Zythophile | Look, could you stop drinking craft beer straight from the bottle. Thank you

It was a phenomenon I first became aware of while watching the marvellous, multilayered Hill Street Blues in the early 1980s. Officers Bobby Hill and Andy Renko, the “salt and pepper” squad car duo, would repair their spirits after a tough shift dealing with assorted area villainy by repairing to a bar, where they would drink beer straight from the long-necked bottle.

That style of drinking, of course, was a reflection by the show’s writers and producers of authentic working-class US culture. Around the same time, however, doubtless through the medium of American yuppies, who liked to pick up on certain elements of working-class behaviour (eg copying the Mexican workers they saw sticking a slice of lime into the neck of Sol and Corona) in an attempt to look “authentic”, drinking beer straight from the bottle spread from working class bars across the US to middle-class bars in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Soon after, yuppie wannabes across the Atlantic in Britain seemed to have copied the habit from the young American financiers they so admired, adding it to their lusts for striped shirts, red braces, Filofaxes and BMWs.

From there, the idea that consuming your beer straight from the bottle was “cool” swiftly became mainstream in urban centres around the British Isles. I remember being at the bar of a disco in the basement of a Dublin hotel in June 1992 (I was there for Bloomsday), ordering a bottle of Heineken, when the following conversation took place: