Friday, February 24, 2006

Oi am a Coider Drinker



WANKERS


In the early ‘90’s I lived in Bristol. Apart from being a happening musical place, with the likes of Portishead and Roni Size producing distinct musical idioms, it was also the sleepy capital of the West Country.

The south west of England has always been cider country, and Bristol had some pubs (usually in grotty areas) that sold nothing else but the stuff. It wasn’t the industrially produced Strongbow and the like, it was rough scrumpy with bits floating in it. Some people claimed that rats had been dropped into the cider vats to accentuate the flavour.

It really is the strangest drink that I have ever imbibed. A sickly sweet concoction, it was also a mind blowing 9% proof. Three pints of the stuff and your legs went numb. After five pints, the hallucinogenic effects took hold. Wandering out of a cider den into bright sunlight was disorientating in the extreme.

The stuff was also extremely cheap; a pint of beer at the time was £1.60, while a pint of scrumpy cider was 90p. Perhaps this price discrepancy explained the type of clientele that the cider pubs attracted. They were invariably ancient decrepit hippies, and whiffy vagrants. One thing that they had in common was one remaining yellowed tooth. The cider contained so much unfermented sugar that they were effectively spending all day bathing their teeth in the alcoholic equivalent of Coke.

There’s not much to be said for scrumpy really. It makes you go mad, and all your teeth fall out. No wonder the sheep in North Devon are the best serviced in Britain.

13 comments:

M said...

Ewww, beastialty! Yuckiness.

I've seen the people in which you refer. Scary looking to say the least.

Cheap eats & cheap drinks bring out the best our societies have to offer, eh Garfer?

Fuckkit said...

Scrumpy is evil shit, gets you drunk from the feet up so you think you're fine til you try to get up and end up face down in the sawdust and blood wondering who nicked your legs.

garfer said...

I only drank it a couple of times. The effects you describe are wholly accurate.

Sniffy said...

I hate it when my legs go (gange used to affect me that way on the rare occasion that I had it). I used to love the baby stuff (Strongbow) - at a mere 5.5%, I could down 10 pints of that in a night and almost make it out of bed by midday the following day. scrumpy? I tried it a couple of times and didn't really like the flavour.

FirstNations said...

my gramma used to brew the stuff; used molasses and gravenstein apples. it really is hallucinogenic. sink a shot of whiskey in it like my dad used to do and you can almost hear the tooth enamel dissolving.

Kyahgirl said...

Poor, poor sheep.

Do you get rye whiskey over there, or is it just Scotch whisky?

I'll stick to my Rye...or beer...or Spiced rum is pretty good.

S.I.D. said...

Two litres of Strongbow,packet of fegs, bag of KP peanuts...my daily diet during 3 years nurse training.

Frobisher said...

Ditto, used to live in Bristol myself and have happy memories of the Bell and Cosy's in St. Pauls. There was a notorious cider pub, can't remember the name, some customers used to get so bladdered that they'd "poo" themselves and not realise. Scary.

Sniffy said...

SID, that was my staple diet during my PhD years, except I thew in the odd pizza, pasta dish and curry too.

garfer said...

Given the calorific content of cider it's no wonder your weight balooned.

Sniffy said...

And no wonder I lost about 5 stone in 4 months when I stopped drinking.

Holdem Poker said...

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RabbityOne said...

I am from The Blackdown Hills area of Somerset/Devon and am very familair with scrumpy, I hate the stuff. My great grandfather was a nasty horrible man and a scrumpy drinker, I didn't know him but this is what I am told of him.
If he walked into a pub, such was his reputation that people would get up and walk out. He went haymanking one day then cidr drinking in the evening,and when walking back across some common land known as Buggs Moor near the village of Buckland st Mary, he saw what he thought was the devil and threw his pitchfork at it. It frightened him so much it completely transfored him and aferwards was a very kind man who never raised his hand to anyone anymore and never touched scrumpy again.
This was no doubt the hallucinogenic effect of the drink, perhaps it made him see his own evil?