Anyone making a New Year’s resolution this year?No, of course you’re not. Because we all know there’s nothing like resolving to quit some vile habit in order toguarantee that you’ll be doing it again in about 48 hours flat. Which is why, last New Year, I decided to set mystandards so laughably low, so pathetically easily obtainable, that I’d be in no danger of disappointing myself. I resolved to organise a piss-up in a brewery. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I set out to achieve the lowest level oforganisational competence which is deemed possible. And consequently I can now confirm that the old adageis woefully inaccurate: it is really fucking difficult to organise a piss-up in a brewery. Your basic problem, right, is that you’re talking about a brewery. If you’re visualising some kind of quaintlyantiquated cottage industry run by a couple of alcoholic octogenarians and their pet horse then think again.Breweries these days are big, soulless, industrial complexes. Try ringing up the company that owns one ofthose and saying, “Would you mind letting me and a few mates into your factory sometime so we can get wasted?” and see how far that gets you. You might as well ask Jamie Cullum to record something genuinely soulful and emotional.Ain’t gonna happen. The solution? Find yourself a long-established brewery with an extremely tourist-friendly visitor centre. Myselfand various permanently intoxicated cohorts opted for the ‘Heineken Brouwerij’, located in the Stoned Meccathat is Amsterdam. I have to say, in terms of testing organisational competence, this was setting the bar a mite higher than I’d originally planned. If a flight over to Schiphol Airport wasn’t enough (you know, in my head I still hear it as ‘Schit-hol Airport’) then being diverted to Belgium due to dense fog, and having to catch a coach up to Amsterdam was the icing on the cake. Amsterdam, of course, is a city with more to offer than mere lager. There’s weed and mushrooms as well! Personally, my only drug of choice is the fermented variety, but I had a blush of boys around me who spent the entire weekend sampling every single intoxicant they could lay their hands on. Consequently I found myself sat in an apparently renowned hash bar called Biblos, staring through a dense cloud of marijuana smoke listening to one of my friends (who’s a black belt in karate) rattling off a painfully detailed description of how clicking your fingers on someone’s testicles is one of the most agonising karate moves you can pull. I know I’m not particularly treading new journalistic ground here, but stoned people can be nothing short of bewildering when you’re just good old-fashioned pissed.
(Incidentally, I’m not just inventing that testicles thing for comic effect; it genuinely is a tried & tested karate move. Which seriously begs the question ‘how the hell do you discover something like that?’ or perhaps more importantly ‘if you discover something like that by accident, what in the name of holy fuck were you trying to do?!’)
Anyway, mushrooms…
One point that’s entirely sensible but struck me as exceptionally funny was that the pre-packaged hallucinogenic
fungi (called ‘Philosopher’s Stones’) carry health warnings, advising such droplets of wisdom as: “Do not consume
contents if you are schizophrenic.” Quite frankly, if you are schizophrenic and you try tripping anyway then you both deserve what you get. I concluded, having observed my respective companions during an afternoon on magic mushrooms, that all you really need to print on the packaging is “Warning: Consumption of contents will make you slowly rub your hand back and forth across your chin for two hours, feeling the small hairs and thinking it’s all terribly interesting.” When I suggested moving on from the Bulldog bar, where we’d ended up, one of my mates told me that he couldn’t imagine what moving would actually feel like, a statement which rather neatly summarises the whole mushroom experience as far as I can tell.
Before we de-camped to the brewery, I clanged back a coffee and was quite tickled to notice that the sachets of hash bar sugar all bear the legend ‘De Goede Smaak’. Beautifully appropriate, I think.
And so, finally, to the Heineken Brouwerij...
Broadly, it made for a cracking afternoon’s visit. Today’s Heineken Fact Of The Day is this: In thecompany logo, each letter ‘e’ has been rotated slightly anti-clockwise to create the impression that theletters are smiling. If you stare at the Heineken logo for long enough and use some chemical assistance,you’ll start to imagine you can see it. This fact, combined with some of the brewery’s array of entertainments, led me to believe that a fewpeople in the design company had perhaps sampled a little too much of Amsterdam’s alternative culture. Hence the drum kit made out of beer barrels, the holographic beer can that everyone tries to pick up, and the battery of ‘Mood & Music’ chairs along one huge wall, where you sit down, rotate backwards, and a screen is lowered above you, which displays various random images and sounds. Sitting in one of the chairs makes for an interesting enough experience, but standing in the room and watching everyone sat in a line looking like Darth Vader on re-charge mode is frankly bizarre. It makes you feel slightly like an evil genius, watching your army of automatons grow stronger. Which,
when you put it like that, is not exactly the worst way you can spend your day.
After an hour or so of looking at various pieces of beer-making paraphernalia we reached the in-brewery
bar, where you can redeem your token for a glass of Heineken. This is where my mushroom abstinence
utterly paid off – a large contingent of the group I was with didn’t feel like a beer at this point and so
deferred their token to me. Result! Now that, my friends, is how you organise a piss-up in a brewery.
Okay, I’m about 1000 words into an Amsterdam article and so far I seem to have avoided every cliché
regarding windmills, tulips, canals, clogs and hookers. That would probably make this a good time to ‘fess up and tell you about how we drunkenly agreed that taking a wander around the De Waletjes red light district would definitely be the most sensible course of action.
Let me be specific; I didn’t try sampling the physical delights that were on display – not because I have any moral problem with prostitution, I just know how self-consciously English I’d become. Have you ever tried playing snooker with a bendy cue? Have you ever tried playing snooker with a bendy cue when you’re playing against a professional and it’s your turn to break?
Come to think of it, how the hell did Hugh Grant ever get round to telling Divine Brown what he wanted in that LA back-street?
“I... I... I... I was wondering if you would like to... I mean, you probably wouldn’t, but... if you would like to... if you could possibly see your way clear to... perhaps... let Mr Piglet sneeze onto your tonsils?”
(You know, what’s most terrifying about that image is just how altogether believable it is.)
Right, going off the point here… prostitutes in Amsterdam. Walking around the red light district makes for auniquely weird experience. You’re confronted with street upon street of hookers behind little glass windows,making various levels of effort to jiggle their wares around to attract business. When singled out for attention Ifound myself caught halfway between ignoring them (as you’d ignore a raving derelict in the road) and politely saying “no thank you” (as you would to a Big Issue vendor). On one occasion, I even caught myself saying “not today thank you” in exactly the tone of voice you’d use to speak to your mother. That was the moment when I realised that I’m just plain not cut out for the seedy life. Time to go buy some porn and get drunk in a hash bar.
