Joy of Tippling: A Salute to Bars, Taverns, and Pubs

By Ray Oldenburg

The Joy of Tippling is a toast to the importance of drinking together, crafted by the ultimate tippler. Like Ray Oldenburg's bestselling The Great Good Place, in which he coined the now-famous term "third places," his latest book is packed with factual information, humor and wit, personal insights, and sound sociological observations. The Joy of Tippling is a celebration of third places, and a call to community. Ray Oldenburg is known internationally for his book The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community, which appeared in 1989 and is presently in its third edition. He is coauthoring a fourth edition with Karen Christensen.

• "Ray Oldenburg's charming, reasoned ode to tippling and taverns—to moderate social drinking and the places where this occurs—is just the book America needs now. I wish every politician would read it and take its lessons to heart." — David Wondrich, author of Imbibe! and editor of the Oxford Companion of Spirits and Cocktails
• "Great news, tipplers! The killjoys, buzzcrushers, pinch-faced scolds, and puritans are WRONG. Knocking a couple back at the local bar is good for you. In The Joy of Tippling, sociologist and inveterate tippler Ray Oldenburg tells us why, backed up with solid research, indisputable facts and real news, all cheerfully served with dash and wit." — John Tebeau, author of Bars, Taverns, and Dives New Yorkers Love
• "Ray Oldenburg proves what wise tipplers already know: that drinking alcohol, in moderation and in warm company, is good for you. Reading The Joy of Tippling is like sitting on a barstool next to your smartest, most charming friend; it's an edifying experience you'll want to return to again and again." — St. John Frizell, restaurateur, bartender, and Men's Journal drinks correspondent
• "In The Joy of Tippling, Oldenburg turns his attention from that sacred social space known as the public house and instead focuses on the very act that brings us together—tippling. A delightful read full of anecdotes and wisdom." — Jeffrey Morgenthaler, author of Drinking Distilled
• "Here's a unique, philosophical approach to what draws us weird humans to bar culture. For those interested in delving into the what, whys, and hows, Ray Oldenburg has done thorough research into these complexities. — Amanda Schuster, AlcoholProfessor.com
• "After corresponding with Ray Oldenburg for twenty years, I've had the pleasure of visiting his favorite 'third places' with him and tippling in his home 'saloon,' hanging out with him and his friends. He's mixed his favorite drinks for me, and I gave him his first taste of baijiu, talking all the while. And that's the real point of his new book: bringing people together." — Karen Christensen, editor of the SAGE Encyclopedia of Community and publisher of The Joy of Tippling

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berkshire Publishing
• Release date: Feb 9, 2024
• ISBN: 9781614728375

Book preview

1

A Search for Community

My first plea for the return of some semblance of community in the United States was published late in 1989. The book was entitled The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day, and the core idea was that we all need a place apart from home and work where we can relax in warm company and be ourselves, outside the roles we play in the family and on the job. In such places we meet and get to know people different from ourselves, and the resulting diversity of association is favorable to the development of the individual and the hope of a unified society.

The book caught on in both hemispheres, indicating that the course of urban development worldwide leaves much to be desired. The reception of that book prompted two others as my ideas about community continued to develop. Celebrating the Third Place (2001) is a reader in which proprietors of nineteen places that serve to bring people together in happy communion describe their establishments. The book before you focuses on those places that serve alcoholic beverages, on alcohol’s effect in generating social capital, on its connection with conversation and creativity, and on its role in bringing people together.

Most of the manuscript for this book sat in my filing cabinet for over a decade, as I had reservations about its reception. A book promoting the consumption of alcoholic beverages is certain to elicit a good deal of hostile criticism in some circles of our culture. I no longer care about that. Furthermore, research is now abundantly on my side, and books encouraging the prudent consumption of alcohol have long since been in print. The groundbreaker, Dr. Morris Chafetz, produced Liquor: The Servant of Man in l965; Gene Ford’s The French Paradox & Drinking for Health came out in l993; and Andrew Barr’s Drink: A Social History of America appeared in 1999. There are more recent books, but I count these as my favorites.

The reader might well ask herself, given those titles, why another book in favor of the consumption of ethanol? Aside from the fact that the content here is decidedly different, so is the tone. I have endeavored to entertain as much as to edify. While my previous books provoked barely any criticism, this one may well reap a harvest of it, as I am promoting the habitual use of moderate amounts of alcohol—and this is the United States, where the good that alcohol does is still pretty well hidden from view in favor of scaring everyone about the danger of its abuse.

I am a sociologist by training and thus in a field in which one’s personal experiences may have an effect on one’s course of inquiry. They certainly did in mine. After graduate school I took on teaching positions in small, friendly towns where my wife and I could walk to restaurants, grocery stores, and even, at the University of Nevada at Reno, casinos. We only used the car for such occasions as gem hunting on weekends or trips to California. All the necessities of life were within walking distance, as they had been in the little town where I grew up.

Yet when we moved to Pensacola, Florida, a city plagued by sprawl, we found ourselves for the first time in a modern suburban subdivision. Here, one’s house was all-important because there was nothing but houses. Alleys had been done away with, so cars and garages were parked out in front and not attractive. The sidewalks were empty and there were few signs of life, as people seemed to be holed up in their houses. Mandated setbacks required lengthy but useless front lawns, expensive to maintain. The use value of acreage surrounding our house was zero. With nothing within walking distance, we needed two cars even before we had children. The home-to-work shuttle was my life and I hated it. On the drive to work one day, I noticed a bakery with a coffee counter and several picture windows, through which I saw working men having coffee. The next day, I left home early and stopped by. After my third visit, all the men knew and accepted me. There were nine regulars, and only two of them were in the same line of work. The chatter was rich and the laughter frequent—I never had a completely bad day after that.

