Reykjavík Grapevine - 01.06.2012, Blaðsíða 16

16
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 7 — 2012
Icelanders are not the kind of
people who go to a pub to drink
a beer or two over the course
of an evening spent chatting
with friends. Quite the con-
trary, they are the kind of peo-
ple who head to the pubs long
after the evening has passed,
and their intention is to drink
themselves into oblivion. To
understand this behaviour, we
spoke to historian Stefán Páls-
son, who teaches at Iceland’s
Beer School, about Icelandic
drinking culture in the twenti-
eth century.
Much like other Western
countries at the turn of the
century, Iceland had its period
of prohibition. The decision
was made in the nation’s first
referendum in 1908, with 60%
voting in favour of the ban. It
took parliament four years to
pass the law, which then gave
people three years—until Janu-
ary 1, 1915—to finish their li-
quor. Officially speaking, the
dry spell then lasted until 1933,
when 60% of the nation voted
in a second referendum to lift
the ban.
However, when the ban was
lifted, beer was notably left out.
Stefán Pálsson says the reason
is unclear, but it seems that
Icelandic goal-oriented drink-
ing culture—drinking to be-
come dead drunk—at least par-
tially explains why beer wasn’t
made legal until 1989. “Today
people are rewriting the story,
giving the impression that ev-
eryone really wanted beer, but
a few boring politicians were
holding us back,” Stefán says,
“but that was certainly not the
case.”
BEER IS LEFT OUT
So beer was left out for no good
reason?
Well, some argue that this was to
soften the blow to the temperance
movement: You lost your ban, but
at least beer is still banned. Others
argue that it may just have been
an error when the regulation was
drawn up, that beer was simply
forgotten and then nobody could
be bothered to change it after-
wards.
I actually blame the doctors
who could prescribe legally im-
ported alcohol to patients during
prohibition. So if you had chest
pains, the doctors could say, ‘Okay,
you need whiskey’ or if you had a
neurotic disorder, perhaps it was
gin. Somehow, however, the doc-
tors never had the imagination to
prescribe beer for anything. So,
since there was no legal import
of beer in place at the time, it was
much easier to leave it out.
The strange thing is that no-
body really complained. You would
think that someone would at least
have written to the papers when
prohibition was dropped, asking
‘Where is my beer?’ But this did
not happen.
GOAL-ORIENTED DRINKING
Were people just unfamiliar
with beer then?
I think that when it came to alco-
hol, Icelanders were very goal-
oriented: men drank alcohol to
become drunk and get into fights
with each other. So you would
have your flask with liquor in your
pocket and there seemed to be
very little demand for beer. And
this was for a very long time so-
cially acceptable, though it has
become more taboo today.
Also, this Danish culture of con-
stantly drinking light lager during
the day was frowned upon. While it
was socially acceptable to become
terribly drunk every weekend, or
at least every now and then, you
really had a problem if you were
drinking socially on a weekday or
even at lunchtime.
How and when did this change?
In the mid to late ’70s, Iceland-
ers began for the first time to go
abroad as tourists, traveling to
sunny coasts. While it used to
be that people who went abroad
were upper class or had a pur-
pose, work related or had to do
with their studies, the average
Icelander could afford to be drunk
in Spain for three weeks, and this
really brought in beer culture to
Iceland.
BEER CULTURE IS BORN
But it was still illegal to sell
beer in Iceland at this point…
Right, so in the early ’80s you start-
ed to see Icelandic pubs selling
‘bjórlíki, which was basically vodka
mixed with Pilsner. You had places
like Gaukurinn trying to look like
an English-themed pub selling this
nasty mix of Pilsner and hard li-
quor, and all these pubs pretended
to have the secret ingredient that
made this taste like delicious beer.
Obviously you’d think this
wasn’t allowed in a country with
beer prohibition, but this went to
court and the courts decided that
this ‘bjórlíki’ was actually a cock-
tail. They were not brewing beer,
but rather mixing something that
was supposed to taste like beer.
At this point it was just a matter
of time, and on March 1, 1989, the
ban was dropped. Interestingly,
opinion polls at the time suggest
that the legislation would not have
succeeded had it gone to referen-
dum…
A PROLIFERATION OF PUBS
Did drinking culture change af-
ter the ban was lifted?
Nightlife had very much been re-
stricted to weekends. Clubs would
book concerts with people buying
tickets to dance and drink lots of
alcohol. The idea was not to pop
into a pub or a café to see if you
saw someone you knew and then
continue to the next pub.
So beer really led to a growth in
pub culture. The number of small
pubs and restaurants and cafes
has grown ridiculously since the
beer ban was lifted. In a way, I
think that Kaffibarinn in the early
’90s and Café Au Lait, where I
think Nonnabiti is now, were prob-
ably the first examples of really
crowded, tiny, pubs, which were
seen as the place to be.
Then there was also the fact
that Kringlan—Iceland’s first shop-
ping mall—opened in 1987. It had
a devastating effect on commerce
for downtown shops. The city cen-
tre went into a steep decline and
property value dropped, which
meant that you could sustain a pub
or a café where you could not in
the past.
AND MORE DRINKING
Now, Iceland’s nightlife is
pretty infamous. Icelanders
are known to go out and drink
themselves silly. Why don’t
we have a more refined beer
drinking culture?
It’s difficult to say, but the pub is not
traditionally the same social insti-
tution as it is in many other coun-
tries. It takes decades to change
that… If you go to the countryside
you’ll see how the scene used to
be here in Reykjavík. Locals watch
television weekdays and go out on
weekends to see a band play, and
there will be lots of drinking, danc-
ing, and some people fighting. In
Reykjavík, however, we are mov-
ing more in the direction of having
something more European.
But it’s not quite there yet?
No, it’s not quite there yet, and
perhaps instead of replacing the
heavy weekend drinking, the ca-
sual beer drinking during the week
is simply an addition. The level of
alcohol consumption has been ris-
ing very rapidly in most Western
countries, but especially here in
Iceland. Specialists in the field are
worried about this trend.
“The pub is not traditionally the same social
institution as it is in many other countries”
Spirits
Beer
Total
120
100
80
60
40
20
1981 1983 1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007
Sold liters per person, 15 years of age and older
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If the numbers keep on progressing this way, we'll end up drunk... er... even
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Drinking | Drinkinging
WHY DO ICELANDERS DRINK LIKE
COLLEGE FRESHMEN?
Words
Anna Andersen
Photography
Alísa Kalyanova