A Barman

Pouring pints for thirsty tourists, defusing situations with drunk patrons, and finding flow in the Friday night rush with Brian Wynne, a barman in Dublin. What caused one customer to throw a dog at Brian? And what is "craic"?

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Transcript

Dan: Brian Wynne is a barman in Dublin, what we'd call a bartender here in the States. And he's the kind of guy who needs no introduction, not because he's famous, but because...

Brian: As Michael Crichton said, I do sometimes suffer from a “deplorable excess of personality."

Dan: No, he needs no introduction because he can introduce himself perfectly well.

Brian: I'm a friendly, kind of an outgoing chap. I've become friends with people easily, you know? That's what makes me, um, fit the bar trade so well is that, uh, I'm extremely likable, I'm incredibly handsome... intelligent, witty, you know? I am the most humble man in Ireland.

Dan: He's worked at a brew pub called The Porterhouse for 20 years. It's not the stereotypical Irish pub you might be imagining with-

Brian: The roaring fire and the, the old man asleep with the red nose at the bar and the dog on the floor licking a bowl of beer.

Dan: It's in a well-known touristy district of Dublin called Temple Bar.

Brian: We've got, one, two, three, four, five floors. We can hold about 450-odd people. Two bars.

Dan: Oh, so this place is huge.

Brian: It's a good shop. It's all wood and regret really is what it is, you know?

Dan: It's the kinda place a tourist might wander into and ask for a pint of Guinness. But, for three decades, this Dublin bar didn't sell it.

Brian: We've been open since '96 and we put our first Guinness tap in three weeks ago. We make an equivalent porter. When I say equivalent, I mean it's vastly superior, of course, but I can't say that. I'm sure your lawyers will have a go at you for allowing me to say that kinda thing.

Dan: Unfortunately, they found that tourists still wanted Ireland's most famous beer.

Brian: I suppose it's like the Paris syndrome, you know, when the Japanese tourists come to Paris and they expect it all romance and it's just covered in graffiti and smells of piss. So when the French tourists comes in to me and asks me for a Guinness and I say we don't sell the stuff, it ruins their stereotype, it bursts their bubble.

Dan: Right. Well, congratulations on the first, how has the first three weeks of Guinness sales gone?

Brian: Oh, it's outselling everything else we have.

Dan: Is it really?

Brian: By miles. Yeah. It's, um, I've... Look, there it is, you know? It's a decent product. It absolutely flies out. You spend 20 years explaining to people why we don't sell Guinness 'cause our products are superior and more Irish, and you make jokes about it, and I have so many anecdotes and lines all built up about the sale of Guinness, which we don't have, and then we do have it in, and every time somebody asks for it, for the first few weeks anyway, it was just this, "Ugh. Guinness."

Dan: I'm Dan Heath, and this is What It's Like To Be... In every episode, we walk in the shoes of someone from a different profession, an interior designer, a stadium beer vendor, a summer camp director. We want to know what they do all day at work.

Today, we'll ask Brian Wynne what it's like to be a barman. We'll talk about the delicate art of cutting someone off when they've had too much, what he's learned about reading people after three decades behind the bar, and how he handles customers who try to order a Budweiser. Stay with us.

So how did you get into bartending in the first place?

Brian: My dad was a sales rep. He sold soft drinks. So, like, the whole county, that's 200 different pubs. And he'd be driving around to them all selling his wares to them, and he just got to know every barman and publican and publican's wife up and down the whole part of Leinster, the province we live in. And, um, I wouldn't have been the most academic of children, and I basically failed every exam ever put in front of me in school. So my father looked at me like I'm some sort of idiot... A wise man, to be fair, you know? I'm clearly some sort of an idiot, so perhaps I should try something that required less academia, you know, something that required very little thought. So basically, he said, "We'll have to get you a job." So he went into one of the pubs and said, "Will you take my stupid child in?" So they took me in and I sorta failed from bar to bar until... It's a tough hell job to walk into and be good at, 'cause mostly it's about life experience that makes you better, you know, being able to judge people and judge little things and how to react accordingly. So, God, you could spend years in a bar as a completely useless kind of a passenger until you just get it one day, you know?

Dan: What was the hardest thing for you to learn as a young man?

