Yeah, I was going to point out that “macerate” means nothing like that; it describes extraction, softening, or disintegration by soaking in liquid. What happens to bartenders’ hands might be called laceration if they actually get cut by the bottle caps, but really they’ve been minced.
I can’t open a twist-off without using my shirt. I’m a female but I have humongous man-hands (shut up!) and the problem might be more with my “delicate skin” than the strength of my hands.
Once a year I work at a festival for charity, and my job is to serve beer and bottled alcoholic drinks. I’ll twist of about a hundred or more caps in an eight-hour shift. The first year my hands were done for halfway through and I had to use my shirt to open bottles the rest of the shift. The second year, before we started I went to some other vendor’s booth that was giving away free t-shirts and got us a shirt. Then I ripped it to shreds and gave pieces to each of my co-workers. Everyone did much better being able to open twist-offs this way.
Things would be a lot easier at our booth if we simply had bottle openers.
BTW they made a big stink of making sure we did not sell any drinks without taking the cap off first. I’m almost positive that, at least in Ohio, the server has to un-cap the drink before serving it to the patron.
I think that Sierra Nevada recently dropped using twist-off caps altogether; the new caps say something about “flavor-lock caps” and mentions the need for a bottle opener…
Not a stupid rule. It’s just tacky for the bartender to pry the cap off with his teeth.
Your liver won’t be celebrating, either.
My ex worked in a bar for awhile an carried a “church key” with her always. If you open all bottles with a bottle opener, all the caps are bent and no one can try to reseal an already opened beer. The other big reason is that if you twist off caps all night with your bare hands, they get raw (working in a bar, you’d be twisting off a LOT of bottle caps) and the rags they use to wipe the counters down are just way too gross to use on the mouth of the bottle.
sigh On preview… I’m just reiterating what everyone else said.
When I was a bartender, I almost always used the wall-mounted one with the little bin that caught the tops. It was easier and saved my hands. Occasionally, I would twist off, but rarely. And even more rarely (like when the wall-mounted opener was busted), I would use a hand opener.
I can see the owner wanting to prevent any possibility of impropriety by making sure the bottle is always in sight of the customer once it’s open. Perhaps that bar (or maybe another one owned by the same owner) had some issues with drink tampering (not just drugging, but dumping some of the beer out so the customer runs out faster and buys another, watering it down, etc.), so the owner has put this rule in place.
I’ve been bartending for years, and I’ve always used a beer key. I don’t know any bartender who doesn’t; on the rare occasions I forget mine, it drives me nuts to use the wall-mounted kind. I never open any beer by hand; too many of them aren’t twist-off and if you forget which ones, thus trying to twist one that won’t come off, that shit hurts.
Also it is indeed illegal to serve someone an unopened beer here in Texas; even when you order a bucket of bottled beer, they all have to be opened before serving. Bars here aren’t licensed for off-premise consumption, so everything must be consumed or thrown away on property.
The only exception is, oddly, a bottle of wine. If you uncork it, you can leave with it. Even if you don’t drink anything out of it, as long as the bottle is uncorked it can leave with you.
I have never been served a sealed beer or any other drink. I assumed this was to do with licencing laws, i.e. that the UK pubs don’t have an off-licence so you can’t take the drink off the premises.
As for opening it in front of me, I like it. It proves it wasn’t just a scabby already opened beer that someone changed their mind about, and that it hasn’t been tampered with/spiked while not in my view. I like my drinks to be fixed in front of me, not way down the other end of a busy bar whereny old prick can tamper with them while the bartender looks for the lime. Maybe I’m over-cautious, but I’ve seen it happen.
Yah, agreeing with what everyone else has said - I’ve never been to a bar and been served a bottle that wasn’t already opened. It’d be weird.
I don’t have an opinion one way or the other; I just popped in to say that, all of a sudden, I crave a cold beer.
No, macerated is the correct term. We’re working with the same definition. The hands of chefs and bartenders are constantly wet, what with washings, rummaging for a cold beer, etc. The repeated hyperhydrosis leads to a state where the epidermis can be easily torn off by normal activity, i.e. it has been softened/disintegrated by soaking in water. Repeated dry hand opening of bottles would lead to jagged lacerations, but twisting a bottle top with hands soaked in water leads to maceration.
link - second bolded term