Hitting the bottle
By ALEXANDER KONDORSKY / The Russia Journal
Russians may be known throughout the world for their love of vodka, but the drink is actually a relative newcomer to the country.
Before the mid 15th century the most popular beverages were not spirits, but drinks made from grain or fruit with alcohol volumes of just 5-8 percent. I don’t know if any of these drinks could be called "beer" as we know it, but they certainly represented a similar drinking culture.
You might find it surprising, but in terms of drinking preferences the Soviet era, too, was not so much the era of vodka as the era of port.
For the Russian masses, vodka was too expensive at 5 rubles for a 0.5-liter bottle (the average monthly wage bought 30 bottles of vodka); drinkable beer was hard to find and wine was never very popular.
Port – in actual fact an awful-tasting fortified brew named after the Portuguese drink – was available at almost every food store, costing 1.5-3 rubles for a 0.7-liter bottle with a strength of 18-19 percent alcohol.
The fingers of one hand are more than enough to count the varieties of beer available in Soviet times – Zhigulyovskoye, Moskovskoye, Nasha Marka and Rizhskoye. All these beers were non-pasteurized, had alcohol contents of less than 4 percent and often perished within a week of bottling.
If they weren’t to your taste, you would have to visit a top-end restaurant to enjoy imported beer. To add insult to injury, the only way to buy a bottle of weak, stale Soviet beer was to wake at 6 a.m. and spend the first two or three hours of the day standing in line.
I must admit, there were many places to drink cheap beer, but I wouldn’t call them bars or pubs. Try to imagine a gigantic room fitted out with 10 beer-dispensing machines, 20 tables, no chairs and a crowd of about a hundred unassuming drinkers standing around the tables, chatting, smoking and eating snacks they had brought with them.
It would be no exaggeration to say that the Russians rediscovered beer in the early 1990s. It was almost shocking to see beer available around-the-clock at every corner and in a couple of dozen varieties, though most of them were imported. Almost simultaneously, beer commercials peppered TV, radio and street billboards.
That was the time when the habit of drinking beer from bottles and cans on the street, in transport, in parks, etc. – something totally alien to the Soviet era – became the norm. Simultaneously, bars and pubs sprouted like mushrooms after rain.
The 1998 financial crisis marked the end of the era of imported beers and the beginning of the reign of domestically produced ones, though many of the latter are fully or partially owned by foreign corporations (Carlsberg-Tuborg, Sun-Interbrew Inc., Efes Pilsner). More than 400 breweries operate in Russia today, employing mostly Russian staff and paying taxes to the Russian government, which is definitely a positive development.
Domestically produced beers are affordable at an average price of $0.5 per 0.5-liter bottle, while premium imported brands may cost as much as $3. Given the average wage of $134 per month, it appears to be not much of a problem for the average urban adult in Russia to have a beer or two after work.
Beer drinking in Russia has increased dramatically over the past few years, to the extent that recorded sales outstripped those of vodka last year. In Moscow, per capita consumption of beer is 40 liters annually, but we still drink five times less beer than the Germans do.
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