Brian: Oh, God. A basic work ethic. Keep moving, do stuff, be proactive at all time, just work. Your boss man pays you per hour, so if you've done nothing for a half an hour, well then, what are you doing? Move, keep going. I suppose after a while you learn a bit about how to read people and... 'cause that is the main thing, that's your main... the purpose of a bartender, you know?

Dan: Is to read people...

Brian: Yeah, to be the kind of the soul of your pub. If you walk in... I mean, every pub's the same really at the end of the day, you know? It's just a bar, a stool, and some drink. But what would make some bars better would be the guy or the girl behind the counter who's got a bit of craic about them. They can listen to your stories, they can give you advice, they can ignore you. They can, you know, do whatever it takes to make you feel that you're comfortable there for however long you're gonna sit there, and that's the kind of people reading skills that I came to much later. I wasn't much good at that stuff in my early 20s.

Dan: I don't feel like many bartenders in the US are paying a lot of attention to the people side of things. Like, here you just walk in and you order a drink and you pay and that's pretty much it. But it sounds like you're paying closer attention to social stuff.

Brian: Oh, God. I mean, if a person comes into your pub and sits at the bar and asks for beer and you give him beer and then you walk away from him, you know, what makes him come back?

Dan: Mm-hmm.

Brian: How do I get the rest of his money into my till? Which, let's, let's call a spade a spade here, that's the craic here really, isn't it?

Dan: Now, you've used the word "crack" a couple of times. What does that word mean?

Brian: Ugh. Just, do you know something, Dan? I'll tell you this much, I have done whole theses on explaining to Americans what the word "craic" means.

Dan: Oh, good. Let's do this. Let's do the lecturette on craic. And, and how d- i- is that "crack" like C-R-A-C-K?

Brian: It's C-R-A-I-C is how it's spelled.

Dan: C-R-A-I-C. Okay.

Brian: Yeah, yeah. I'm sure now I can look at the sound engineer as well, he's half, he's half listening thinking, "Oh, he's not gonna tell him what the craic is." You won't get it. You don't understand, you can't get it. You know what it is, but I can't explain it to you.

Dan: It's... I'm genetically incapable by virtue of being an American.

Brian: Well, it's cultural, man. It's not genetics.

Dan: Just give me a peek in the window, even if I can never access it directly.

Brian: Do I pull back the curtains for this man?

Dan: Yeah, yeah. Just a little bit.

Brian: Your man's saying I should. Right. Okay. If you ask Google what the craic is, Google won't know. "Hey, Google, what's the craic?" "I can't answer that question." "What is the craic" is a greeting in this country. "How are we getting on?" "What's the craic?" At its most base level, the craic, it would be just a combination of the fun, you know, any story you wanna tell me? What have you been doing today? Have you had good craic? Yes, I had good craic. It was good fun. It's the personal enjoyment you get from the engagement with somebody else that you get on with someone you find funny would be, "Your man's great craic." Or you meet somebody who comes in, "Oh, that guy's absolutely no craic. Your man's absolutely s*** craic."

Dan: No craic... That's like the ultimate insult.

Brian: Ah, he's a mood hoover, you know? "That guy over there's a..." "He's a craic vacuum." You, you know you meet people in the course of your daily life that are just so dull?

Dan: A mood hoover. That's my favorite new phrase.

Brian: Yeah, but that's the thing, man. See, you wander into the pub, you come up to the bar, you and your buddy are there. You finish work, it's been a long hell day, and you sit at the bar counter and the barman comes over. "Hello, chaps. How are yous? Two pints." Grand, you put up the two pints. And the two men are sitting there staring into space. You know when you get that 10,000-yard stare sometimes after you've had a long day, and you do not want to interact with any other humans until you've had your, uh, your medicinal pint? And that's when the barman wobbles over to you, you know? "How we getting on, lads? What's the craic?" "All right, Brian. How are you?" "Oh, I'm grand." "Any jokes for me, lads?" And then there's that moment of silence when if you ask anyone to tell you a joke, they always stop. They always stop and go, "I don't know any jokes." "But you do know a joke. Tell me a joke." "I don't know any jokes." "Tell me..." And then you tell them a joke, and then they tell you a joke, and you walk away, and they're laughing. They're having a bit of craic, and then everyone's happy, and then they come back tomorrow for a pint again, you know?

Dan: I've got, uh, two young girls, so I know a lot of, like, kid jokes. You wanna hear a kid joke?

