Just a few days after Irwin LaRocque became the new Secretary General of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), my buddy Kamal, a Trini transplanted in Boynton Beach, Florida, sent me a schmaltzy, frothy piece on regional beers that would make some of my Caribbean friends hop or hops as the case may be. It was indeed a bitter pilsener to swallow.
First of all, the article came from the Murdoch-owned Fox News, an organization not held in great esteem by many and whose credibility is as questionable as the Murdochs saying that they knew nothing at all about phone hacking at News Of The World.
Late night talk-show host Craig Ferguson’s joke is a good indicator of the attitude to Fox, “CBS News today has fired four employees for wildly fabricating a news story. The good news: they all got jobs over at Fox.” Jay Leno quipped, “This week in Baghdad, four people were arrested for pretending to be journalists. I’ll tell you, this has got all the people over at Fox News nervous.”
The article Five Best Caribbean Beers is by Fox journalist Richard Goldsmith.
Interestingly, Mr Goldsmith starts off with a truism, especially in the context of the inordinate delay in appointing a new Secretary General. Goldsmith says, “Island time is different from time anywhere else. In the islands, especially the Caribbean islands, time seems to lose its urgency. Nothing seems important enough to rush for.”
If Mr Goldsmith had stopped there, he would have been batting a hundred. Then, however, Goldsmith decided to select the top five “island” beers and put Carib and Kalik ahead of Red Stripe, Blackbeard Ale (Virgin Islands) and Presidente (Dominican Republic).
In his email to me, Kamal sent only the bits on Carib and Kalik and provocatively remarked, “Where did Red Stripe place? Well, let me put it this way. It is like the Olympics – Gold, Silver and Who.”
Carib, the beer that originated in Trinidad and is also brewed in Grenada and St Kitts, is first on the Goldsmith list. Goldsmith says that Carib is “the quintessential beach beer . . . there’s a gentle malty background with a pleasantly sour citrus aftertaste . . . . You can drop a lime in and feel confident it’ll beat Corona every day of the week and twice on Sundays.”
In my many years, I’ve had many a lime with Carib and never tasted the gentle malt or sour citrus. Actually, like many other people, my first taste of beer was not auspicious. In fact, I commented that it tasted like what my Jamaican friends would pronounce as “auspice”.
Second on the Goldsmith list was “Kalik Gold” from the Bahamas.
“Dem right to call it Kalik,” one of my Jamaican friends said. “When you drink it that is what you get – Kalik.”
Red Stripe is third on the list. I don’t have the opportunity to do my own comparisons between Red Stripe and its competitors and test Goldsmith’s claim that, “Sadly, it doesn’t taste as unique as it once did, especially now that microbrews are so much more readily available and demonstrate how different beer can truly be.”
Barbadians and Guyanese for whom beer is money in the Banks will agree. So too St Lucians (Piton), Antiguans (Wadadli), Vincentians (Hairoun) and Dominicans, like LaRocque, whose “Kabuli” are all left out of the list. The problem is what is appropriate behaviour in this situation? Do you accept the taunts and boasts of the Trinis or do you grin and beer it?
The moral in this beer-faced and outrageous ranking lies in something General de Gaulle once said about France, “How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?” In terms of Mr LaRocque and CARICOM, it translates into, “How can you manage a region with so many different types of beer, which every country believes is the best?” I suppose you have to be stout-hearted.
Tony Deyal was last seen saying that most Caribbean people, even those who don’t drink, will agree with the toast, “Life, alas, is very drear. Up with the glass! Down with the beer!”
