A New Year's Beer
On the last weekend before Christmas I went to the Mokafé bar in the Galerie du Roi, because I know they serve Bush de Noël on draught. I like to have at least one glass of Bush de Noël over the holidays, but rarely more than two. It is a very good beer and was on that occasion too, syrupy and rich and warming as a Christmas beer should be, a necessary corrective to the damp and the cold December streets.
The alcohol burned pleasantly in my chest and radiated outwards, tingling at my fingertips. The beer looks like a brandy, deeply brown and served in a large balloon of a glass. Smells like Slivovice, I thought with a shiver. Treacle too, and raisins. Sticky fudge, and right at the end just the merest hint of a floral alpine straightener lurking with intent. The longer I drink it the less carbonation remains captured in the liquid and by the final few sups it feels on my tongue like licking a baby cactus. The beer has loosened my grip on the conversation at my table and on the other goings-on of the café. I am already a little woozy and my cheeks are burning, their rosiness reflected back at me in the mirror opposite. I am warm here, and it is cold out there. I am not thinking about all the other things I should be thinking about, or whether my legs will work when I go to stand up. I am not really thinking about anything at all, just how comfortable it is in this warm room with this warm feeling slackening my stiff muscle fibres. The beer has done its job.
Two weeks later, at around 8.30pm on the evening of 1 January I went to Le Coq for my first beer of 2025. A New Year’s beer, and there is only one. It comes in a large green glass bottle and it is called Avec les Bon Voeux - “with good wishes”. At 75 centilitres, it is too big a beer to be tackled all at once by a solo drinker, but I did my best. It is an effervescent beer, burnished gold and only faintly troubled by the vaguest notion of an occluding haze. It fizzes on the tongue like orange sherbert, tangy and bright. But there is no prickliness here; this is a pillowy beer, so soft it almost vanishes, unobtrusive and deliciously transient. It is an elusive beer; it does not squat on your palate and in your nasal passages; its briskness, its essential hurried temporality encourages you to dive in and drink on. But be wary; though this is a lighter beer, in body and spirit, it is just as likely as its Yuletide counterpart to knock you on your arse and leave you cradling a sore head.
The Christmas beer might exist to satisfy an atavistic instinct towards oblivion as the days darken and the temperature drops, carrying as it does the weight of a year’s exertions on its back, and tasked with obliterating your troubles before the arrival of the new year. The task of the New Year’s beer is different. The beer is no less a reward - for good behaviour over the holidays and for as-yet unbroken resolutions. The Christmas beer brings the year to a close; it is a full stop and has the declarative power of one. The New Year’s beer is different, the capital letter at the beginning of a sentence that you’ve yet to write, a clean slate, a new start, a bright and breezy rallying cry not to waste the coming year’s unspoiled promise. It is optimistic, and sitting there in Le Coq on the first day of a year the auguries of which are discouraging, optimism feels like a radical act.
Maybe this explains why there are so many Christmas beers, and only one true New Year’s beer.