It's All in Pouring the Pint

By John Madigan

Approaching the High Holy Days of March, let us pause to reflect on the nature of beer and its relation to the Celts. For more pints are drawn and quaffed in this season than throughout the rest of the year, in honor of whichever god, goddess or saint one wishes to honor. 

The first evidence of beer in Ireland shows up in the Bronze Age around 2000 B.C., brewed by the "Beaker Folk," as they've come to be known, says John Gleeson, co-director of the Center for Celtic Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Dublin-born, Gleeson worked for the Arthur Guinness Brewery in his youth.

"They earned this name because of the stone beakers they used to brew the beer," he relates with obvious relish, pointing out that the tradition was to drink the beer and then smash the beaker against a wall...a tradition to which Irishmen unknowingly adhere to this day. 

When the Celts arrived in the Auld Sod around 500 B.C, they discovered the sophistication of this culture; beer, horses, metal makers, and the great megaliths dappling the countryside. As the story goes, these Beaker People people went underground and thus one had to be very careful when passing the standing stones, warns Gleeson," because you could be lured in by the suantrai music...and they would feed you ale, and you would remain forever." Carrying a steel pin was supposed to protect against this doesn't-sound-so-wicked spell. Celtic culture and tradition integrated with this culture, with brewing part and parcel of all that.

Beer drinking was complemented by an affinity for whisky in Irish culture, says Gleeson. But by the 1840s, the temperance movement was gaining strength under the direction of Fr. Theobold Mathew, a Capuchin from Cork who took up teetotaling a few years previously. He was very persuasive. By 1841, almost five million Irish had taken the pledge, out of a population of around eight million. Consumption of whiskey was cut in half.

Mathew himself was a controversial figure. After all, what else could one expect of someone who hung out with Protestants, accepted a government pension, allegedly mismanaged his crusade's finances and interpreted the no-drink pledge as a sacred vow. While the hierarchy supported him, many of the regular — and probably more thirsty — clergy viewed him with suspicion.

Before the Great Famine, according to Gleeson, the family pub was a multi-generational place where people gathered for social purposes. It was not a place to go merely to become drunk, but for poetry, sing-alongs, political meetings, church functions and old-fashioned conversation over a pint. "Pub to pub is the poor man's university," says Gleeson, quoting an old saying. 

The family-owned pub has been a long-standing tradition in Ireland since the 17th century, says Gleeson. The term "public house" comes out of this, he adds, meaning literally a house functioning as a pub and serving the local drink with the family name over the door. 

After the Famine, family-owned pubs sought to prevent intermarriage between economic classes and "thus pubs became segregated by sex. No women allowed," according to Gleeson. "With men no longer working 24 hours on a farm, they were done with work by 5 p.m. With their idle time, they headed straight for the pub. Keeping the women out was a way to prevent match-making across class boundaries," he claims. 

By the 18th century, every town had its own brewery because beer does not travel well, Gleeson explains. "In fact, in the old days, it didn't travel at all," he relates. Entrepreneur Arthur Guinness of stout fame and fortune brought this era to an end. He spearheaded the construction of canals around Ireland, providing a smoother ride for his kegs and making a much more convenient and cost-effective method of shipping of the beer. In came malt and out went beverage. 

Now, Gleeson laments, many of the family-owned pubs are falling by the wayside in the bigger cities. "There's been a deterioration of pub life since the big drinking factories have come in with loud music, so no one can even talk to each other. No one converses, so everyone drinks," he says. But Gleeson contends that the smaller pubs are still around. "They are just more difficult to find. The same is true in the United States," he adds.

Historically, St. Patrick's Day came about in the 17th century thanks to Father Luke Wadding. The scholar petitioned the Pope to officially recognize Patrick as a saint and give him his feast day of March 17. Ironically, this happens to be in the middle of Lent — a time of fasting — so it is apparent that Wadding didn't do all the homework he should have. 

But as the folk-story goes, according to Gleeson, Patrick himself was in the middle of Lenten fasting when, while living with a non-believer, succumbed to the temptation of eating meat. "Being an Irish Catholic and feeling guilty, he prayed to God for forgiveness," Gleeson reports. "God responded by turning the mutton bone into a piece of fish," he says, continuing, "This was taken to mean that one day of breaking the Lenten fast was okay and we have had St. Patrick's Day ever since."

Incidentally, when St. Patrick came to Ireland in the 5th century, he supposedly had his own personal brewer: a traveling companion named Mescan. 

Traditionally, the Irish would carry around a shamrock on St. Patrick's Day, says Gleeson. "On the last drink of the night, they would drop the shamrock in their beer and down the pint," he says, explaining that "this was called drowning the shamrock." 

After that, it was back on the wagon, back on the fast and a fitting ending to a fasting interlude.