Previously: 40 Years in Beer (Book II) Part 50: Papazian goes AWOL as we contest AB’s aggression against Budvar.
Around the same time in 1994 that I began risking charges of treason and apostasy by publicly questioning Charlie Papazian, inquiring whether Papazian had any intention of at least pretending to be an actual leader (and, even 30 years later, my own intention is to never let him forget his evasiveness), a book called Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants came to my attention.
Substitute “mass-produced American low-calorie ‘light’ lagers” for “goods” in this passage from the book, and you’ll understand why I was so enthralled.
Goods are being produced for ever-faster consumption in ever-greater quantities. They lose in “substance or content,” but that is replaced by the external “packaging.” The actual quality, for instance, the taste of a thing, no longer counts, but rather what would have to be called the illusion or image of the thing is what matters. Things no longer speak for themselves. From now on, advertisements define what a thing is. Ads create a world of illusions, within which things are assigned their new place, their new meaning, and the new rituals that surround them. The advertisement for a given product encompasses not only its “promotion,” but also “recruitment” and “solicitation,” and in the broad sense the whole culture industry (is) part of this advertising and publicity.
The book’s author was Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1941 – 2023), who was not a Groucho Marx character from Duck Soup, but a very real German-born cultural historian operating from “the perch of an adroit and amiable Marxist sociology,” as Publishers Weekly once phrased it.
Tastes of Paradise dates to 1980 in the original German, and in 2024 I’m still consulting it with frequency. It is neither long nor “heavy,” and boasts thoughtful essays on coffee, chocolate, tea, tobacco, hashish, opium and alcoholic beverages. Taken together, these have the effect of guiding readers from the Middle Ages through contemporary times, with the focal point being sociology, not pharmacology.
Schivelbusch depicts beer as a pre-industrial, communal and organic beverage, reflecting the pastoral ethos of the countryside, and inexorably grounded by nature’s limitations on the maximum alcoholic strength likely to be attained through simple, traditional techniques of fermentation.
Distillation was a concept brought to Europe by the learned Arabs, who used the process in chemical experiments, also providing a means of concentrating the strength of alcohol as...Read more
