disdain for consumer habits they associate with Guardian or Independent readers.

Related to that, what do you think is more common: a Guardian/Independent reader boasting about their great taste in craft beer, and then secretly downing a can of Fosters? Or a right-wing culture warrior slagging off “fancy” foreign food, and then going to a nice restaurant, consuming something suspiciously similar to the thing they were slagging off the other day? It is quite obviously the latter. I know a fair few right-wing Culture Warriors. I will not name anyone, and I do not keep a file on other people’s eating and drinking habits. But I will say that I know for a fact that these people’s actual consumer habits often do not match the “laddish” image they try to project in public. They will be at a wine tasting, tweeting about how they are having a few cans of Carling with the lads.

Hating craft beer, in particular, is very clearly an affectation. When you say “I hate craft beer”, what you really want to say is “I’m a blokeish, laddish, realpeopley kind of guy who voted Brexit; I’m not into any of that effete, poncey-fancy Islington Glastonbury Channel 4 Bluesky Remoaner crap.”

How can I be so sure of that? Can I read these people’s minds?

No, but I can spot obvious inconsistencies. “Craft beer” is not a style. It’s a term that can encompass literally any style of beer, so unless you hate beer in general, you cannot hate all of them. You can hate grapefruity IPAs; you can hate sours; you can hate fruit-infused stouts, and you can hate smoky porters. If you do, then yes, you will hate many craft beers. But even if the only style you like is light lagers, there are craft versions of that, too.

Claiming to hate craft beer is an act: a reverse-pretentious affectation.

What the hipsters get right

Don’t get me wrong: I am second to none in my contempt for the Guardian and the Independent, and for people who read these papers unironically. I have been relentlessly criticising these publications for as long as I have had a public platform. For a while, I even used to write for the Independent, where I went out of my way to let its readers know how much I despise them. (Judging from the comments section, they got the message.) But the problem with these people is not their taste in holiday destinations, music, food or drink. Ed West nails it when he says:

“Urban liberals tend to have better tastes the closer the end result impacts on them, which is why their taste in politics is terrible and their taste in coffee, food and beer is very good.”

(West also uses “liberal” in the American sense: he means “left-wing”.)

That’s true of urban leftists in general, and it is especially true of hipsters, who are the vanguard of the urban leftists. Hipsters are annoying, but they generally have good taste, if and insofar as their choices directly affect them personally. If you order a pint of Tzatziki Sour, a pint of Tzatziki Sour is exactly what you will get, with a likelihood close to 1. If you like that pint, the person who gets to enjoy it is you. If you secretly hate it, and would secretly rather have a Carling instead, the person who will suffer in silence for the next 20 minutes is also you. Political preferences are the exact opposite of this. You can loudly express your support for Marxism and socialism while enjoying all the spoils of a capitalist economy. Individually, hardly anyone has a discernible impact on political outcomes, so at the individual level, there is no penalty for advocating idiotic ideas, and no reward for advocating sensible ones. This is why it is not surprising that in their personal lives, socialists are often shrewd entrepreneurs. (By the way, I just pronounced that word in a French way, in my mind. Because I’m better than you.) Nor is it surprising that hipsters have good taste.

On an anecdotal note: I moved to Stoke Newington in 2008, when the area was already heavily hipsterised, but not yet what you would call “gentrified”. (Meaning, it was, by London standards, not expensive – although I realise that “by London standards” is doing some heavy lifting here.) Over the course of the five years I lived there, I could see in real time how the area was improving, due to hipster demand. The beer got better. The pubs got better. The wine got better. Nice restaurants were opening up, alongside nice coffee shops and bakeries. Yes, the leftie political antics were a bit annoying, and I was quite aware that in political terms, I did not fit in at all. But that didn’t bother me that much, because at the time, British hipsterism was still relatively apolitical: it had a vague leftish vibe, but that was about it. It was only in 2015, when hipsterism turned into Corbynmania, that the hipsters got hyper-politicised. Had I still lived in Stoke Newington then, I would probably have started to hate it. But by then, I had already moved out, and I will not let that possible counterfactual retroactively ruin my (perhaps slightly romanticised) memory of Stokey.

Stoke Newington is no outlier. A few years ago, I went to a hipster craft beer pub somewhere in East London, in what must have been an old industrial estate of some sort. There is not much you can do with a place like that except completely redevelop it, which they were probably doing, but this takes ages, and is very expensive. In the meantime, the place would have been a complete dump. But it wasn’t. It was bustling, and it had great beer. Because of the hipsters.

Or just the other week, I went to a mildly hipsterish al fresco pub on the roof of an old car park, surrounded by grey tower blocks. The place would have looked absolutely grim otherwise, verging on dystopian. It still kind of did, but such is the hipster aesthetic: it makes objectively ugly and depressing surroundings look stylish. Even hipster comedy can be good, as long as it avoids the political.

I’ll mention one more hipster pub, where I went with a colleague a few years ago. When I said something positive about the place, he replied: “You do realise that every single person in this pub voted Corbyn at the last election, right? You do realise that if they knew where we work, they would kick us out. I bet several people here know you from Twitter, and hate you.”