On the work front, the lack of community where we lived affected me deeply enough that I abandoned the specialty known as symbolic interaction for which I had been trained. One of its major tenets was that reality is a matter of how we define it—what we agree upon in our discussions. The modern American automobile suburb took me away from that view totally. There is a physical reality in which we exist that has a profound effect on what is possible for us.

The deprivation attending life in the automobile suburb prompted the publication of The Great Good Place, in which I introduced the simple concept of the third place, a place apart from home and work where people can get together to enjoy one another’s company. Those places—corner groceries, drugstores and their soda fountains, diners, and taverns—made neighborhoods into communities where people got to know one another, where they fit in and enjoyed the social support that such community offers.

Often, when I began to describe my idea about a third place to people, they would immediately say, Oh, you mean a tavern! The sociable consumption of alcohol adds another dimension to community. Morris Chafetz called alcohol the servant of mankind and goes on to say that it barely, any longer, serves us as it has for centuries. It brought us together, from all walks of life, in drinking establishments, those perfect democracies where all were equal and in which alcohol set a mood of happy relaxation amid friendly company. In her fine essay Tavern Talk: The Decline of Political Discourse, Jacqueline Pfeffer Merrill observes that we don’t mix anymore.

While consumption rates for alcoholic beverages in the United States have changed little since the end of World War II, the amount consumed in bars, taverns, and restaurants has dropped significantly. Since the 1970s, our taverns have been in steady decline, and most of us now take our politics and our drinks at home. The tavern is a failing institution, and even the recent rise in niche joints like brewpubs and mixology bars has not helped much, since they too often replace, rather than invigorate, the neighborhood bars that generally serve a different clientele.

The isolation imposed upon us by bad urban planning, and by our own bad habits of sitting in front of the TV, seeks remedy. We are social animals after all, and research has shown that we are happiest among friends. My aim, here, is to encourage the reader to find a place and a time of day to get together with people face-to-face on a regular basis. If it’s just for coffee, OK, but that won’t do what alcohol can.

Unlike my earlier books, this one does not follow scholarly format. Citations are in the text, and there are no footnotes. Finally, because books dealing with the use of alcohol are typically heavy and admonishing, I’ve tried to make this one entertaining as well as edifying. My intention, after all, is for everyone to have a good time.

Tippling and Community

Our economy depends on a high rate of competitive acquisition of things we don’t really need but are conditioned to want. Both the corporate world and our government, at all levels, have thus done their utmost to create a consumer society, a culture hostile to community and the pleasure people derive from the company of others. For the most part, they have succeeded. Looking at the built environment since World War II, the architect Raymond Curran described it as an Open Order that affords a new freedom and a new life style. Its chief characteristics, he notes, are a high level of mobility, personal isolation, and independence from a communal context.

The most obvious community-killing strategy imposed in the United States has been single-use zoning (that is, laws that prohibit businesses from operating close to where people live, blanket prohibitions that ban not only noisy or polluting establishments but only small shops and taverns). Places where people might meet and get to know one another in residential neighborhoods are now against the law. The place on the corner where Americans once got together is today just another private dwelling; nor do we meet afoot, as suburbanites have to get into the car for everything.

In our daily newspaper, there is the Home of the Week, pictured in color, and its features are glowingly reported. Never is the use value of the surrounding area mentioned. The use value of a neighborhood refers to such beneficial facilities as drugstores, grocery stores, and barber shops that are accessible without the need to drive to them. As Raymond Curran duly noted in Architecture and the Urban Experience, homes are homes wherever they are, and what separates one city from another is the quality of the (surrounding) public domain and the experiences it offers (or denies). Most American homes are now located where there is no public domain. Our post-war suburbs are rigged for the boredom that encourages shopping.

Some years ago in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, a Canadian couple with no children bought a modest frame house in an old but quiet neighborhood. When at the bank, during closing, their financial standing became clear, the bank people were aghast—this couple could afford so much more, and every effort was made to get them to come to their senses, to no avail. The house they purchased was one block from an old neighborhood tavern that they visited regularly at day’s end and spent time having a couple of beers and chatting with the locals. That couple opted for community.

Let’s relate the choice of residential location to the desideratum of happiness or joy and its sources. In the early nineties, two psychologists, Michael Argyle and Maryanne Martin, surveyed a variety of studies to come up with the seven major sources of joy. Here they are arranged in order of importance:

1.Social contact with friends or others in close relationships

2.Sexual activity

3.Success, achievement

4.Physical activity, exercise, sport

5.Nature, reading, music

6.Food and drink

7.Alcohol

Did you notice that television is not on the list, and that is what people depend on so heavily if all they have is a house in their neighborhood? While TV makes the isolation more bearable, it also mitigates against community. Apart from the time not spent with friends, the tirades of the hate-mongers who continually discount and disparage the major media have caused major rifts between those who believe them and those who don’t. Even families have been torn apart as questions of what is true depend heavily upon one’s viewing habits.

Highly stratified neighborhoods lacking a public life are detrimental to the development of the individual. In order to grow and develop, we all need to meet and interact with a diversity of people. In small communities, that diversity is built into daily life,