Drink Up

Today

While making the coffee this morning Paul was recapping some old advertising slogans. "The water in Majawkah!" he proclaimed, recalling the Heinken ads of the '80s. "Mackeson's Stout! it looks good, it tastes good and, by golly, it does you good!" "Of course", he added wistfully "you're not allowed to make claims like that any more..."

"I don't know", I said "Stouts are full of iron and B vitamins"

In My Day

Alcohol used to be seen as having many medicinal properties. In Victorian times doctors would prescribe red wine in cases of illness and you used to be able to buy "tonic" wines.

For a brief spell in my late teens I worked as a cleaner at Orchard Lodge Care Home in Annerley in South London. The main occupants were elderly men who would probably otherwise have been on the streets. There they received food, lodging (in long, bare-boarded dormitories with a chamber pot under each bed) and medical attention. Many of the old boys ate very little and probably had mild vitamin and iron deficiencies. The doctors at this place were a pragmatic bunch and knowing that getting the geezers to take pills daily would be a problem, used to prescribe half a pint of stout daily. There was approximately a 100% chance that this medicine would be taken.

The prescriptions were hardly of the NHS variety; instead they were in the form of a voucher, redeemable at the pub over the road. On sunny days I would see half a dozen of more of the men sitting on benches outside the pub, each with his half-pint glass of Mackeson's or Guinness.

The last time I heard of stout being recommended medicinally was when I was breast-feeding Becky. The midwife assured me that a pint of Guinness daily would improve my milk no end. I confess to not much liking beer of any kind but I did sink a few pints of Guinness until breast abscesses put an end to that activity for good.

The problem with stout is that, having the highest calorific value of any beer, it also makes you stout.