Tag Archives: Patrick deWitt

drink’s everywhere but in me

note: I’m sorry it took me so long to make this post live…it’s something of a relic given what the world went through in 2020, and it was written in April 2020! Enjoy!

zine: Paper and Ink #13: Tales From The Bar Side by various contributors
drink: Gimme Da Loot! (7%, 16 fl oz, can) brewed by Revision Brewing Company (Nevada, USA)
music: Jan Jelinek avec Les Exposures, La nouvelle pauvrété (2003)

This afternoon, after making what can only be called the world’s worst bastardisation of a quesadilla, I had somehow managed to make the perfect cup of tea. I use my Red Hill Brewery stein, used THREE teabags of Madame Flavour’s Melbourne Morning blend, put in the perfect dash of milk, took my sad brunch and fabbo brew upstairs…

…then spilt the whole blasted thing because I put down the stein for a minute. Heart: broken.

As I write this, I’m currently waiting for the review beer to thaw out. It was right at the back of the fridge on my shelf (been hiding it deliberately for matching it up to a zine), so more on that later.

a beer can sits upside down inside a glass, draining very slowly

I chose this particular not necessarily for this specific beer, but because at the moment, no one has ‘tales from the bar’. At least, they shouldn’t in my state (Victoria – the isolation restrictions have been stricter than the national ones). Despite this, there was an outbreak at a healthcare location I frequent during a certain time period, so guess who consented to getting their nose…violated. The COVID test isn’t fun but they did give me my (confirmed negative) result in less than 24 hours.

an empty beer can with an illustration of Lenny from The Simpsons, and to its left, the front cover of a zine with an illustration of people playing pool in a pub

The intro by editor Martin Appleby, given this pandemic-stricken world we’re now living in, sounds like utopia to any alcohol wanker:

As you can probably tell from the title of this issue, the theme is bars and pubs. Specifically dive bars, shitty pubs and back alley boozers. Intended as a celebration of these places and the characters you find in them…

Realistically, it’s only been a month and a half that social isolation has been in place, but it feels like five, honestly. Christ, I miss my pub trivia crew. I didn’t even think I’d get to a place of ‘normal’ socialisation to even have one (I’m awkward and unwell, okay? why do you think I drink…? Don’t answer that!)

back cover of a zine on a blonde wood table - photograph of the front of a bar, with a bartender in white's back visible

The beer is fucking amazing. It’s the colour that hazy NEIPAs (New England India Pale Ales) are supposed to be, and I guess in it freezing, the citrus hops retained their flavour, so so juicy. It smells like a mix of orange – specifically blood orange? – grapefruit* rind and the of the fruit just under the surface. Half of the beer is still frozen in the can, by the way.

handwritten beer tasting notes in purple ink in a pocket-sized notebook on top of a zine

Passed the halfway mark of the zine, and pretty impressed with the entries – there’s a lot of poetry, and some really good short fiction pieces which go in places you weren’t quite expecting. For some reason, I thought this theme would attract a lot of try-hards playing up how drunk they can get, but so far, the seediness in many of the pieces feels authentic. My favourite piece is about a woman who lures attractive young men to her local, same time, same place, every week. The selections do celebrate rather than (pun intended) take the piss out of the dodgy familiars at bars or pubs that perpetually smell of urine and cigarette smoke. The contributors are generally from the US or the UK, and it makes me happy that the gender balance seems to be about 50/50. It’s also great to see some names that aren’t typically Caucasian!

The beer still isn’t melting all that fast, and given that it’s autumn proper, I’m not really surprised.

a beer placed at a tilt, filling the glass it's partially in with beer, next to a kitchen stovetop

Bloody hell, this is like waiting for Godot…I’ve finished reading the zine and my recommendation is check the website and see if there are still copies…or perhaps I just did that and sadly, looks like stock is all gone.

a beer can on an oil heater/radiator in front of a chest of drawers where books and other alcoholic paraphernalia can be seen

I guess the best endorsement I can give the zine is it really makes me miss reading at my local/s (I’ve got two in walking distance!) with a damn good book, and sneaking in a pint…or three. It also reminded me a lot of Patrick deWitt’s novella Ablutions which is a pretty 80s bloky bartender with various addiction issues and dysfunctions.

The remaining bit of the beer eventually melted…into beer-coloured water. It took forever to melt because in this part of the world we’re hitting autumn proper. (please don’t judge me on my thawing method or the messiness of my room.)

