Drinking with boomers – a fact-finding mission

What pub salad taught me about Britain

Last year, I woke up with a hangover so bad that I told myself I’d stop drinking. After a few months of sobriety, it turned out I had meant it. The hangover really was awful.

One thing I didn’t give up was pubs: a day spent there surely beats an hour-long slot at a cat café, no matter how well-curated the café’s Instagram. I hung out with friends and colleagues both my age and older at the pub, and didn’t fancy my chances convincing them all to join me at board game night.

As I started to stroll, instead of stagger out of pubs, I started to notice something. Boomers handle proceedings very differently to me and my friends in their early-to-mid 20s. ‘Boomer’ is a slippery concept, thanks to people who constantly use and misuse the term online, including me. I don’t really mean the generation born between (roughly) 1946-64. What I’m referring to is a state of mind, rather than age. That state of mind happens to be more common in people in their 40s or above; for our purposes, that’s the age range we can define as boomer.

In my experience, the difference in pubbing operandi isn’t simply a matter of drinking more or less. Boomers can put away tequila shots just as quickly as Gen Z might order halves. The divide is at once subtler, and broader.  

For one, there is pub etiquette. Boomers have it, while Gen Z tend to have neither knowledge nor interest in this nebulous social code. For people under 30, it extends as far as not actually, literally smashing a pint glass over someone’s head, and even that’s optional on the right night. Older drinkers, however, pride themselves on knowing the dos and don’t of a boozer. A lot of them also use the word boozer.

Perhaps the most important part of pub etiquette is getting your round in. When boomers return to the table with drinks, it’s often with a pack of crisps or two wedged between the Guinesses and lagers. A self-respecting boomer can rely on artisanal skill in slicing open bags of sea salt or cheddar & onion down the sides. These are then spread out in the middle of the table, where anyone can help themselves. Pub salad, both the term and concept, are largely missing from the collective Gen Z consciousness.

Rounds are also less popular amongst people my age. While rising living costs and flat real wage growth have made them less financially viable, we’ve also grown up with more choice. It’s harder to be sure of what everyone wants now that drinking taste has become so diversified. As soon as you need the Notes app to take the table’s order, the simplicity of a free-for-all becomes much more enticing. And what about the boring sods that have given up drinking altogether?

Sobriety is looked on with understanding in Gen Z circles, and without mercy in boomer ones. Britain’s tabloid press delights in mocking how bleeding heart touchy-feely my generation is, but it’s not without its perks. It’s hard to see how we’re the ones who overreact to everything when ordering a fruity drink can become the subject of boomer conversation for a full five minutes. God forbid you come back from the bar with a lemonade.

There is a noticeable edge to this mockery. The same edge accompanies a lot of what a pub’s older residents have to say. It’s not specifically sexist or homophobic, but jokes and jibes do tend to put up guardrails, encouraging conformity towards a noticeably male, heterosexual way of being. People who fall outside this narrow demography must adapt in order to avoid ostracism. Homophobic jokes are less acceptable around a Gen Z table. They do, at the very least, have to be jokes. It’s also more permissible for men and women in their 20s to be friends, without it receiving boomer, When Harry Met Sally-style suspicion.

Topics of conversation tend to be bleaker with boomers, for whom opportunity has, to a degree, wilted into regret. You can expect to hear about bad marriages, worse political opinions and friendships that all too soon became bereavements. Friends my age are more likely to spend their time around the table proving unwavering commitment to the bit. That’s ‘telling jokes’, for any boomers playing along at home. 

Then, there is the length of stay. Boomers will happily whittle away an entire afternoon in the pub, whereas Gen Z have places to be, and don’t tend to arrive as early or stay as long. Pub crawls and bar hopping can straddle the generational divide, but skew more millennial and Gen Z. 

Finally, there is leaving the pub. This is usually a quiet affair with boomers, who are aware their lairiest nights are behind them. People my age are more prone to kicking at something, or singing about the drunkest member of the group.  

This back-of-the-envelope anthropology gets, lazily, at key traits of each generation, and the Britain in which they were raised. Gen Z are restless and keen to move onto something new, which promises to be better than what we already have. Dire financial conditions have atomised us: it is pricier for people my age to look out for each other than it was for boomers. Gone are the days of rounds and pub salad.

Boomers, on the other hand, take it slow. Over the course of their longer lives, they have accumulated gradual losses from which they never recovered. In some cases, this has made them calloused. Equally, they now put greater value in the people who’ve stuck around, and the places where they can still congregate. There is not as much FOMO when there’s fewer friends to MO on than there used to be.

Since Brexit, age has become a bigger source of disagreement. YouGov described it as “the biggest dividing line in British politics”, in reference to the substantial electoral cleavages (yes, really) in the 2016 referendum and 2017 and 2019 general elections. A lot of pubs only cater to one age group. Even in ones that serve both students and boomers, media wankers and just regular wankers, the two groups drink in opposite corners, keenly aware of who outnumbers who. In the midst of this generational Cold War, I’m grateful for my time behind enemy lines. I’ve gained perspective on the type of person I want to be, and a couple of the types I don’t.

If pubs never existed and were thought up today, the financially unthinkable emphasis on socialising would likely stop them from ever being invented. While Americans lament the lack of third places – spaces to gather beyond the home or office – we have one woven right into our cultural fabric. For as long as that’s still the case, we’re lucky.