Brian: They're the best jokes. They're the best jokes.

Dan: So a photon is checking into a hotel, and the, uh, the bellman comes over and says, "Hey, can I help you with your luggage?" And the Foton says, "No, I'm traveling light."

Brian: Mm-hmm. That's a good joke.

Dan: That did... That did nothing for you?

Brian: I'm laughing on the inside.

Dan: That joke lacked craic. I need to up my game. 

Brian told me that the majority of customers at his bar are tourists. You would think he would get sick of dealing with them day in and day out, but he genuinely seems to enjoy them.

Brian: Especially Americans. They love coming to Ireland, sitting in a bar, and talking to an Irishman. And I'm an insufferable talker. I talk nonstop.

Dan: So is it sort of like having a warm audience every day you go to work?

Brian: Oh, God, you put that so well. Yes. It's almost like having a warm captive audience. You know, I often think about that guy that lives in Austria who chained his entire family to a basement downstairs 'cause he just wanted to talk to somebody. But I don't want them to talk to me. In fact, I just want them to listen. That's what it is.

Dan: Do American tourists ever come into the bar and order, like, a Budweiser?

Brian: It does happen. It does happen, um...

Dan: Do you shout them out the door?

Brian: No, no, the first thing they will do is they will get the eyebrow, which you can't see, but... You know the way The Rock does that thing with his eyebrow?

Dan: Mm-hmm.

Brian: I can do that with both of them individually. You know, so you got the inquisitive eyebrow and the desultory eyebrow and then the disappointed eyebrow.

Dan: And the Budweiser gets which of those?

Brian: Well, in that order.

Dan: Okay .

Brian: You know?

Dan: It's the full cascade of emotional judgment.

Brian: Uh, it's odd. My eyebrows decide to have a little... have a moment all their own. They all do a little macarena on top of my head. But look, the thing with Budweiser as an example is, I mean, that's factory beer. If you ask me for Budweiser, I'll say, "Well, I've got Budějovice," which is the original of that, you know, the Czech Budvar, the original of that species of thing. And I have that, and they always say, "Well, is it the same thing?" And I say, "Well, it's the original." It's not the same at all. It tastes like beer, whereas Budweiser just tastes like regret.

Dan: But he's not just chatting it up with tourists. He's also got a whole cast of local characters who he keeps track of.

Brian: I mean, I know the names of so many people, like hundreds of random strangers. I know their names. I couldn't tell you their second names. I don't know what they do for a living. I don't know what they do when they walk out the door. But when they walk in the door, oh, "Here's Pat The Grimace. He drinks a pint of that stuff. Oh, there's John The Smelly. He drinks a pint of that stuff." You have little nicknames for all these people, of course, just so you can remember them all.

Dan: Do they know their nicknames, or are those for you?

Brian: God, no, they don't.

Dan: I think Pat knows now what his nickname is, unfortunately.

Brian: My good man, this is Ireland. There's a lot of Pats in my bar. You know, let's be frank here.

Dan: Fair point. Fair point.

Brian: Yeah, that's the kind of thing. So you know when certain fellas come in, oh, there's those two chaps. They'll be coming in, quick pint after the cinema, two retired men. I know what they're gonna drink before they do sometimes. They wander in, you see them humming and hawing at the bar. "I don't know, what do you want?" "Oh, I don't know. What are you having today?" "Oh, lads, do you know what yous want? Couple of pints of plain to sort yourselves out, and then you can have a fancy IPA." "Oh, sure, Brian. Good man yourself. Oh, two pints, that's all." And then they're happy, and that's it. They would've decided that anyway. I've just, you know, ironed out the creases in the conversation, made that happen, and then moved on, easy-peasy.

Dan: And do you ever try to get strangers talking to each other?

Brian: Oh, constantly. That's the trick. Um, I once... There was a girl sat at the bar, extremely attractive middle European woman, classy, really bright, good craic about her. She came and sits at the bar, and then this other... I don't want to say it out loud, but a man lacking in gorms sat beside her, and I got them talking together. And they're still going out. That was before COVID, so that's five years ago.

Dan: Wow, you were a matchmaker.

