Icy Beer is ... Fine?

Source: Unsplash (not sure that’s a beer, but it’s the best I got.)

The kids, it seems, are engaging in shenanigans. This hot tip came from fellow non-kid Alan McLeod, and, well, here’s what the Daily Mail said about it. (In a few minutes of Googling, I have isolated this source as the journalistic patient zero).

Now, it seems younger drinkers are taking this concept a bit too literally – by adding ice cubes to their pints. A new survey has revealed that nearly three in 10 Brits aged 18 to 35 admit dropping mini blocks of ice into their lager…. The survey also found that more than a third of youngsters like popping a few ice cubes in their red wine.

Trend/clickbait reporters dutifully consulted TikTok and discovered, indeed!, some users had posted photos and videos of themselves happily adding ice to their beer. Is this a trend? An outrage? A sign of societal collapse?

Or maybe it’s just fine.

Comments.

1. This is not an important issue, even by the standards of blogging, but it does give me an opportunity to make an important point: people like what they like. I like green, which is the color of life, and I dislike orange, the color of the hot, burning sun. You may love orange, and yet no argument can offer will make me prefer it to green. That’s now how people work. Humans are creatures of unknowable, inscrutable preference. Some of them put ice in their beer. It’s okay.

2. Kids have been doing weird stuff since there were kids. Adults have been both fascinated and alarmed by children’s behavior almost as long. Throughout my life, an evergreen kind of soft newspaper article is the one that identifies a weird kid thing and discusses how it’s wrong. A lot of the young people putting ice in their beer will graduate to other things. What young people do in their 20s is not what they’ll do in their 50s.

3. As far as I can tell, most of the stories document kids putting ice in mass market lager. One described the range as “Michelob Ultra to Modelo.” When people object to icing a beer, they’re thinking of dilution, of watering down the hallowed brewer’s art. And indeed, I would probably object to someone handing me an Orval on the rocks. But mass market lagers are already pretty dilute. I mean, there’s even that joke, maybe you’ve heard it: “What do American beer and making love in a canoe have in common?”

Anyway, Michelob Ultra’s central virtue is that it tastes like mineral water—adding ice almost makes sense.

4. Come on, you would totally drink this: One of the TikTok videos shows a young woman preparing one of these offending drinks. It’s made with freshly-squeezed lime juice and beer, a lime-and-salt rim, a lime garnish, and ice cubes. This is a beer cocktail, which if memory serves were not just acceptable but en vogue in recent memory. To get really blasphemous here, I suspect that same recipe would work very nicely with a tropical hazy IPA.

This whole story has something of the feel of the Tide pod panic of ‘18, but with far smaller stakes. Are some young people icing their beer? Probably. Let them do their thing. It’s fine.