Month: June 2011

In the final minutes of “BEERTICKERS: Beyond the ale” documentary filmmaker Phil Parkin announces he still has some unfinished business.

When he began making this movie had no aspiration to be Morgan Spurlock (the protagonist in “Super Size Me”). “I never actually intended to be in the film,” he wrote in an email, “but became so ingrained in the content that I felt the viewer needed someone different, a non-ticker, to lead them through.” He set a goal to reach 500 ticks, and at the outset of the Sheffield Beer Festival he has 472.

Drinking No. 473 he talks about the lessons he has learned, but by No. 479 he is looking a little dazed as he wonders if friends who are to meet him will show up. And I’m thinking, “Dude, don’t do it.” Twenty-eight half pints (the “official” size for ticking as champion ticker Brian Moore explains at the beginning) amounts to about two gallons of beer even if you get a few short pours in there. This does not seem like a good idea.

In fact, his friends do arrive, it gets dark and the organizers call time after Parkin orders No. 492.

“Yes, I drank far too much that day, we arrived at 2 p.m. and I didn’t leave until around 12 or 1 a.m. if I remember correctly,” he wrote. “Much of that footage didn’t make the final cut. I drank far too much. Eek.”

The documentary started out to be an examination of beerticking, also known as scooping, a hobby he viewed as akin to trainspotting. It turned out to be about UK drinking culture, real ale and pubs. About a culture and people easy to care about. Maybe this makes me a hardass, but when Spurlock kept ordering to excess in “Super Size Me” I felt no empathy toward him.

When Parkin looked at his clock at 1:50 on morning and realized feeling like shit was part of the process my head also hurt. And who wouldn’t want to have a pint in a pub with Mick the Tick, listening to him play in a skiffle band in the pub where ticking may well have started?

British beer culture comes off all the better because this was not shot through a gaussian lens. Mick the Tick staggers a bit from time to time, and Dave Unpronounceable and Gazza (two of the other ticking principals) have a few rough edges.

Parkin gets a little rah-rah goofy when he visits the Thornbridge Brewery and helps brew a beer, but it works because by then he has begun to consider the difference between appreciation and accumulation. “I could have only one (beer). I wondered if it bothered the other beer tickers,” he comments before going on to the next tick.

In an email he reiterated that ticking doesn’t necessarily include keeping tasting notes, and for some “it’s all about the numbers. Quite sad in some cases as the appreciation of beer goes out of the window.”

Perhaps. But listening to Mick the Tick talk about beer I don’t really care if he can tell me if tick No. 24,612 tasted like fresh oranges on a June evening or brussel sprouts. As Parkin’s images illustrate so well, in the pub friendship, sharing and community are as important as the beer itself.

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You can find copies of “BEERTICKERS: Beyond the Ale” here and here.