He was probably right. But that is not an argument for boycotting hipster consumer culture. It is an argument for free-riding on it.

Good beer as reparation payments from the hipsters

Since its politicisiation about ten years ago, hipsterism has been an extremely negative force for Britain. They have forced a series of idiotic political movements and ideologies on the country. Momentum. Extinction Rebellion. Black Lives Matter. Just Stop Oil. The gender movement. Given the huge cost of hipsterism, the least they can do for the rest of us is use their cultural muscle to improve our beer, our wine selection, our pubs and our restaurants. We could think of this is a form of reparations payment, a partial compensation for the fact that we constantly have to endure their political idiocies.

If you reject good beer and good food because you associate them with people you hate, you are depriving yourself of that partial compensation they offer you – but you still have to endure the full gamut of hipster follies. That is the worst of all worlds: the full cost of hipsterism without any of its benefits.

I don’t dispute that craft beer snobbery can be a bit of an affectation. I don’t dispute that it can be about distinction, and about showing off. I just think that the benefits massively outweigh the costs.

As mentioned, there were already lots of beer connoisseurs in Britain before the 2010s, when it was not yet considered cool. Those beer connoisseurs had some influence on the beer market, but it was not transformative. Making it cool to be into good beers gave it an extra impetus. It gave people an additional inducement to try beers they might not otherwise have tried. That is the power of hipsters: they can make things cool. They can make other people want to imitate them. Non-hip beer connoisseurs just don’t have that power. They couldn’t have made the beer revolution happen on their own.

When demand for good beer goes up, brewers will supply more of it. This is true irrespective of what causes that increase in demand. The market doesn’t know whether it is caused by an increase in the number of beer connoisseurs who genuinely appreciate it, or whether it is because of hipsters who just want to do the cool thing. The result is the same either way: more good beer. A bit of pretentiousness is a small price to pay for that.

How to ruin craft beer for the hipsters

Still not convinced? Then let me try this. What does the average hipster hate more than anything? Why, that’s obvious: it’s when un-hip people start adopting their habits, and thereby erode the reliability of the hipness signals. When only hip people do X, X reliably signals hipness, but when everyone starts doing X, it no longer does. Hipness is what economists call a “positional good”. It’s about distinction and differentiation. We cannot all be hip.

I’m old enough to (vaguely) remember how, after the commercial breakthrough of Nirvana in the early 1990s, “being alternative” went mainstream. Except, that is, of course, a contradiction in terms. Once “being alternative” is part of the mainstream, it is by definition no longer alternative. Because “being alternative”, like “being hip” is a positional good. We cannot all be alternative. I remember how the earlier adopters of alternative culture were absolutely furious about this. Suddenly, all the uncool kids looked just like them! Under those conditions, how do you signal that you’re one of the cool ones? You’ve adopted the Kurt Cobain look to distinguish yourself from the others, and now all of a sudden, your school is full of Kurt Cobain clones!

There have been many such cases. In their book The Rebel Sell: How The Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (2004), Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter show how various waves of “counterculture” went mainstream, and thereby ceased to be a counterculture. They also show how this always led to great anguish among the early adopters.

According to Brendan’s theory, “the craft-beer irritant really wants to distinguish himself from Them: ‘ordinary people’”. If that’s so – there’s an extremely easy way to ruin it for them: Brendan’s heroes, the sainted Ordinary People (peace be upon them), need to start drinking craft beer. Make it mainstream! Make it un-hip! MAKE IT CRINGE!!

To be clear, I personally don’t think the hipsters would be all that bothered about that. But then, I’m not a Brendanite: I don’t believe that everything that happens in the world happens because someone, somewhere, is sneering at ordinary people. But if you think that craft beer is predominantly a hipster affectation, you should support its mainstreamisation.

Which is, of course, already happening. Today, Camden Town Brewery, Beavertown Brewery and BrewDog are to brewing what Nirvana were to grunge music in 1993. Absolutely nobody would think that there is anything niche or avant-gardist about them. They are now as mainstream as it gets. People who are new to the beer scene may not even know that they all started as small craft breweries in the late 2000s or early 2010s.

At the other end of the spectrum, large, long-established breweries have launched beer styles that, until quite recently, one would have associated with small craft beer breweries. Greene King are a multi-million-pound operation which has been around for over 200 years. But their Level Head IPA, their Hazy Day IPA and their Flint Eye lager are clearly not something they would have brewed in, say, 2010. Maybe they’re just brewing those beers to confuse Brendan.

It’s a similar story on the pub side of things. Apart from hyper-specialised craft beer pubs, which base their brand identity almost solely on their beer selection, the pubs with the best craft beer selection in Britain are Wetherspoons. This is not even a revolutionary novelty. Wetherspoons pubs have had good beer selections for as long as I’ve been aware of them, and all they’ve done is upgrade them further over the years.

