$16 a pint, in this economy? Stuff that, I’m starting a moonshine side-hustle

I avoided acquiring taste for as long as possible. Mostly because taste is expensive. The more taste you acquire, the more you have to shell out for a (let’s be honest) comparable product, but one which gets you more nods of approval as you set about socially climbing in earnest.

My view is that if you spoil your tastebuds, they become accustomed to fancy treatment. Then they start getting antsy and making demands. You start by scorning the $10 bottles of red you drank in uni. Pretty soon, even $50 bottles of the Barossa’s finest don’t cut it. And eventually, your tastebuds won’t be moved by anything less than wine from one of the elite bins at Penfolds. Your palate has become a demanding little brat, and your wallet will be empty.

I speak from bitter experience. During one lockdown or another, I invested in my tastebuds. Masked up, I would enter my local bottle shop in search of craft beer, desperate for a new experience among the unending monotony of curfewed life. I would find beers with exceptional can designs and phrases such as “NEIPA” and “hazy pale” which made me feel special. Then I’d close my eyes to avoid seeing the cost, tap my phone and leave to pursue my latest dumb man hobby.

Soon, bitter and sweet blurred, blended, overlapped. I found myself rotating the can as I sipped to admire the cover design. I began to recommend specific beer to friends. I became, in short, a wanker.

But that was 2021, when life cost a reasonable amount and there was less to spend on. Now it’s 2024, your mortgage hurts to your very bones, the kids are only allowed to do free activities such as “pick up a stick” and “constant wailing”, and eating anything other than instant ramen is frivolity.

All of which is to say – expensive tastes? In this economy?

A pint of beer should not be $16.Credit: Oscar Colman

Even when you avoid the trap of taste, the surging cost of being alive means you still get stung. This year, footy fans at the MCG will have to shell out $11.50 for every 425ml of draught beer they toss back. That’s $27 a litre. Beer for the common man? Hardly.

At the Australian Open, it was even worse. A schooner set you back $14.50, and a glass of champagne was $29.50. Even a humble pint at the pub will set you back $15 minimum these days.

There’s something wrong with the system when the cost of a pint of average-tasting draught beer overtakes an entire bottle of cheap wine.

I’m no expert, but doesn’t wine require large areas of land covered in vines which fruit at inconvenient times and require pickers and a bit of stomping? That’s to say nothing of the barrels, which must be rather hard to make for the world’s last few coopers. Then you have to invest in fancy glasses, and purchase the services of men and women who have taken their tastebuds into formidable levels of snobbery so that they can write labels describing the “grippy” and “velvety” tannins formed by years of waiting around for the taste to ferment to its optimal peak. Do they really taste berries, cloves and spices when these things were not actually added to the baby wine? They say terroir, I hear their pure terror of being called out.

By contrast, beer is what, yeast-riddled barley-water spiked with a plant known only for its bitterness? Then you put it in a metal tank, grow a beard while you’re waiting (regardless of your ability to do so – I don’t make the rules), and pipe it directly to the pisshounds sitting at the bar. $16 a pint?

It’s time to rebel and tackle the tyranny of taste (and expensive tastebuds). Bring back moonshine and dodgy home brewing. Let’s all pretend to take up intense “hobbies” when, in reality, we’re trying to save cash. I’ll happily gin up my own batch of near-undrinkable beer, charge $5 and open my shed doors to all.

I vividly remember gingerly uncapping a bottle from my friend’s dad’s first batch of “beer” only for the entire thing to geyser forth on my shorts. It didn’t dint his pride. “That beer cost 25 cents to make,” he said. “Can you believe it?” I certainly could and, after tasting it, fully believed it. But the cost! Just 25 cents for a mild buzz and the novel sense my stomach was actually beginning to ferment – what a bargain.

One person’s cat’s piss is another’s prudent financial investment. In this economy, I reckon our tastebuds can like it or lump it.

Doug Hendrie is a Melbourne writer.

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