Kindred Spirits

There is a certain kinship between passionate hospitality professionals. 

Beer anoraks are sometimes coffee enthusiasts. Cocktail enthusiasts are sometimes natural wine geeks or cider fanatics. People that have a deep love of food, flavour and customer experience are often all of the above. These parallel paths are a shared obsession of the smaller details of a seemingly every day product, be it the morning espresso or the midnight Manhattan; the goal of elevating and mastering one of life's regular pleasures. But what can beer learn from its fellows?

Coffee, to me, is a little like alchemy. Unlike beer, first our product must be brought into being before it can be sold, manipulating the variables (dosage, grind, temperature) to get something (hopefully) sellable. Grind too fine, your coffee is bitter and over extracted, grind too coarse and it will be sour and astringent. The best baristas will make decisions regarding grind size to maximize or minimise elements of the beans flavour profile, depending on its roast, its terroir, its character. The grind may change throughout the day, as factors like temperature, humidity and the frequency of orders. There is a perfectionism intrinsic to the trade I see much more rarely in beer. For example, when did you last change the pressure of your pilsner by 2 PSI to improve its carbonic bite? Not often, if you’re anything like me.

There is also an element of ownership in coffee, just as there is in cocktails that comes from creation; this isn’t a negroni, this is my negroni. This isn’t the house espresso, this is my espresso. There is ego in it, part of one's self in every cocktail shaker or steaming grouphead. As beer servers we (hardly ever) are the beverage’s architect, merely its babysitter, its guardian before its final resting place of the customer. In the post-Ray-Daniels landscape of craft beer, we know what temperature our cellar should be, how often we should clean our lines and if we should read best before dates. That doesn’t make it our pint of best bitter... And our service suffers because of it; if our ego was wrapped in every foaming glass, at the very least bartenders would be tasting their lines every day before service - again, something I often miss when opening a bar. 

Wine, led in part by the meteoric rise of natural wine, is going through a change converse to the recent real cider revival. Where wine is presenting itself as an unstuffy egalitarian and rejecting its high brow history, cider is banging its fist on the bar demanding to be taken seriously.

We can learn from both of these seemingly incompatible ideals, as beer is simultaneously completely devalued by the mainstream and being seen as elitist middle class nonsense. 

the promise being that if you pay more and you’ll get a better, more ethical product; but this trust is hard to gain and is very easily broken

Craft beer has a well-earned reputation for snobbery, gate-keeping and whiteness - just as wine has. The make or break mission for craft beer in the next ten years will be how it tackles inclusivity and its image as a hobby for bearded middle aged men. Hiring people who aren’t men, aren’t white and are passionate about beer is a great start, and something you can definitely see spreading in the wine world. Natural wine has been seen by many as a chance to start afresh, with a new image and a new demographic, marketed at a younger, if still a mostly white group of people. Both natural wine and craft beer struggle with its price point - the promise being that if you pay more and you’ll get a better, more ethical product; but this trust is hard to gain and is very easily broken. 

But quality control in the natural wine industry has come on leaps and bounds since its admittedly sticky beginning. Yes, there are a lot more UK breweries than there are UK winemakers, but the amount of faulty beer I taste regularly is staggering, the amount of natural wine… almost nonexistent? Because natural wine is cradling a newborn genre of beverage, their care to select only the best to release is something to be applauded. I personally have been known to spend a lot of time in Soif, a natural wine bar / bistro, which stocks a very large bottle list while delivering incredible seemingly never ending excellence. I know numerous craft beer bars that I could not say this about. Far too many bars focus on GP percentage and not on selling a quality product. 

Beer, like cider, has often been overlooked as a serious food pairing partner, in no small part to the classism inherent to fine dining. As drinks of the working class, what place does beer or cider have at the ivory white table cloths of michelin starred restaurants? While this tide is slowly turning for beer, cider is getting left behind. Cider really has more in common with wine, being pressed from a single fruit, often a single variety, while owing a large part of its character to the terroir it is grown in. While work has been done to raise beer's profile and restaurants like noma, Momafuku and The Nomad all have a beer selection, there is still a way to go until this permeates mainstream culture. 

Baristadom is very performative, in a similar way to cocktails can be. Both professions talk animatedly about the theatre of what they do, the showmanship, the presentation being just as important as the resulting beverage. The World Barista Championship rates its contestants on its technical skill and sensory experience of their finished product(s), but also for their eloquence, their explanation and their performative skills in presenting their work. Do we have the same theatre in beer? Is refreshing a glass, pouring a beer and spraying down with water as exciting as setting a beachcomber zombie on fire with a little blowtorch?

This theatre, just like their recipes, must be trailed, rehearsed and perfected. When did you last take the time to try and make your customer interaction 5% better? Even the most dedicated beer nerds I know are much more likely to crack open Garret Oliver's The Oxford Companion to Beer than they are Mathew Dixon’s The Effortless Experience. By all means some experiences with customers may involve regurgitating Bavarian purity law at them, but that is a rare occurrence. More often it is taking the time to understand what a customer wants to receive, both in service and in liquid form. Is this customer interested in a twenty minute history lesson, or would they like the quicked stress-free interaction possible? Or, in essence, would they like to be challenged or comforted? A sour bretted imperial stout or a crisp Keller Pils? Either option should be treated with respect and diligent professionalism. That is our value. That is our theatre.

Much of what makes a barman great is the same that makes a hotel concierge great - it is hospitality in its purest form - removing anxiety from every step of the process, making your guest feel welcome and at ease. Anyone who has spent a few minutes desperately trying to get the waiter's attention so they can get their bill knows this anxiety. Or, even worse, walking into a new cafe or restaurant or bar and not knowing what they want you to do. Do I seat myself or wait to be seated? Do you need me to scan something? Can I order with you or do I have to install an app? In the age of COVID, this palm-sweating bewilderment is only a more regular occurrence. 

Hospitality employs 3.1 million people in the UK and almost all of my friends are within that number. There is a type of person that devotes a lot of time to the sensory, that goes into work every day trying (and sometimes failing) to make sparks of magic happen. I love that person. Food, flavour, experimentation - these are the things I love, and if you love them too, I hope something in this helped you add 5% to your next customers experience.