Slinging Beer During the Pandemic Should Have Been Fun
Instead, It Put the Ugly Side of Humanity in the Spotlight
It’s been 84 years… Ok, it’s only been 18 months, but serving customers beer during the pandemic has not been the fun experience I was hoping for, and I am exhausted. I have always regarded sipping beer on a patio as such a great experience, and by extension basically begged to get hired on at my favourite brewery a few years back. But working through Covid 19 has taught me something pretty brutal; that people are entitled, and can get ugly when they are told they have to change their behaviour. Beer, in my mind, brings people together. But, sometimes, modifications have to be made in order to do this safely, such as a global pandemic. Instead of people understanding this, and accepting slight changes to service, or questions at the door, in order to still get to experience booze outside of one’s house, a few select people showed the most unbecoming behaviour. But before we get into the harrowing side of slinging beer, we must first acknowledge our societal relationship with alcohol.
Alcohol is Essential
If you look around the globe, when the pandemic hit, there was an unspoken rule that alcohol would be necessary to get through this. In fact, it was universally declared an essential service, give or take a couple of states that tried to prohibit it, and quickly changed their tune. Edward Slingerland gave a fascinating interview on the CBC, talking about just that. In his book Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization he makes the case that booze not only brings us pleasure, but helped to forge our very civilization. Which I encourage you to listen to here. So, it is no wonder I found myself slinging beer throughout the pandemic, and was basically deemed an essential worker, AKA Beer Slinger.
Wait, What is a Beer Slinger?
Just so everyone is on the same page, I was hired to work behind the bar pouring beer into pints, and babble to customers at the wood. Writer by day, beer slinger by night has basically been the perfect balance for me. I get my uninterrupted solitude when I put words on the page, and then the socialization and randomness of people drinking at night. I…
