The Drink Yer Granda Used To Drink Thread

Hotblack Desiato

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCKLbHgKFBE

Brendan Behan's Dublin, a film released 1966 when he'd been almost two years dead :eek:

@4:00 Brendan Behan's dad next to an old style Guinness tap - this is before the "classic" red light up one. Haven't seen this type before.

@ 5:06 his da sinks a tankard style glass with the side handle, looks like keg Guinness

@ 12:00 some serious pint sinking going on. Straight sided glasses and looks like keg Guinness, thin heads. Must have been tasty enough all the same

[non-drink-related]Jaysus they're some fecking tomatoes at 16:08. Not like the tasteless crap you get in the supermarkets today, and they were probably grown in Ireland as there was very little imported fruit and veg then.[/non-drink-related]

@ 21:00 old-style aluminium kegs with three holes - why three? Was this for carbonated keg Guinness or modern style nitro?

@21:46 the rarely seen (never seen if you were a kid then!) red Lady Lavery five pound note. Someone was spending a good part of their wages. Note the drawer full of large old copper pre-decimal pennies

@ 22:00 they're drinking nitro Guinness in nonic glasses. The modern era. Yer man sinks it in one :eek: must have had a quare thirst on him

@ 22:30 a singalong and a smoke in a pub of an era long ago... you could cut the air with a knife

@ 24:18 "But every cripple has his way of walkin'" non-PC speech :pac:

Hotblack Desiato

My da (born 1920) was a pint man. I doubt a sun ever set in his adult life without a pint of plain being sunk.He died before I was 18, I'd have loved to share a couple of pints with him like my half brothers did, I'd love to ask him about keg Guinness and nitro keg Guinness and the difference and what it tasted like. Although given tobacco abuse which was normal at the time I'm not sure taste was a factor!

Hotblack Desiato

He and his drinking buddies had zero time for Guinness Light, for what that's worth :P

In that era it was the norm to drive home (not actually home, but the pub near home) sink a few pints then drive home and slap the missus about if dinner wasn't on the table at the variable time you chose to arrive home.

L1011

Fergal Quinn made his pocket money stockpiling tomato trays in the few weeks they were imported and selling them as firewood in winter; or something along those lines (according to a short autobio in some Superquinn book from the 1980s) so we did import them.

One of my grandfathers was a life-long pioneer. The other grandfather drank a whiskey - usually a Black Bush or sometimes a white Bushmills; later on he was introduced to Crested 10 - and a half a Smithwicks as his usual round. Never a fan of Guinness, never much in to drinking full pints.

Drank Scotch when working in Scotland and the US is the 30s and 40s as "Irish" back then could have been dyed industrial alcohol; no coherent bottling of product did as much if not more damage to the export market than the trade wars everyone cites as the reason for all the distilleries closing. By the time I could go out with him he couldn't stand even the vaguest whiff of peat off something.

He stopped smoking at 16 or so (having started at 12) which was part of how he made 89, but as he went for Smithwicks he couldn't give much help on the changing tastes of Guinness either! I'm fairly sure whatever ales he was drinking in 1936 in rural (island) Donegal weren't actually Smithwicks though, and even then what was sold as Smithwicks in the 1960s compared to 2007 was likely rather different

Hotblack Desiato

I'm just hoping to live long enough to be an ornery enough bastard to annoy my now kids, grandkids is extra achievement points