Brian: Yeah, those two people are still going out together. They come in occasionally, and the man always makes a point of giving me the nod, you know? "How we getting on?" You know, that kind of a... "Good man yourself." Yeah, that kind of stuff. Uh, that, that makes my day, you know, if I can, um, just inject myself a little bit into their lives and make it a little bit better.

Dan: Walk us through, like, a, a typical day. Like, what are your hours? What are the busy times? Give us a slice of life.

Brian: So my working week would be... I'm off every Wednesday, Thursday. I've had Thursday off my entire adult life. It's a thing I remember in my first bar. Um, I was in the UK, and the bar manager asked, "What day you want off?" And I said, "Can I have whatever day you want plus Thursday?" So then come Friday, which will be a good, busy day, I can hit the ground running on Friday, you know?

Dan: Mm-hmm.

Brian: Full of beans. I've had a day off. So we'll say Friday, I come back after my two days off, and I'm relaxed, and I'm full of cheer and full of optimism and hope for the weekend and optimism and hope for humanity. I really feel that the world is turning its corner and we're gonna be going well. And then you walk into the bar, and you see all the boys and girls behind the bar counter and... I'll start work about 5:00 on a Friday evening, and then I'll just hammer me way through until we stop serving about 2:00 in the morning. So by about half three, I've got my medicinal pint in front of me, and then I get a bus home. I'm home for about 4:00, and then it will be either, A, I will sit and watch a bit of football that my lovely wife will have recorded, or I will just sort of stare into the darkness for a while before I go to bed.

Dan: That's a long time, 5:00 to... You know, you're winding down at 4:00 in the morning.

Brian: Yeah, yeah, but that's the job, you know? That's Friday. Saturday's the same. Sunday I'd finish, I suppose, by half one. I'm having my medicinal pint. I could be home for 2:00, you know? Get home, get in, and then, you know, euphemistically slice a toast, cup of tea.

Dan: Is there a physical toll of the job? I mean, that's just a lot of hours on your feet.

Brian: Yeah, yeah, there's a physical toll. So again, I'm nearly 50. I'm in pretty good shape for a man of my age. I don't do exercise. I don't go to the gym. But, like, I've been on my feet my entire adult life. Both of my feet work. My knees aren't too bad. Hips are getting a bit, um, recalcitrant, a touch noncompliant in the mornings. But other than that, you know, the only real problems... Uh, like, you know, they get the... You get your, uh, your right shoulder 'cause, you know, between the, the pouring of the pints and the lift the thing over the... onto the bar counter, it's all with the right hand if you're right-handed, so it's just that constant movement.

Dan: Oh, gosh, I didn't think about all those repetitive motions, like, and, and they're all on one side of the body. That's interesting.

Brian: Well, it... Yeah, that's the thing. Like, my wife's been... She's worked in the same pub I worked in. She's worked in that pub since it opened in '96.

Dan: Hmm.

Brian: And she's about five foot one, five one and a half, I should say, I suppose, just in case she ever listens to this. And our bar is quite high, and then the counter mounts, sort of the unit that the taps are attached to on the bar is also quite high. So she really has to reach over to put a drink down. And over the course of 30-odd years, you know, the, um... She sort of worn down the rotator cuff in her right shoulder, so she's... Essentially, she retired last year.

Dan: Wow.

Brian: Yeah, just because the basic wear and tear on the body, she just couldn't do it anymore, you know?

Dan: So give us a sense of some of the day-to-day operational challenges that you're dealing with as a barman.

Brian: Oh, the most basic things. When your beer stops pouring out of your tap and you run down, the young lad's gone down to change the keg, he comes across a simple problem. To me, it's hardly a problem, but to him, you know, it's like looking at a nuclear reactor. You know, you get a lot of kids, when you go into the cellar, it's just, "Oh, God." Especially with us because it's craft beer. All of our sort of mechanics, the gas systems and the tapping heads, the thing that clips onto the top of the barrel to let the beer out into the beer systems and that the gas pushes it through, in 99% of pubs, they are the same. They're utterly identical 'cause they're all being supplied by Diageo, the people who own Guinness.

Dan: Mm-hmm.

Brian: Whereas with us, it's not, 'cause we'll have kegs of beer from Moretti, Chimay, Sierra Nevada, um, English breweries. We've got different types of connectors, different types of beer line, different kinds of everything. So it's not quite the same, so that kind of basic problem-solving.

