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July 28, 2005

Half and half

I had no idea people drank so many "cocktails" made from beer/cider. I always thought that, when you went into a typical pub, the beers on the bar were all intended for separate sale, with the possible exception that student bars expect to sell vast amounts of Snakebite and black. The last few weeks working in pubs has taught me just how wrong I was — these are just some of the concoctions I've been asked for, or heard about:

• 1/2 pint stout, 1/2 pint bitter — often called a Black and Tan, but I don't recommend ordering it by that name in Ireland any time soon, because if you're lucky you'll only offend people by polluting your Guinness. If you're less lucky, people might think you're referring to what they'll see as a terrorist group from the early 20th century. When I ran out of Guinness halfway through pouring myself a pint, I ended up trying this, and it's not half bad.
• 1/2 pint mild, 1/2 pint bitter — generaly just called "mix" or "mixed", this drink seems to be exclusively drunk by working men in their late-50s or 60s, and apparently is (like mild itself) rarely seen outside of the midlands. Quite often people drink this with a lemonade top, but with sufficient mild I would expect it to be sweet enough for most already.
• 1/2 pint stout, 1/2 pint cider — the famous Black Velvet. Absolutely vile, do not order this under any circumstances. A 50/50 mix of stout and champagne also tends to get called Black Velvet, and frankly sounds almost as bad. I'm not sure whether layering the drinks as opposed to mixing them makes a difference, and I'm not about to waste more beer finding out.
• 1/2 pint lager, 1/2 pint stout — "half and half", apparently. I've never tried it, but given I didn't like Mickey Mouse (below), I'm not in a rush to, either.
• 1/2 pint lager, 1/2 pint bitter — Mickey Mouse, also known as Golden Sunshine. Apparently it's very refreshing, but I didn't see the appeal myself.
• 1/2 pint lager, 1/2 pint cider — Snakebite. Depending who you ask, Snakebite absolutely must, or absolutely cannot, involve a dash of blackcurrant cordial. For clarity, if you want blackcurrant (and you should!), I suggest ordering "Snakebite and black," although to be honest I really recommend drinking something else — if you hate beer so much as to turn it into this, just drink an alcopop or spirit/mixer or something.
• 1/2 pint lemonade, 1/2 pint anything else — I always thought shandy only ever involved lager, and cheap lager at that, but I've since been asked for shandies made with expensive lager, with bitter, with mild, and even with stout. Bitter shandy is actually really nice, especially on a hot day. Apparently stout shandies are the hardest to make properly, since convention says that the stout and lemonade should be separated in the glass as far as possible, with the stout floating on top of the lemonade. Frankly I'm not sure I see the point!

Now I think about it, there are some gaps in this list; where, for instance, is the cider/bitter combination? Is it so vile that nobody ever drinks it, or have I just not encountered it yet? If anyone tracks down this elusive cocktail they should let me know, and if it's not utterly vile I might try it. My experience with Black Velvet doesn't give me much hope, though...

Update: cider with bitter is apparently bitter snakebite, and cider-based Black Velvet is apparently Guinness snakebite. So, that clears that up, albeit somewhat unimaginatively.

In the comments, lonecat points out that a floating stout shandy is called Fade to Black, but in fact this blog seems to be the only place on the entire Internet where that term has been used in conjunction with Guinness, so clearly more investigation is required. Also Joe reminds me that Snakebite is also known as both Snakey B and Diesel, the latter particularly in its blackcurrant-containing form.

Posted by James at 01:30 | Comments (4)
Tags for this entry: drinking pubs cocktails beer

July 27, 2005

Tracks that might offend

Last Monday, I concocted a plan, together with Some Guy I Met In The Pub, that would make us both incredibly rich. However we're both far too lazy to implement it, so I'm going to go ahead and tell you all in the hope that someone else gets rich off it instead. Just remember you saw it here first, OK?

