Et tu, Buckfast?
Guinness 2.0
On Friday night I was drinking Buckfast. Maybe that in itself is not surprising. I am from west Belfast. The Buckfast I was drinking came in the form of a cocktail, served at Scarfes, the bar that lives inside the Rosewood Hotel. It was smoked Buckfast, technically, which formed, alongside naked malt, hazelnut and ‘sassy cider’, a cocktail called Poetic Justice. It was £22. I’ve become part of the problem.
But let me explain! I bought it partly out of curiosity and partly out of a suspicion that Buckfast is being gentrified and that Buckfast will soon become, along with stout and dulse (which you can now get in Whole Foods Kensington) a kind of weird Irish delicacy. I bought it specifically for this reason, actually, forcing my friend to drink in a hotel bar with me and watch a man who looked like Sting sing “Fields of Gold” accompanied by a saxophonist while around us everyone else conducted extra-marital affairs (this is kind of the vibe of all hotel bars, generally speaking). My suspicion — namely, that Buckfast is the new Guinness, a semi-ironic Irish-coded bev people drink because they think it says something about them and their preferences and their cultural clout — is still there.
Growing up Buckfast was the kind of drink you would resort to if you wanted to get blocked, not if you wanted to drink a nice cocktail whilst quietly singing along to Englishman in New York (he was really good). Buckfast is the ends that justifies the means. It gets you fucked fast, as the saying goes. It’s extremely popular, obviously, in Northern Ireland and Scotland. In Northern Ireland it’s sometimes known as “Lurgan Champagne”. At one point the Belfast Telegraph reported there was a Buckfast related crime recorded by the PSNI every 10 days. An American sommelier recently tried it via a cousin from Northern Ireland, and called it “an ungodly concoction”, one which required an exorcism to enjoy. Last December a company in Glasgow launched an off-brand Buckfast alternative, “King William fortified wine”, and got a load of orders from Belfast postcodes, presumably because their customers panicked about Buckfast being a bit too Catholic.
But recently Buckfast has been toying with a different type of reputation. Not just in cocktails in fancy hotel bars. A restaurant that also marketed Irn Bru daiquiris briefly did a Buckfast bottomless brunch (“In London, Buckie has a mythical presence,” its owner told The Sun. “Everyone has heard of it but they don’t expect to like it. When they try it, they are surprised by how much they enjoy it.”) In 2018, Forbes created a cocktail list for everything you could make with “Scotland’s trashiest drink”. Someone started a Twitter account specifically dedicated to telling people where you can find Buckfast in London, then immediately abandoned it (there’s an offies on Leather Lane that does it apparently). In the mid-2010s a TV chef, recruited by Buckfast distributor J Chandler, created an entire menu of Bucky infused dishes as part of a push to move on from the drinks ASBO reputation. At the time chef Martin Blunos said: "What I really like about Buckfast is that it is so fruity. When you cook with it the alcohol evaporates and you are left with the fruit, the spices and the vanilla. It works well. It really, really does." He really, really said that.
That was in 2015, and since then Buckfast has retained its anti- uisce beatha reputation, but given it now appears in £22 cocktails, maybe things are on the up. Maybe soon enough the Rosewood will stock bottles of King Billy, and we’ll all be drinking that and Lambrini instead of natural wine. Maybe it could develop a different reputation abroad, one that doesn’t really make sense to the people at home, like Italians considering Tennent’s craft lager.
It wouldn’t be impossible for Buckfast to become properly gentrified. Or at least properly chic. It wouldn’t be impossible to follow in the footsteps of Guinness, now apparently the UK’s most popular pint, and the kind of drink that has become a veritable personality trait, particularly for men in their 20s and 30s in London who wish to communicate a kind of inoffensive, passive chicness about themselves (see also: shopping at Uniqlo). Drinking Guinness, Finlay Renwick wrote for GQ, communicates a rejection of bouji culture, an embrace of blokecore, of being salt of the earth. And also Irishness. “Being English is fairly embarrassing,” he writes. “Being Irish, however, has recently been co-opted into something both cozy and cool. This can be seen by the recent resurgence of traditional Irish music in trendy corners of Dublin, Paul Mescal speaking his native tongue on the red carpet making the internet melt, and even a film as miserable as The Banshees of Inisherin causing people to romanticise Irishness. This fetishisation may be rooted in a two-dimensional fantasy, but the Emerald Isle undeniably has rising stock. Plus, Guinness tastes better over there.”
What the article doesn’t say, though, is that there are different types of Irish romanticism. Guinness — slogan jumpers from boutique fashion brands, cuddly, Colin Farrell loves donkeys!, Toucans, The Corrs, your post-Brexit passport (thanks Grandad), rain, mist, blessings — does not connote the same kind of Irishness as Buckfast — King Billy, Maniac 3000, lazer discos, your post-Brexit passport (thanks Grandad), Gerry Adams doing tweets, Derry Girls, we don’t take Ulster Bank tenners in here, sorry — and one is easier for English customers to romanticise than the other. Nobody has ever said “it just tastes better over there” about Buckfast or Belfast. Instead they say: “What’s that accent, are you American? Scottish?” And you say: “No I’m Irish”. And they say: “Which part of Ireland?” And you say: “Belfast”. And then they say: “Oh my god you know what I’ve never been to Belfast? Isn’t that mad? I really want to go though. I’ve heard it’s so nice now.” And you say: “Well it’s only a 55 minute flight.” But they don’t hear you because at this point they have turned back to the bar to order a pint of Guinness.
I wouldn’t actually recommend the smoked Buckfast cocktail but the Sting tribute act is worth going to.
This week I read
This week I wrote
A piece about religion in The Idol, for i-D and a report from Northern Ireland’s one and only US-style evangelical megachurch, for FT Weekend. A religion heavy era!