I love that the ‘loot’ on the cans are sacks, labelled with the hops used in this beer (Mosaic, Amarillo, Galaxy, and Citra). I’m trying not to go all beer wanker talking about this beer because I’ve been more about the spirits and cheap red, and christ, there are squillions of hop varieties that do all sorts of things to make the beer taste the way it does (self-promo! I found out when researching for the Australian and New Zealand chapter of this book; internationals are super keen for the hops in this region).

Omg, did I totally miss an opportunity to make a Corona beer-Coronavirus joke?! Yes, yes I did. My dopey humour is out-of-practice: must be all that work trying to finish Hilary Mantel’s 900-page finale to her Thomas Cromwell trilogy (she is one of the few authors to win the Man Booker Prize for her previous two) before May starts. I FKN DID IT.

*if you’re on medication that you take regularly, make sure you can have grapefruit and/or its juice if you’re lucky enough to be drinking swanky cocktails in isolation – it can be listed as a contraindication. This beer doesn’t have grapefruit juice in it but worth mentioning because I totally forget and am supposed to avoid it

2017 book and beer chums

While I continue to finish up filling in gaps as hinted at over here, and partially filled here, 2017 book-and-beer matches! I embarrassingly keep a spreadsheet of this sort of thing, because it seems like a good idea when you read, drink and then have to remember or retrace your steps a lot.

 

issue #15 (Feb 2017)

BOOK: Books vs. cigarettes by George Orwell

BEER: Mountain Goat (Melb, AUS) Rare Breed ‘Pulped Fiction’ blood orange IPA

notes: the ‘Romance’ issue, so pairing good lit with good booze seemed pretty romantic to me. Learnt way more than I wanted to about the hygiene in French hospitals during early twentieth-century warfare, as well as a cool (or not, ha, ha, ha…anyway) unit to measure temperature that wasn’t the Kelvin (think it was this one), and Orwell did not have a happy childhood. His experiences at boarding school, and of being a partial scholarship recipient sounded awful – though, perhaps that’s testament to his skill in describing and conveying human behaviour.

issue #16 (Mar 2017)

BOOK: Ablutions by Patrick deWitt

BEER: TWO, gasp! Doctor’s Orders (Sydney, AUS) ‘Fleshwound’ & Brasserie Fantôme (Wallonia, BELG) India red ale.

notes: As of late last year, I just read Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential and feel like this novella is the dive bartender companion in that it describes some of the clientele and professionals in the industry in the late 80s-maybe early 90s. Both books are hilarious, and reading deWitt’s barman narrative makes it hard to ignore speculation on just how intimate he is with their way of life…it’s also a quick read. I’m not sure how on earth I managed to stretch out two good bottles of beer (not exactly small ones either…500mL and 750mL respectively!) to cover my reading period. I gobbled up this book.

issue #17 (Apr 2017)

BOOK: The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham

BEER: Sierra Nevada (USA) ‘Narwhal’ barrel-aged imperial stout

notes: I’d somehow managed to find myself a new sharehouse to live, and completed this B&B way before things started to get awful. Froth ed gave me a bottle of the ‘Narwhal’ and trying to ignore that various beer sirens were singing, I read Wyndham’s classic with it. The book is scarily not as dated as it should feel. One of my favourite memories of growing up in England was watching Chocky, which is based on Wyndham’s book of the same name. Most of his famous titles are on booklists as examples of excellent speculative fiction – which I’m hoping to read more of this year (2018).

issue #18 (May 2017)

BOOK: Difficult Women by Roxane Gay

BEER: SPARKKE (Adelaide, AUS) ginger beer, pilsener, hard lemonade, cider

notes: Had started reading this late for a WMN book club meeting, and due to deadlines and a performance I was rehearsing for, didn’t actually get to read and drink at the same time. At the time, no one knew that I was going into hospital for depression (I went straight after the performance wrapped up, and given you can’t drink booze in hospital, there was no B&B for June).

It wasn’t a good month, but Emily and Clint getting a copy of Froth and the piece about Difficult Women signed by THE AUTHOR got me so excited, I had to get sleepers to properly knock me out that night in hospital (they didn’t know I was in, that’s why it’s so funny. Also first time in my life I’ve nearly puked in excitement!).