Dan: Hey folks, Dan here. Here’s a question for you: Do you ever want to share anything with our guests? We don’t typically share our guest’s contact info, because we haven’t cleared that with them. But maybe it’s worth an experiment with this episode: Like, if you have something you’d like to share with Brian – the barman I’m interviewing now… maybe it’s a reflection or an appreciation or a comment, just send it to me at dan@whatitslike.com and I’ll forward it and make sure he sees it. I can’t promise he’ll respond, obviously – he’s a busy guy– but he’ll see it. And if it turns out this is something that you all really enjoy doing, we’ll work out a simpler way to make it possible in the future. But, for now, let’s get back to it.

I wanted to ask you, I mean, you've spent your whole career around alcohol. How has it changed your perception of alcohol?

Brian: Well, it pays my mortgage. It's that.

Dan: Mm-hmm.

Brian: Um, as I mentioned, I drank an awful lot when I was a kid. Uh, I would say in my 20s. Just because it was easy, it's there, you know. It's great fun and, "Oh, look at me, aren't I great?" And I spent about two years working in this cocktail bar which was just full of lads, you know, lot of machismo, you know, a lot of dudes running round as flair bartenders and all that jazz, and we were encouraged to drink. You'd be encouraged to give shots to any pretty girl comes to the bar, you don't charge them for shots, give them an ou- shot of something. A room full of pretty girls, you'd have a room full of lads before long. So I spent those two years blind drunk, and it just became an awful habit. The next couple of bars I worked in after that, the boss didn't mind drinking. I randomly, and I mean randomly, found myself living in Cyprus, and, geez, I was drinking about a bottle of rum a day in the, in that bar.

Dan: Wow.

Brian: Oh, God, a bottle of... Well, it wasn't Bacardi, but it was a, a local variant on the theme of cheap white rum.

Dan: Mm-hmm.

Brian: It would s*** the bed, man, I was drinking a bottle of that a day. And then, the various adventures and random ports of call in various other spots, I found myself in Dublin where you cannot drink when you're working.

Dan: Oh, is that right?

Brian: Yes, it is very much so.

Dan: Huh.

Brian: You know, if the boss man saw you drinking when you're working-

Dan: So...

Brian: ...you wouldn't be long working there.

Dan: I had no idea.

Brian: Yeah. Now, I know there are still places where, you know, the barman might have a, like a half a glass of beer later on when it's, you know, after it's too busy or maybe a, a little whiskey on his break or a pint on his break, whatever. But it's not the kind of thing where you're serving away and you've got your drink on the side that you're constantly sipping out of. You know, it's not that kind of... You can't really be at that 'cause you're dealing with cash as well, you know? And that's important. Plus you're dealing with people. It's very hard to refuse somebody when you're half-cut yourself.

Dan: So if people offer to buy you a drink, you have to decline it?

Brian: Well, if somebody says, "Can I buy you a drink?" I'll always go to a joke first and say, "No, no, but I'll take the cash." Or else I'll say, "Yeah, but I'll, I'll have it after work." We're lucky enough where we work that the guy that owns the pub allows us, uh, we've like a staff price button for, for booze, so we can have a drink after work. We don't have to pay full price for it. So when a punter comes up and asks, you know, "Can I buy you a drink, pal?" I go, "Yeah, yeah," and I'll just ring up a staff pint, whatever it is, and-

Dan: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Brian: ... you know, uh, so it's on his receipt. He says, "Yeah, that's good of you." And it's... I'm not taking... I mean, a pint in Dublin now is knocking nearly eight euros, so I'm not taking eight euros off a guy just 'cause I told him a joke when all he really wanted to do was give me a two-euro coin, you know?

Dan: Mm-hmm.

Brian: So I'll just take a, take one drink and I'll have it afterwards. I sometimes I don't even have it, you know? I just take for it and then I forget about it and whatever, 'cause I don't feel, um... I suppose the fun in booze is kind of gone for me. I like the taste of the stuff, but I don't wanna go out... I don't go out drinking anymore, you know? I very rarely have more than three or four drinks any time I go out.

Dan: I wanted to talk to you about just dealing with people when they're drunk. How have you learned to handle those situations?

Brian: Oh, delicately.

Dan: Yeah.

Brian: Well, do you know, so the cliche of a room full of drunken people, uh, uh, it isn't that bad. If you walk into my bar and you've got... you've already had a couple of pints, I probably won't serve you.

