1968

Nineteen sixty-eight
Listen for sounds that resonate
Everything new is out of date
Coming down fast, I can't wait
You're gonna be late
You're gonna be late

Nineteen sixty-eight
Nowhere on Earth now to escape
Rock 'n' roll planet going ape
Everyone's bent all out of shape
You're gonna be late
Now is it too late?

Nineteen sixty-eight
Now is it too late?
Now is it too late?

Nineteen sixty-nine
Is looming in the mists of time
Nineteen seventy
Is gonna be the death of me

Nineteen sixty-eight
Getting high from the smoke grenades
Anarchists storm the barricades
Paris in flames, all hope fades
But is it too late?
Ain't never too late.

Nineteen sixty-six
We're turning on and turning tricks
Nineteen sixty-five
We're on the strip, getting swingers hip
To the ride of their lives

Nineteen sixty-eight
Motor City 5, Apollo 8
Rock 'n' roll planet going ape
Coming down fast, I can't wait
It's never too late
It's never too late.

(Brad Shepherd/Dave Faulkner, 2009)

1968. Apart from being the best song on the Hoodoo Gurus most recent album (best thing the stellar Shepherd/Faulkner axis have produced since The Right Time) it was also, on paper at least, a pretty fucking year. We've explored previously the thesis that Your Correspondent was deposited on this fair globe just the 30 or so years too promptly, and thus missed out on the greatest eras of music, muscle cars and most importantly of all, South Sydney dominance of the NSWRL. Seems that 1968 was itself, perhaps, the azimuth of all human endeavour. We were mere months away from stepping on the moon. The airwaves were alive with Hendrix, Cream, the MC5, the Who and the Stones. Dougie Walters had just made his debut for Australia - with a century, of course. Holden were winning Bathurst with V8 Monaros which you could crank down the nation's highways at whatever clip you felt safe for the conditions. Souths smashed Manly to win the comp. AIDS, Starbucks and Kyle Sandilands hadn't been invented yet. In short, 1968 was made entirely of fucking awesome. Apart from that whole conscription-for-the-Vietnam-war thing which sounded a bit stink.

And apart from one other thing. This bucket of slop was the best beer in the world.

NZ's Dominion Breweries, these days owned by the Heineken empire, have been making a big retro-promo splash with their 50th anniversary bring-back of the original DB Export brew, which hasn't been available in the Shakies for many summers - largely replaced by the beige, milquetoast DB Export Gold (pretty much a rebranded Export), the drinkable-but-largely-ignored Export Dry and yet another fucking low-carb monstrosity in a world of the fucking things, Export 33. Novel as it must seem today to be in a world where 'dbexport' referred to a beer and not a programming command, DB Export has a mythology to it based around its origins - the response of Dominion Breweries to the 'Black Budget' of 1958, which taxed the living suffering fragmented fuck out of the imported beers which were apparently the NZ working man's preferred tipple. In an exercise in historical revisionism unseen since Johnny Howard tried rewriting the 'black armband' view of Australian history out of school textbooks, DB have painted the introduction of DB Export as some kind of exercise in sticking-it-to-the-man, and Waitemata Brewery owner/head brewer Morton Coutts as some sort of late-50s Robin Hood or Zack de la Rocha figure. When in reality the guy just wanted to make some damn coin, for fuck's sake. Fairly heavily overplayed 90 second TVC here , longer 'doco' version as follows:



It's an entertaining enough watch, but given that New Zealand Breweries (Lion Nathan to you, or Castlemaine Perkins if you live in Quoinslaaaand) have been making exactly the same claims about Steinlager having single-handedly saved NZ from the deprivations of Nordmeyer's Black Budget for most of the last 50 years, you can take DB's claims of historical vindication with the fistful of salt (and hops) they warrant.

So yeah, the punchline to the whole story is that 10 years after DB Export hit the pubs of NZ, it was declared Best Beer In The World. What it won, to be pedantic, was the International Brewing Awards' Championship Challenge Cup for 'Best Beer In The World In Any Class'.

And having sampled a longneck of the recently-released commemorative release of said beer, I can safely say it is profoundly indifferent bilge effluvia, a very testament to the white-bread mediocrity that New Zealand was mired in up until the 1980s, and a beer that would have compelled precisely no bastard whatsoever to abandon their imported Heineken et al in favour thereof, had it not been for Arnie Nordmeyer and his puritanical taxation predilections. DB Export's award winning status stands only to remind us that international brewing awards are handed out with the same discretion and selectivity as the favours of a $2 hooker. And ever more it was the case, but particularly in the late 1960s. 1968: a year of great music, great cars, but SHIT BEER.

Still, DB also own Monteiths, so they're not complete fucking writeoffs. Who's up for a Pilsner?

The Doctor is OUT.