So annoying to me. I usually chat with the bartenders, tip them okay, make it clear my party’s going to be buying a lot of drinks and not causing any trouble. I’m not worried about short pours, I’m worried about not getting the lagniappe most bartenders will eventually give you with some pretty heavy handed pours.
Ahem. I’m not French, but I’ll step up to the plate for their having some more than decent beer.
The rejoinder is an obvious one (most of the examples are from ethnically not-very-“French” subcultures) but hey, it’s French beer historically and legally.
Italy, I kind of got nothing.
France and Spain would do well to stock their taps with German, Dutch and English beers. Vice versa when it comes to the wine cellars.
But we’re not talking about food and beverages sold by volume or weight in a supermarket to be taken home. We’re talking about food or drink being served on the premises to be consumed as a “serving” of food. At that kind of establishment, there are no requirements for serving consumables in measured and marked serving vessels, even if it’s expensive. Like your eight-ounce filet mignon. Should that be served on a plate with a calibrated weighing scale? I don’t see why alcohol should be different. You get the amount you get and if you dn’t like the amount, you go to another establishment that charges less or gives you more.
And I don’t really see what benefit the consumer gets in the long run. So, a bar has to serve beer in a calibrated and marked glass. Is that bar required by law to serve that quantity at a regulated price? If not, it could just increase the price, right? So in the long run it’s not making much difference here. I don’t buy that “500 million pounds” figure at all, because it assumes that consumers would be getting the increased amount of alcohol at the same price. But why would you assume that?
In the USA, imports are often coming in 0.33L bottles now (11.2oz) while domestic brands seem to be sticking with the American standard of 12oz (around 0.355L). I just noticed the change in size of imports within the past year or two.
This is where i was at the beginning of the thread. Joe Brit gets exactly one pint for $5 (or pounds, Euros, whatever). My glass in the US is never purported to be a pint. I’m charged $1. I make the decision to purchase or not on my evaluation of value.
Not knowing much about wine in general, I don’t think that the Netherlands or England produce much if any, but Germany produces a lot of wine, some of it having a good reputation.
ETA: Of course you’ll get Spanish and French wine here almost anywhere.
Historical reasons. That’s the way it has always been done. Also, liquid doesn’t change volume to any sort of degree that a steak does from pre-cooked to cooked state. Also, having a standard size for a drink is trivial (it is a liquid, just poor and it fills the vessel) whereas with foods like steak you can get into all sort of a mess trying to get exactly 8oz pre-cooked.
But mainly that’s just the way it has been done and a long time ago it became law. No one is particularly wound up by it, in fact they kind of like the standardisation, and so it is no danger of changing.
Seriously, we don’t care. We like it. You like it your way, we like it ours. You can do it your way over there, we’ll do it our way over here. Cheers.
Right I’m off down the pub to have some more of those 64 SEK Guinnesses.
That’s the same in Britain though. A pint of John Smith’s in one pub is £2.70 (my local, actually, which is pretty cheap these days) and £3.50 in another. At least the British consumer is able to make the evaluation of value on a level playing field. I suppose the US custom of tipping, and thus potentially getting freebies, complicates matters further.
There is definitely a sort “drink measuring” here in the States it just isn’t law. For example, up until just a year or two ago bars in S. Carolina were only allowed to stock airplane bottles - every drink was always the same size. Whether that was to protect the owner or the customer I’m not sure, probably both.
And I’m told that very often bartenders put more alcohol in women’s drinks.
thanks for teaching me a new word
You guys don’t know the half of it! My granddad would grumble if a lady wasn’t given a half pint in a schooner glass (not the 2/3 pint glass that the Aussies call a schooner, but a similarly shaped half pint glass).
There was a rather interesting program on the subject a few weeks back on Radio 4 - apparently during WWI, the UK government decided to encourage the drinking of weak-ish (3% or so) beer as a session drink rather than the stronger ales and barley wines (5-10%). The usual measure thus became the pint rather than the 1/3 & 1/2 that had previously been the norm. In addition the pint and half became the only legal measures for beer. [ The Belgians instead banned spirits and the knockout juices they now export in great quantities became popular ]
There are 2 standard responses to the short pint. In a good pub you can just ask for it to be topped up and they will do so. In dodgier pubs where they try to disguise the shorting with getting on for an Oktoberfest level of foam you comment on how they serve good halves and they grudgingly top it up. In both cases you need to give the beer a chance to settle first…
This reminds me of a joke I heard a long time ago in the US and, IIRC, it was told to me by a Canadian.
Why is drinking American beer like having sex on a boat?
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Because it’s fucking close to water!
I thought it was very funny at the time, but in defense of American beer, I think it refers to the mass produced crap. The US does have some great micro brewed beers that taste great.
If I recall correctly, there was a sort of beer revolution that went on which caused a number of micro brews to pop up. I remember Sam Adams as one of the first to come out with a decent American beer back in the mid to late '80s.
Now there are so many tasty micro brews in the US. This is a good thing as I firmly believe beer needs to be brewed in smaller quantities for better quality.
Yep. As someone who is a bit of a Europhile, I really think there’s no better place to be if you’re a beer lover than in America right now. There is just so much going on. This isn’t the beer scene of the 80s anymore.
In the U.S., the impact of being shorted depends on what kind of beer it is. If it’s a Stone IPA or an Anchor Steam, that’d be really bad, a Sam Adams then kind of meh, but a Budweiser or Miller “Genuine Draft” then it’s a piece of mercy…
Oh yes - and I say that as a European. I’m happy to say that one of my best friends here in Sweden is the twin of the guy behind craftcans.com and the amount of high quality imported American beer I have been introduced to via him is insane. Between Guinnesses this evening I had a couple of Anchor Steams (Southside apparently got it on tap 3 weeks ago) and that felt like slumming it compared to the stuff he has introduced me to over the past couple of years or so.
Especially Colorado. An insane amount of good beer seems to come from there.
Ah, I’m not the only one who drinks my wine out of a pint glass then!
I started going to pubs regularly when I was 13, mostly with older friends. That was quite common then. I’d also gone to a lot of pubs with family when I was younger, of course.
Most English wine is consumed in England. You’ll be lucky to get any, and I mean that in every sense. I love wine, and there are some very good ones from places like Cornwall, Suffolk and Surrey. I have also in my possession as we speak two bottles of very nice Dutch wine, which I bought in Maastricht. It’s not a huge or (geographically) widespread industry in either country the way it is in France or Italy, but it’s a shame not to acknowledge that both the Netherlands and England produce a fair amount of very nice wine.