The idea that you have craft beers for the hipsters on the one hand, and mainstream beers for ordinary people on the other hand, is already out of date today. If present trends continue, it will soon seem positively quaint.

Conclusion

You can enjoy beer without being a beer connoisseur. But as with many things in life, by knowing a bit more about it, you are adding extra layers to your enjoyment.

Still, beer connoisseur culture has its critics. Some believe that beer should be a simple pleasure, and that one shouldn’t make a fuss about it. Stop being precious about whether you want this beer or that beer; stop waffling about Hallertau hops; stop scribbling tasting notes; and stop swirling it around in your glass. Just drink it, and shut up.

According to that logic, though – why have opinions on anything? Why pay attention to anything? Why know anything about anything? Isn’t that “being fussy”? Isn’t that “being precious”?

Imagine applying this attitude to other areas of life:

“Stop commenting on the performance of this football player or that football player. Stop arguing about whether it was the striker’s fault that the team lost, or whether the football manager needs to be sacked. Football should be a simple pleasure! Just watch it, and shut up.”

“Stop listening to the tour guide’s pretentious waffle about Bath’s Roman history. Don’t even go on a tour in the first place. A city trip should be a simple pleasure! Just rush through it, and shut up.”

“Why do you need to know anything about how your favourite band was formed, or about the dynamic between the singer and the lead guitarist? Music should be a simple pleasure! Just listen to it, and shut up.”

What a stupid attitude that is. It’s great to know stuff about stuff! It’s great to be fussy! It’s great to develop interests, and it’s even better to turn them into obsessions.

Beer is as suitable for this as anything. In hindsight – it was never justifiable that we treated beer and wine so differently in this regard. Wine buffs get away with being fussy and precious. (Although I’m sure there’s a Brendan article somewhere which says that drinking any wine other than Blue Nun, or having words other than “red” and “white” to describe it, is really just a form of Sneering At Ordinary People.) Beer buffs should too. Like wine, beer has a lot of history, variety, depth and complexity. It can be a simple pleasure, but it can also be so much more than that.

Beer lovers need to overcome their fear of being labelled “pretentious”, “fancy”, or “poncey”. We need to break free from the cult of ordinariness.

I mentioned above how latte macchiato, which was once considered fancy and pretentious, is now a completely ordinary drink, which you can get on any high street. This trajectory is not the exception, but the norm. At the time of writing, my fridge is stuffed with Mediterranean-style tapas-like dishes: Halkidi olives, Nocarella olives, Piri Piri olives, red pepper houmous, garlic prawns, Serrano ham, Prosciutto ham, anchovy fillets and cream-filled peppers, etc. Where have I got all this pretentious fancy-poncey stuff from? Waitrose? Bayley & Sage? Some independent posh delicatessen store, with an Italian name that I pronounce correctly to show that I’m better than you? No – it’s all from Lidl. (Which I pronounce “Leedle”, by the way, not “Liddle”.) Lidl sometimes has nice craft beers too, although it's variable.

New consumption habits are rarely adopted by everyone all at once. They will, at first, only be adopted by a minority who are more open to new experiences. At that stage, they will be seen as somewhat “fancy”, an effect which wears off over time as more and more people adopt them.

Socialist commentators, who see themselves as the voice of the working class, are often disappointed when actual working-class people turn out to be unreliable allies. They too often side with the class enemy, from East German workers abandoning their workers’ paradise for the West, to British “Red Wall” voters preferring the comically posh Boris Johnson to the People’s Prime Minister Jeremy Corbyn in 2019. It is often hilarious to watch how Leftists try to explain this without sounding elitist.

Something similar happens at the opposite end of the spectrum as well, although in the cultural rather than the economic sphere. Right-wing or Right-coded commentators see themselves as the cultural voice of the working class, defending ordinary things against the sneering of the metropolitan elites. Yet actual working-class people, far from limiting themselves to beans on toast and Greggs sausage rolls, are often not at all averse to adopting “poncey” middle-class consumer habits.

I just had a quick look at Untappd, to see where people consume the specific beers that Brendan is whining about. Yes, some of that beer consumption still happens in hip craft beer pubs, with names that would give Brendan an aneurysm. But it has also spread far beyond those. For Arrogant Bastard Ale, one of the most recent entries is from a football stadium, and another one is from a decidedly un-fancy looking pub in Colchester, Essex. For Maple Bacon Coffee Porter, I'm getting what seems to be some sort of video games arcade in Florida, and a sports bar in the Netherlands. I’ve already mentioned Wetherspoons’ great craft beer selection. In the Spring 2022 edition of Wetherspoons News, they single out Hoptimus Prime, in the Tasting Notes section. (TASTING NOTES?!? Is Tim Martin SNEERING at us?!?)

It says:

"This pale golden seasonal ale makes a welcome return especially for this Wetherspoon real ale festival. The unique flavour of this beer transforms as its ingredients combine, resulting in a refreshing full-bodied beer with rich malt and fruity hop flavours."

The ungrateful bastards have betrayed you, Brendan. After everything you've done for them.

Cry into your pint of Stella.