A Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change and the Fate of the Irish Pub

A Pint of Plain is a quest to chronicle the state of the Irish pub today, and thereby to examine Irish culture at a time of great change. When the American writer Bill.
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In A Pint of Plain, he reveals that that experience is getting tougher to come by in Ireland. But the traditional Irish music one might expect with one's pint is much less prominent than it used to be. The big business, now, is the exportation of the Irish pub experience as a commodity. The Irish Pub Company has built approximately "authentic" pubs in 45 countries. The tale of Arthur Guinness, the firm's founder, is so familiar in Ireland that some schoolchildren can probably recite it from memory.

Born in Celbridge, County Kildare in , where his father worked as the steward to Archbishop Price of Cashel and brewed the estate's beer, he inherited two hundred pounds sterling on the archbishop's death and invested it in a brewery in nearby Leixlip, also in Kildare, operating it with his brother Richard. Three years later, he moved to Dublin and signed a nine-thousand-year lease on a defunct brewery at St.

James's Gate for forty- five pounds per annum — a lease that's still in effect. The three-acre property included draft horses, a hayloft, and plenty of rats. Though the location was excellent, allowing Guinness to transport kegs down the river on barges, he soon realized how difficult it would be to crack the city's market. The excise laws gave the English a leg up on the Irish, who were also obliged to buy their hops only from colonial suppliers at an inflated price, so beer imported from En gland cost the publicans much less.

Only when "Uncle Arthur" decided to stop brewing ale in and concentrate on porter did his luck begin to change.

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The credit for inventing porter ordinarily goes to Ralph Harwood of the Bell Brew house in Shoreditch, who developed it around Before that, England's best-selling beer was threethread, possibly a blend of pale ale, new brown ale, and stale brown ale. A publican did the mixing, but Harwood's Entire, a bitter, dark-brown beer, required no fuss and came in a single cask ideal for export.

It got its name from the men who "ported" goods at such London markets as Covent Garden and Smithfield. They had adopted the brew as their own, and swallowed it with the gusto of dockers. Guinness's version, officially ruby-colored, was darker, richer, and more full-bodied than the original — a "stouter" porter, later simply stout. Its secret ingredient was a special strain of yeast whose clone is still around, supposedly kept under lock and key in the Directors' Safe at James's Gate.

Arthur Guinness, though a kind employer, could not be called politically progressive. When he opposed the Society of United Irishmen, a group dedicated to bridging the religious divide, reforming parliament, and ending England's dominion, his stout was pilloried as "Black Protestant Porter.

A Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change, and the Fate of the Irish Pub - Bill Barich - Google Книги

Guinness's attitude toward its employees has always been patriarchal, and it isn't unusual for three or four generations of a family to have worked there. Boys in search of a job used to sit for an aptitude test in their early teens, and if they had a relative with the firm, they received a gold star on their exam that granted them preferential treatment. Seamlessly blending history and reportage, Bill Barich offers a heartfelt homage to the traditional Irish pub, and to the central piece of Irish culture disappearing along with it.

There are nearly twelve thousand pubs in Ireland, so he appeared to have plenty of choices. He wanted a pub like the one in John Ford's classic movie, The Quiet Man , offering talk and drink with no distractions, but such pubs are now scare as publicans increasingly rely on flat-screen televisions, rock music, even Texas Hold 'Em to attract a dwindling clientele. A Pint of Plain is Barich's witty, deeply observant portrait of an Ireland vanishing before our eyes. Synge, Barich explores how I rish culture has become a commodity for exports for such firms as the I rish Pub Company, which has built some five hundred "authentic" Irish pubs in forty-five countries, where "authenticity is in the eye of the beholder.

While 85 percent of the I rish still stop by a pub at least once a month, strict drunk-driving laws have helped to kill business in rural areas. Even traditional I rish music, whose rich roots "connect the past to the present and close a circle," is much less prominent in pub life. I ronically, while I rish pubs in the countryside are closing at the alarming rate of one per day, plastic I PC-type pubs are being born in foreign countries at the exact same rate.

From the famed watering holes of Dublin to tiny village pubs, Barich introduces a colorful array of characters, and, ever pursuing craic , the ineffable Irish word for a good time, engages in an unvarnished yet affectionate discussion about what it means to be Irish today. Sponsored Products are advertisements for products sold by merchants on Amazon.

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About A Pint of Plain

He finds the locals, both the pubs and their patrons, displaced by glamorous versions of themselves, and he discovers that he has unwittingly become part of a global plot to replace the real with the faux. He finally does find a few remaining magical places once he gets out of Dublin, which for some readers will not be soon enough , but they are hanging-on-by-the-thumbnails operations in danger of going poof or pouf. Most browsers will pick this up because they want to read about Irish pubs, but they will get much, much more than they expected.

An excellent, however sneaky, addition to the literature of globalization. He's equally at ease covering the effects of the temperance movement and introducing regional slang terms for being drunk.

Bill Barich’s A Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change, and the Fate of the Irish Pub

A Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change, and the Fate of the Irish Pub is an engaging account of his quest and investigations. Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support? Learn more about Amazon Prime. Read more Read less. Prime Book Box for Kids.

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    Try the Kindle edition and experience these great reading features: Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. Read reviews that mention ireland pubs barich culture quiet calls living traditional ideal tourists rural changing globalization tvs museum laws simply business perhaps authentic.

    There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. This was an interesting book. I checked out a few of these pubs in Ireland and the descriptions were accurate. It's not a flashy sports pub but it is one of a kind.