Tick, Tick, Gloom

It’s when the glass is half-empty that the problem begins. After each sip my eyes start to REM across the room, scanning the pumps, darting towards the beer board. Conversation collapses as familiar logos and names are sought, identified and ignored. Instead of deploying wryly-observed anecdotes from my day, mental Post-Its are re-read as my Rolodex of recall is ransacked.

Hello. My name is Alex and I’m a ticker. I wasn’t always this way. I used to be happy with one pint of something nice and then another, and perhaps one more after that. Each drink was the same as the last, each sip tasting identical to the one before. The only other flavour allowed to pass my lips was the sting of salt supplied by a bag of peanuts. Or for those truly special occasions: an away win or a date - a packet of Golden Wonder.

But all that has changed. I went here. Now I’m as likely to repeat a real ale as the BBC are to repeat How Do You Want Me? a sweet little sitcom that contrasted the crushing mediocrity of Simon Nye‘s writing with the unkempt wonder that is Dylan Moran in full bemused flow.

But why would you always stick to the same beer? Unless that particular pint is so utterly transcendent that its absence causes your liver to weep chunky tears of blood and iron. Because there is a whole world of drinks out there, and discovering them won’t happen if I stick with the same ale time and again. The perfect pint will always escape me if I get a ‘usual’. And so I need to keep searching, I need to keep sipping, I need to keep scanning. Like The Littlest Hobo of beer, but with slightly less body hair, I’m always moving on.

And now after years of quiet enjoyment, it is starting to become a problem. No longer am I happy in good pubs with good music, good food and good conversation. I keep wanting more. Once I’ve sampled all the regular ales, tried the guest beer and seen what is coming on next, I’m itching to move again. I’ll even trade in a fireside seat on a damp Friday night for the remote chance that the next place will have something different, something darker, something unusual.

There are limits though. I don’t write down all the beers I’ve tried in a little book. I don’t score, rate and rank every pint I’ve ever had using a system as fiendishly rule-bound as the latest New York dating manual. I don’t maintain a database of any kind, well unless this page counts… and it doesn’t. I also don’t drink halves. If I’m going to try a beer I’m going to either enjoy right to the bottom of the glass or make sure that I wince my way through the next half an hour.

Logically I should be happiest at a beer festival, but I’m not. Yes, I enjoy the variety of the ales on offer and yes; I like the chance to taste beer from breweries that I’ve never heard of in distant places. But beer festivals are shit. Nice drinks don’t make up shuffling around drafty and dusty community halls, blinking under harsh sodium lighting and enduring ‘good time’ Zep and Creedence covers bands whose limited talent is only matched by their limited understanding of sacrilege.

So the question has to be asked. Am I alone in this affliction? And are we scoopers just OCD box tickers who’ve grown out of football stickers? Do others out there wonder if there more to beer than just the brown Bests offered in so many pubs? Do you go out of your way to try something different or is good beer about enjoying the familiar, and lots of it? When your pint is half-empty are you happy with the same again?