I wrote a funny bit of dialogue about how my mother, in unintentional Asian tiger mum mode, completely doused my excitement with a metaphysical wet blanket when I told her about what Em and Clint had done. She is, however, being a Magpies supporter, very proud of my brother driving the hearse for a former footballer who was granted a state funeral around the same time. But seriously, it wasn’t a good time of the year and photos of Roxane even holding Froth…it felt like an amazingly surreal and wonderful thing to happen and cling onto. We all have our s/hero/i/n/e/s! <3

(NB. 1. I don’t want to drive anyone’s hearse, famous or not. It does actually sound quite nerve-wracking & 2. Sparkke have since added TWO beverages to their core range, f*ck yeah! 3. I clearly need to up my game as an Asian daughter)

issue #20 (Jul 2017)

BOOK: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

BEER: 4 Pines (Syd, AUS) cherry coconut brown ale

notes: Another WNM book club selection, which I’d read way after the meeting. It’s been on my to-read list for years, and still haven’t seen its TV adaptation, which is apparently really good as well as quite different from the book. I knew it’d be full-on, so chose a beer to get me through its darkness (it did). Also loved what Clint did with the colour scheme of the woman’s garments.

issue #21 (Aug 2017)

BOOK: The Woman In White by Wilkie Collins

BEER: Bright Brewery (Bright, VIC) ‘Stubborn Russian’ imperial stout

notes: It was so much fun writing this, and getting to hang out in Bright despite the fact that it was actually freezing (one morning the hot water system froze over so it took a while to get it going!). Met some faithful Froth readers, who I again bumped into on New Year’s Eve last year, and keep trying to invent reasons to go back up to Bright. and they do kickarse things like raise awareness of important issues, whilst having fun! James & Jenn were fab hosts, as were their two kittehs!

issue #22 (Sep 2017)

BOOK: Wasted: a story of alcohol, grief, and a death in Brisbane by Elspeth Muir

BEER: Shenanigans Brewing (AUS) ‘Flower Power’ grisette

notes: um, risky choice of book when you write for an alcohol mag, BUT both the beer and the book evoked all those pre-summer feels when the flowers are starting to show, and scents of life become more intense. So, a memoir that deals with the death of a family member, and drinking culture in Australia had to go with a beer that is intensely low ABV-wise. It was also the beginning of a three-month stint in Northcote living with two magical creatives, and a cranky-as-fuck tabby. It was the most happy and productive period of my life I’ve had in a reeeeeeeeeeally long time. I love you Danni & Lolly (and Maddy-cat).

issue #23 (Oct 2017)

BOOK: A Horse Walks Into A Bar by David Grossman (translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen)

BEER: Coconspirators Brewing (Melb, AUS) ‘The Bookie’ pale ale

notes: second month of the Northcote sublet, and I found myself starting to go on dates. I met one gorgeous person a while back who didn’t at all like me, and he was mega into film. I’m hopeless with films, but I recall his pretending to sound like a gangster (no, not like an African one that supposedly terrorises Melbourne, whatevs, stupid fucking out-of-touch-with-the-twenty-first-century federal government), and what a hoot this book and beer were! Clint also designs for this Melb-based brewery, who are doing some delish fabbo things. Fond memories!

issue #24 (Nov 2017)

BOOK: A Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

BEER: Two Birds’ Brewing (Melb, AUS) ‘Passion Victim’ summer ale

notes: my last month in Northcote, and my housie Danni was such a sweetie, helping me take profesh photo where the month’s book and empty beer cans are popping out of a showbag!* I cackled out loud reading the book, and chose the beer because summer was coming, and it had Galaxy hops! It also reminded me of how much I miss the sciences. Adams clearly revels in knowledge, in a not-talk-down-to-others kind of way, but in a way that can’t help but infect you with a passion (har har) for the intersections of several disciplines.

*from a Froth launch

issue #25 (Dec 2017-Jan 2018)

BOOK: It’s Raining in Mango by Thea Astley

BEER: Sailors’ Grave (Orbost, AUS) peach melba pavlova cream sour

notes: having found myself in a somewhat oppressive living sitch, I had to lock myself in my room for a day to even read this book, which I totally chose on a whim but is wonderful – why isn’t it better known?! The reviewing beer bit was much easier, though also tricky given I was rehearsing like crazy for a performance. I got asked to leave that sharehouse whilst on a date, sigh. That sucked pretty hardcore. I’m thankfully still friends with the other housemate who is a wonderful human (them and their partner very nearly had to deal with my embarrassed tearful arse after going home from said date).

It was…a character-building year. Got my heart broken a few times, and made some really good, close friends. Hopefully 2018 will mean not having to be hospitalised, and not missing contributing to a single issue of Froth! I might go back and edit these later to reflect the respective themes of each issue (was lax with that, whoops) – this post is already longer than I would’ve preferred.