Dan: Really?

Brian: Oh, 100%.

Dan: How do you, how do you know when someone has kind of past the line?

Brian: Uh, how do I know?

Dan: I mean, I guess 35 years will, will educate you on your, your instinct.

Brian: Uh, y- yeah. If you're... Do you drive, Dan?

Dan: Mm-hmm.

Brian: You're driving along in your car and it's on a busy road and the car in front of you is weaving ever so slightly, hardly enough that you'd notice, but you've noticed it.

Dan: Yeah.

Brian: You just ease off and let him move ahead of you.

Dan: Mm-hmm.

Brian: You know? You mightn't even notice you've done it, but you've done it.

Dan: That's a great analogy. Yeah. What do you think it is that you're noticing about people?

Brian: The way they move, the way they're interacting with everything around them. The fellow who walks up to the door and yanks it open and storms in like he's, you know, the CEO of a company who's coming in to give out to his underlings. You know, "Hang on a second here, captain, this is my bar." You know? Or, um, the fella who walks in and lets the door close on his, on his girlfriend or his wife.

Dan: Right.

Brian: Ah, I've got that fella pegged, you know. In my mind, I've got a little notepad out and I'm real marking his cards. Little things, it's just the little things, you don't even notice you're noticing, but you do notice them.

Dan: When Brian does spot someone who's had too much, he's become expert at charming them out the door with them barely even realizing it.

Brian: There's a chap that I know, I won't mention his name, he won't listen to this, but I won't mention his name. Tommy. Tommy comes into the pub last week and he's absolutely ossified. He's full of pints. He's a barman who works around the corner. He's a man of a certain age. And I'm thinking, "Oh God, look at the state of Tommy." And he's one of these men when he's drunk, he just looks like he's focusing so hard on everything around him, but all he's doing is just trying to remain upright. And he stands in front of a wall staring at this wall for a good 40, 50 seconds, and he's just standing there looking at it. And I know what he's trying to... he's trying to focus himself to walk up to the bar [unintelligible]. I know what's coming. But as he's standing there, I realize he's taken out his cigarettes and he's trying to light one of his cigarettes inside at the end of the bar facing a wall. He has no idea where he is. And it's illegal to smoke cigarettes in Ireland in a pub. So he's standing there trying to light a cigarette, but he's got the wrong end of his cigarette lighter. So I just wander over to him, put my arm around him and I turn the cigarette lighter around. He sees the spark, looks at me, I take the cigarette, and I lead him out the door like you'd lead a horse with a sugar cube. I lead him out the door with his cigarette, he gets outside, I pat him on the shoulder and say, "Tommy, I'll see you tomorrow." "Oh, oh, okay." And off he scatters. And that's it. Easy peasy. He'll be back in tomorrow. He won't even remember.

Dan: How often do you have to cut someone off or, or deny them what they ask for? Like, every shift?

Brian: Yeah, maybe, maybe every four out of five shifts-

Dan: Okay.

Brian: ... I will kind of have to, "Listen here, chief. I think you've had enough."

Dan: And how do people respond to that? Are, are most people sort of quiet and accepting of it, or do you get blowhards?

Brian: Uh, you get, you do get a lot of people who don't take it... "Well, what do you mean by that?" And, "Whose decision is that?" "It's my decision, buddy." "And who are you to make this decision?" "I'm the barman." "But you're only just a bloody barman. What would you know about it?" You're thinking, "Well, you're just answering your own questions here, captain. So, you know, you're not going to get a drink. Have a bit of dignity, chief. Stand up and walk out the door. You can come back tomorrow. Good night. Take care of yourself." You know, I have a little scar on my forehead why I refused a fellow once, uh, in a room that had a snooker table. So he, he had one of the balls in his hand, and he lashed my forehead with this snooker ball. Knocked me spark out.

Dan: Oh.

Brian: Yeah.

Dan: You were knocked out?

Brian: With a snooker ball, yeah.

Dan: Oh.

Brian: He was, he was standing about two meters from me when I said to him, "Look, you know, enough's enough, mate." He just sort of pitched it and clocked me in the head, and I landed straight back down on me back.

Dan: Yikes. Does that kind of thing happen regularly? Like, how often do you feel like you're physically at risk?

