Why is Beer so Important During St. Patrick’s Day?

St. Patrick's Day has entered our lives thanks to films and TV series that, if filmed in the American Northeast, have always linked at least one episode to the March 17th holiday. In reality, this holiday is very ancient and deeply rooted in Irish culture: St. Patrick is in fact the patron saint of Ireland and commemorates the arrival of Christianity in Eire during the 5th century AD thanks to Patrick, who was bishop in Ireland at the time. But why is it so linked to the cult of beer? Let's look together at this indissoluble marriage, more stars and stripes than tricolor to tell the truth.

Beer is a Protagonist of Irish Social Life

"I love St. Patrick's Day, it's my favorite holiday… because it's a religious holiday that is sanctified in bars" so says Jim Belushi jokingly in his "According to Jim" and even in comedy, he's not entirely wrong. Alcohol is part of the entire liturgy related to St. Patrick because beer is a symbol of Ireland on a par with leprechauns, shamrocks and George Bernard Shaw. Today St. Patrick's Day is the celebration of everything related to Eire and there is no doubt that beer and cider are two essential symbols of the social and cultural life of the island.

This holiday, however, is very ancient and we must not be fooled by the joyful vision that we have in the U.S., looking at it from the outside. The first St. Patrick's Days date back to 1600 to pay homage to Maewyin Succat,  the baptismal name of what would later become Saint Patrick. He is responsible for the arrival of Christianity in Ireland and this is why many date the first celebrations in his honor to the year 1000. At the same time, the first real producers of apple cider and beer also arose in Ireland, at the time under Viking rule, and the first feeble export market. England especially loved Irish cider at the time and there was a lot of trade between the two nations: the Irish began to feebly conquer the "rest of the world". The trend towards sea travel continued for centuries to come, perhaps thanks to the Viking ancestry that Ireland boasts, and small communities were formed all over the world.

The cult of St. Patrick continues to grow in influence, culminating in the 19th century: the original rites linked to the Irish national holiday are, however, deeply felt, formal, more similar to the processions we find in Catholic countries than we are used to thinking about because of our movies. And this is where the problem lies: the St. Patrick's Day we think of, with songs, dances, people dressed up as leprechauns and rivers of alcohol, is not Irish in the true sense of the word, it is American. From the early decades of the 19th century, with the surge between 1845 and 1849 due to a very serious famine, the Irish went to the New World, in particular to Montreal, Canada, and to the United States, to Chicago (where they dyed the river green), New York and Boston (where St. Patrick is also the patron saint and the shamrock and leprechaun are the symbols of the NBA basketball team, the legendary Celtics). St. Patrick's Day changed in the United States and reached the world thanks to cinema and TV: it is no longer a tribute to the patron saint but a tribute to Ireland as a whole, to its roots, to its culture, to the symbols of the country. Among these symbols there is beer: the classic dark stout reigns supreme but we find many green beers with colorants sold in every supermarket in the city. A nice way to remember your ancestors and bring Irish culture to every corner of the world, net of a few too many excesses.

The Phenomenology of Green Beer

Green beer has nothing Irish about it. It is part of those American excesses that many "original" Irish have repudiated in recent years. After the worsening of violent demonstrations, Ireland has managed to work very well on the nation's rampant alcoholism, which is not a stereotype at all but a real problem. Today, St. Patrick's Day has returned to being more composed and Irish pubs have lost a bit of that underground soul that pervaded them until the 90s in favor of a truly significant decline in alcohol-related problems.

Green beer is now almost "banned" in the country to favor the many local businesses that can make more money on a holiday. This product was invented more or less in 1920, in the United States, by Thomas Hayes Curtin, a coroner from the Bronx. Today the green is given by a harmless food coloring but at the time the coloring was wash blue. What could it be? Wash blue was a solution of iron powder incorporated with a coloring used to make dirty whites bright again. In practice it was soap. The doctor added it to the light beer and created this new and "inviting" drink. There were no cases of poisoning, so it is assumed that the toxicity level of the soap was low enough not to cause harm. In reality, the American journalist Phil Edward places the birth of this drink in 1910 in Spokane because among the advertisements of the local newspaper he found a "Green Beer be jabbers " among the announcements but he was unable to trace the recipe of the Washington bartender.