{"id":2807,"date":"2010-09-02T18:22:13","date_gmt":"2010-09-02T22:22:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/?p=2807"},"modified":"2010-09-02T18:33:39","modified_gmt":"2010-09-02T22:33:39","slug":"what-beer-drinking-can-teach-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/2010\/09\/what-beer-drinking-can-teach-you\/","title":{"rendered":"What Beer Drinking Can Teach You!"},"content":{"rendered":"

In England, I have discovered beer to be an appropriate beverage for any time, place, or person. It can be a drink of the everyman and a drink of the aristocrat, a refreshing drink for the conservative manual worker or the Avant-garde intellectual. In my first week in London, I have had beer in so many different contexts that I am now convinced of this fact.<\/p>\n

At the Notting Hill Carnival, London\u2019s yearly Afro-Caribbean festival, Red Stripe (a popular Jamaican beer) was the name of the game. Jamaica, similar to former British colonies across the Caribbean, contributed a lot to British culture, including its own style of Britain\u2019s favorite beverage. It seems that where the British once had power, breweries became an essential craft. In this way, the exportation of beer and the making of international beer culture appears to have colonialism to thank.<\/p>\n

Colonialism wasn\u2019t that only \u201cism\u201d that beer has exposed me to this week. The British Museum, one of the world\u2019s most important cultural institutions, has been a place of study for intellectuals since its creation at the end of the 18th<\/sup> century. When these intellectuals were not studying however, I have read that many of them would go across the street from the museum to the Museum Tavern for a pint. After a few intellectually stimulating hours in the museum, we made our way across the street to the tavern. The d\u00e9cor was similar to all other pubs we had visited but this one seemed a bit more authentically 19th<\/sup> century. This feeling was only enhanced by a pint of very delicious ale called \u201cOld Peculiar.\u201d What really struck me about the drinking in this particular pub was knowing that somewhere in that very room Lenin and Trotsky had sat and contemplated ways to liberate the peasants of Russia, or that Marx had sat with a pint after the long days spent writing Das Kapital across the street. Just as beer played a part in British imperialism, so too was beer present in the forefront of intellectualism in Britain.<\/p>\n

Classism is also a British cultural topic demonstrated by beer. As iterated by Kate Fox in her book, Watching the English<\/em>, your choice of beer\/beverage can say a lot about a person\u2019s social class. The bartenders and the English people in the pub expect certain people to buy certain drinks and my choice of beer could break unwritten social rules and earn me a liberal amount of strange looks. I have seen this first hand when ordering a half pint of cider (to protect my standing in British society, I must add that this was done for a lady).<\/p>\n

Imperialism, Intellectualism, and Classism. All three of these British \u201cisms\u201d are cultural concepts that are literally seeped in beer.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In England, I have discovered beer to be an appropriate beverage for any time, place, or person. It can be a drink of the everyman and a drink of the aristocrat, a refreshing drink for the conservative manual worker or the Avant-garde intellectual. In my first week in London, I have had beer in so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":425,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6687,92,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2010-matthewg","category-pubs","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/425"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2807\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}