Don Kavanagh defends full-strength beer over light brews or calorific OJ.
No one who met me would ever accuse me of missing many dinners. I am, as I may have pointed out, a traditionally built gentleman who has always preferred a keg to a six-pack and I make no apologies for being happily pear-shaped.
Many people I meet assume that my additional upholstery is a result of drinking heaps, but really it isn’t. Sure, there are plenty of hoary old myths circulating about beer bellies and the like, but they are just that — myths, without a skerrick of truth to them.
For example, Guinness has fewer calories per pint than orange juice, so why don’t people refer to orange-juice guts? In fact, a food scientist friend once suggested that the ideal diet for a human would be a daily intake of a pint of orange juice, two pints of milk and 42 pints of Guinness. This would provide everything you need, apparently, and quite a few you don’t, I should imagine.
Anyway, all this has been brought sharply into focus for me this week when I received two bottles of wine with a tape measure attached. The wines were low-alcohol and low-calorie and, therefore, didn’t taste too good. The problem I’ve found with low-and no-alcohol beers and wines is that they invariably taste awful, nothing like beer or wine and so are not pleasant to drink.
There is no denying there is a bit of movement towards less-strong drinks in recent years, but I doubt mid-strength beer will ever really take off here. Simply labelling something “mid-strength” is an admission of failure in a way — you’d think that you’d market a beer based on what it tastes like rather than simply its alcohol strength.
Low-alcohol wine can be lovely and there are some cracking examples already, but they can be tricky; too weak and there is no flavour, too strong and there is no point. But then wines have been getting stronger anyway, so there is plenty of scope for them to be toned down a little. It used to be that a wine was strong at 13 per cent alcohol, but 14.5 per cent is not unusual now, which means some wines are more than 10 per cent stronger than they used to be.
The extra strength does add calories, so perhaps a little time searching out lower-strength alternatives may help with the post-summer love handles, but don’t expect miracles unless you are taking positive action in other areas of your life. After all, drinking can make you fatter — beer guts do exist, but they exist because their owners are quite sensibly having fun down the pub rather than sweating themselves into a frenzy at the gym.