Brian: So I'm 30 odd years behind a bar. I've been hit maybe four or five times in those 30 years.

Dan: Hmm.

Brian: You know, I've had... Yeah, you get... I had one fella throw a dog at me once.

Dan: Threw a what?

Brian: He threw... He had a little dog. This little old dog.

Dan: I've never heard of someone throwing their dog as a projectile.

Brian: Ah, this little old man, and he had a tiny little dog, and the smell of the dog was unholy. And ye man was absolutely afloat to the back teeth with pints. So I said to him, "Look, you've had enough now, horse. You know, maybe wander off and come back tomorrow, or go home and wash up and come back or something anyway." And he goes, [unintelligible], The teeth are rattling around. "You came to me..." And he threw his dog at me, and I caught the dog, to be fair. Oh, it smelled like wet carpet and socks and stuff and ugh, bleh.

Dan: Bartending can be a dirty job. Brian's had to clean up situations that would make most people quit on the spot.

Brian: There's a lot of stairs in my pub. It's a pub made of stairs, really. So I'm be the longest serving person in that bar by quite some time. And I suppose when you're in a bar long enough, nothing surprises you.

Dan: Mm-hmm.

Brian: You know? If something truly extraordinary happened, you might, "Huh, that's a new occurrence. Hmm." And then you just deal with it, you know? So, um, this fella once was coming down the stairs in front of the main bar, and he was acting the maggot. And he, uh, he was trying to walk down the stairs backwards, showing off to somebody, and he missed a step, and he fell about 10 steps down onto a concrete granite floor-

Dan: Oh.

Brian: ... and opened his head up like a watermelon.

Dan: Oof.

Brian: Like, there was a splat. So all the other kids behind the bar freaked out. And one young fella that was working me, he tried to convince everyone he was the hardest man in Ireland. You know, he did a bit of boxing, this kind of truly heroic individual inside of his own head. In the narrative that he built up around himself, this man was a legend. Anyway, this fella fell down the stairs and smashed his head open, so that young fella fell to his knees and vomited on the floor in front of everybody. So now I've got three young girls crying. My barman is on the floor vomiting onto this guy's pool of blood.

Dan: Oh.

Brian: And my first thought was, "Well, for f*** sake, who's cleaning up all of that f*** mess? Oh, that's gonna be me, isn't it?" We... Uh, an ambulance, uh... There was a paramedic in the pub drinking. She comes over. One guy come over and goes, "You have to move him. You have to turn him on his side." "But the man's bleeding profusely from the back of his head. We're not moving him." Anyway, this woman comes over, we fix him up, but I'm down on my hands and knees then scrubbing this man's blood and bits of brain and bits of bone.

Dan: Bits of brain.

Brian: This other geezer's... O- His lunch is all over the floor, and there I am on my hands and my knees in my nice freshly ironed white shirt, you know, cleaning all this up with a, a nail brush, you know?

Dan: It's a glamorous job, isn't it?

Brian: And I'm looking at Tom Cruise in Cocktail, thinking, "That's what I want to be doing." You know? "I wanna be in a room full of people beside Bryan Brown flinging bottles around, getting the glad eye off every female in the room," you know? No, here I am on the floor mopping up blood. Yeah, love it, thanks. Thanks, God.

Dan: So Brian, we always end our episodes with a quick lightning round of questions. Here we go. What is a word or phrase that only someone from your profession would be likely to know, and what does it mean?

Brian: Have you ever heard of a woman's revenge?

Dan: A woman's revenge? No.

Brian: A woman's revenge. Um, it's a shot. It's not a real shot. You give it to somebody that, uh, would be annoying you, you know? "Have a shot." "I don't want a shot." "Okay, I'll do a shot if you do a shot," and you give them a shot of cordial, lime cordial or something, with a shot of Baileys. So you put the Baileys in your mouth, you throw the cordial on top of it, and it just curdles instantly. Honest to God, I don't know what it might taste like, but I can imagine it tastes like an unused condom in, in your mouth. Or maybe a big mouthful of snot or something. It's gross. Ugh.

Dan: That is disgusting.

Brian: You know?

Dan: And so that's a way that a woman that is receiving unwanted attention can get revenge, that's the idea?

Brian: That's... Yeah, that's where that come from.

Dan: What is a sound specific to your profession that you're likely to hear?