Modern pub jukeboxes, it seems, offer the capability to download tracks from a vast selection (2 million according to Leisure Link's sales bumf), downloaded over now-ubiquitous broadband. This is something of a step up from a classic pub jukebox which might offer 50 or 100 albums, totalling maybe a couple of thousand tracks at best. Of course, not all 2 million tracks are stored on the machine at once, but those which are stored on the machine can be played for half the price of those needing to be downloaded, and those which are downloaded frequently tend to "evict" the less frequently played tracks from the disc. So far, so good, although clc points out the risk this system creates, that someone might choose tracks that might offend the delicate ears of other pub-goers.

But why stop there? Why make people pissed up on a night out stagger up to the jukebox and try remember the name of the song they suddenly really fancy hearing? OK, for some people that's the whole fun of jukeboxes, but wouldn't it be cool if you could identify some tracks in advance, before you go out, and have the machine recognise you and play them? So, my scheme is to issue RFID tags of some kind to people containing a unique ID, along with login credentials for a website. Then you just top up your account on the site with credit, and let it know the tracks you want to hear; perhaps it could hook into an audioscrobbler/last.fm type system, and "learn" your musical preferences, although there would need to be a facility to override your choices for a given night, and pick tunes to suit particular occasions. Then when you get to the pub or bar, you just walk up to the machine, wave your ID token at some sensor, and away it goes, taking credit from your account for every track from your selection it plays (up to some limit you can set, perhaps.)

And why stop there? How about if the RFID tags operated over a slightly longer range, so the machine would know who participating in the scheme was in the pub at any given moment. When not playing paid-for tracks, most of these machines play a "random" selection of tracks, so why not base this selection on the preferences of those present, weighted fairly between everyone with an ID token? Given the machines are also capable of communicating over the Internet, it would be possible to set up a "no repeats" system, too, whereby every person who buys into the scheme is guaranteed (or as close as possible) to not hear the same track twice in, say, any 3 hour period — and here's the clever part — even if they move between several different venues.

OK, so in the cold light of sobriety it doesn't seem quite as groundbreaking or at all likely to succeed, but it seemed a really good idea at the time.

(An aside we didn't think of at the time: perhaps the scheme could let users specify songs they truly hate, and endeavour to avoid playing said tracks in the presence of those users...)

Posted by James at 02:47 | Comments (3)
Tags for this entry: music pubs jukeboxes

July 21, 2005

Gooooooodbye

With the infrequency of Google's crawlstto see what I was talking about, and the varied content of this blog, Google's adsense program just wasn't working out for me. I made a couple of cents, which will no doubt sit in the account to be claimed when I put adsense onto another web project I'm currently toying with. So, rejoice! Be glad! The ads are gone! They never did look very pretty, anyway...

In other meta news, I'm playing with Technorati style tags, and categories, and stuff. The front page lists all the tags, and I've so far tagged everything back to where I started using version 3 of Movable Type. I might carry on back to the beginning at some point, but, I got pretty bored. :)

Posted by James at 02:27 | Comments (0)
Tags for this entry: meta google ads

July 18, 2005

Well under a quid

Nobody likes to feel ripped off. And a lot of people do, when they drink soft drinks in pubs. But, is this fair? Everyone seems to assume that because there's no tax on soft drinks, they should cost significantly less than beer.

Now, first of all, let me make a suggestion — if you're thirsty and can't bear to part with £2 for a pint of coke in a pub, I suggest drinking cordial with soda water. Most pubs will charge well under a quid for a pint of blackcurrant and soda; if you're feeling flush, consider asking them to put a small dash of lemonade in it as well, it tastes lovely.

That settled, what does a pint of coke in a pub actually cost? Well, to you, around about £2. To the pub, the syrup to make that pint of coke has probably cost £35 for a bag-in-a-box of syrup, which gets diluted 5.4:1 - apparently that's 141 16oz servings of coke in an ideal world, which I'm going to call 105 pints¹, after you allow for what ends up in the drip trays behind the bar and so on. So, the syrup mix in your pint alone costs 33p. Then, there's the cost of having someone come out to maintain the dispenser, to fill up the gas cylinders, and the (marginal, admittedly) cost of the water. It wouldn't surprise me if this lot took the price to 50p on a pint of coke. Now consider that, of your £2, 30p is lost straight away as VAT.

