At the end of the day, facts are facts.
- 2 + 2 = 4.
- Dublin IS the capital of Ireland, not Tipperary.
- Green beer, while tragic, is an entirely correctable error.
Last year for St. Patrick’s Day, I decided to renew my perennial campaign against the practice of coloring beer green, which I’ve been doing quite literally for decades. Time was when aspiring beer snobs usually agreed with me, but in 2023, you’d have thought I had suggested clubbing baby seals.
Snobbery ain’t what it used to be, and you could have knocked me over with a Donegal feather. It never dawned on me, not even once, that craft brewers anywhere would do such a thing to their beer, or that our vicinity’s most knowledgeable craft beer fans would countenance such practices.
Shame on me, I suppose. Apparently in my dotage I have not kept up with the awesomeness of those green beers as featured in Instagram selfies. Twenty years ago the vanguard would have been heaping derision on acts of desecration; now anything goes, and having paused to mull it, perhaps the widespread acceptance of green beer even by knowledgeable beer drinkers makes perfect sense.
After all, is a simple blue-dyed golden ale brewed locally that much different than a vintage white pastry sour saison stout brewed with spices used by the Inuit to cure whale blubber jerky, then filtered through salty pebbles from the Yucatan?
Actually, it is different. Given that the artificial coloring contributes nothing to the flavor, the golden ale genuinely is the more authentic representation of “beer.”.
Speaking personally, the argument “but it’s fun and our customers demand it” never carried much weight with me. My job was to educate customers into learning what they want, not pandering to them. Fun lies in learning. It’s not fun to be dull.
Granted, perhaps this goal has become a fool’s errand at a time when St. Paddy’s Day seems to have become yet another victim of dress-up, cosplay-pretend celebration, with people stumbling around dressed like the Lucky Charms cereal leprechaun, chugging green beer and Irish Car Bomb drinks alongside platters of corned beef and cabbage, with not one of these creations having anything remotely to do with Ireland or being Irish.
It’s been a year, and here we go again. Today at Food & Dining Magazine, I explain why I’m doubling down (not dumbing down) in opposition to green-dyed beer: Erin Go Blagh 2024, a much needed St. Paddy’s Day...Read more