Brian: Breaking glass.

Dan: Mmm, that's a good one.

Brian: Do you know what? A fella said this to me years ago. "If you were looking for a barman, break a glass." And, I mean, you could be anywhere. You could be watching the Super Bowl in wherever. You drop a pint glass on the floor and it breaks, and you look at the crowd, and you'll see randomly these little heads will pop up like a little meerkat, you know? Little prairie dogs. It, it's like a head been dragged up out of the crowd by its eyebrows.

Dan: So it's just like a Pavlovian response. Like, when you hear that sound-

Brian: That's exactly-

Dan: Yeah.

Brian: ... what it is. Ah, all my life, anywhere in the world, I'm in a supermarket and somebody drops something, my first thought is, "Where's the brushing pan?" You know? 'Cause a barman's job is 35% cleaning anyway at the best of times.

Dan: What's an aspect of your work that you consistently savor?

Brian: What I love about my job and my favorite part of it would be, let's say Friday night about eight o'clock in the evening. I have a load of people in front of me. They all want pints. They all know how to order. They all know how to queue correctly. They are already with their payment in front of them. And I've got no other barman beside me. And I am flat out. A fella once described it to me as almost looking like I'm operating like a musical instrument. Just up and down.

Dan: Mm.

Brian: Pint glasses. Beer pouring. There's ice going into the air into a glass. There's a piece of lemon gone over my shoulder into a glass. When you get into that flow, those couple of hours in the middle of your shift, let's say everyone else just breaks are going on and you're just there on the bar on your own, it doesn't happen that often, but when it does, it's such a thrill to get through so much work and to enjoy it, you know?

Dan: And it's interesting that you're highlighting a time when you're at your capacity. You know, it's not the calm time when you're just chatting with some charming patron. It's the time when you're kind of at the limit of what you can do.

Brian: Oh, absolutely. Flat out like a lizard on a rock. That and then... I suppose I wouldn't be that typical 'cause, like, we have a lot of brass in our pub that needs polishing, and every now and again there's this... We've got a, an old-fashioned hand pump, you know? The old hand pumps for drawing beer up out of the cellar. And the top of that's brass, so I like to shine that little knob.

Dan: Why?

Brian: 'Cause it makes me happy. When I shine the handles to drawers behind the bar, and they're made of brass, when I shine them and they look shiny, it makes me happy. And they're the little things, you know. And it wouldn't bother me at all that the owner comes in and doesn't see the fact that these little details are done. He sees the big picture and everything's working out. Whereas if I walk into your pub, and I see that that bit of metal hasn't been polished, I think, "Oh, you're not really taking this as seriously as you can."

Dan: Brian Wynne is a barman in Dublin. He's been doing it for 30+ years.

Brian is so clearly a master of the job, and so clearly thrives doing it, it made me wonder, why? How do we account for the fit of a person in a job like this? Here's what I was thinking about. What if there are three levels of work?

Level One is just the basics of the job. To be a barman, you gotta pour drinks, take money, change kegs, clean up, deal with drunks. And a lot of people can get stuck in Level One. The job is the job. It stays the job.

Versus Level Two is about redefining the job. So, in Brian's hands, he starts to take ownership over not just the dispensing of drinks, but how it feels to be in his pub, and that brings out his performer instincts. He's funny, he's attentive, he's charming. He is the world champion of craic. He makes you want to come back, and that's good news for him and for the pub.

And Level Three is really about savoring. I thought it was so beautiful when he talked at the end about polishing the brass beer pumps. That's not a demand of the job. I mean, probably no one but him even notices, not even the owner. That's pride at work. Remember the Christmas tree farmer a while back and how he hand-shears every tree on the lot? In work like that, you've achieved such mastery that you start to cherish the little details. You're measuring yourself against your own standards. And that's where Brian is.

Keeping the beer flowing, sparking conversations among strangers, cleaning up nasty spills and broken glass, and making your pub a place with good craic. Folks, that's what it's like to be a barman.

A shout-out to recent Apple Podcasts reviewers, Go Atomick Adventures, Dogfather05, Happy10531, BCox0424, Entiendo?, and LRE Reviews.

Special thanks to Johnny Campbell for introducing us to Brian. Thank you so much.

This episode was produced by Matt Purdy. I'm Dan Heath. See you next time.