So, £1.70 goes to the pub, who lose 50p of that straight away on supplying the drink. The rest has to pay for the glass you have the coke in (and replacing the glass when it breaks), the ice (and maintenance of the ice machine) you have in it, the slice of lemon, the bendy plastic straw, the staff to serve you the drink, to collect your glass, to wash the glass before it gets reused, to slice the lemons, to collect the ice from the cellar, to supervise the people doing all of the above, to organise their wages and make sure their tax is correct... and then, at the end of it all, it would be nice if the pub could make a profit, don't you think? It might encourage people to continue to run pubs.

Compare this to a pint of, say, Grolsch, in my local. As I understand it, he effectively pays about £1.14 a pint for his barrels of Grolsch, which then retails at £2.35 a pint. 35p of this is presumably VAT, so his "margin" is 86p, compared to £1.20 on the coke example. So, sure, the margins on coke are bigger, but not as significantly as some people would have you believe.

If anyone has any better figures on this stuff, I'd be interested to see them. I only started looking into this to see who was right out of the people who told me "coke in pubs is a rip off, it costs them something like 2p/litre", and the landlord who told me that he actually saves money by just having 2 litre bottles from Tesco behind the bar, instead of a postmix machine (so, he's paying about 50p a litre upwards, depending what offers are on). Turns out the truth is somewhere in between.

¹ This is assuming 20oz == 1 pint; I'm not too hot on this Imperial stuff, so if somoene knows better please shout!

Posted by James at 03:35 | Comments (4)
Tags for this entry: drinking rants economics

July 01, 2005

Without letting slip

Suppose I were to create an anonymous blog somewhere. How would I go about promoting it, without letting slip that I was associated with it?

Answers on a postcard!

Posted by James at 02:38 | Comments (2)
Tags for this entry: meta questions

Totally the opposite of progress

Gosh, is 2005 halfway done already? Amazing how time flies when you're having fun.

As astute readers may remember, 6 months ago tomorrow (yes, I was a day late), I made a bunch of resolutions for the coming year. As threatened, I'm going to review how I'm getting on with them.

1. Get fitter. I have made absolutely no progress on this, although when I had my blood pressure taken recently it was normal, rather than the high end of the safe range, and I did walk up Snowdon not so long ago. So, maybe marginal progress.
2. Drink less beer. Utterly failed. Summer is going well on this score, though, since I'm working far too much to drink heavily. I mostly only drink beer if my boss is paying, now. September will be the real test on this score though — will I start again when term begins and I'm not working 7 nights a week?
3. Cook more. I now subscribe to some cooking blogs, and am maintaining some recipe bookmarks. I've cooked a few new things, and been taught some Turkish recipes, so maybe I'm getting somewhere on this. I still eat a lot of takeout, ready meals and stuff thrown under the grill, though.
4. OpenGuides stuff. Well, OGN has doubled its page count, and I've submitted a wishlist bug to rt.cpan.org that I intend to have a go at implementing some time. I haven't actually done anything yet, though. Still, some progress, I suppose.
5. Clear some debts. Not doing too well on this one...
6. Decide what to do with my life. Not really sure on this one — I have some ideas of what I might want to do, but nothing concrete I definitely want to end up doing. Still, definite progress here.
7. Get a degree. I averaged a 3rd last year, overall. This is totally the opposite of progress.
8. Blog better. I like to think I've been putting more interesting stuff on here than before, with the exception of posts like this one, but you're welcome to disagree; if you do, please say so! I have no ego to puncture.

So. Marginal progress on 5/8 and complete failure on 3. Life could be worse. Somewhat foolishly, I'm not going to revise the targets at all, I'm just going to try get a lot further with them in the next 6 months than the last...

Posted by James at 01:04 | Comments (0)
Tags for this entry: personal