The Beatles’ favourite drink: A heady cocktail
The Beatles’ growth can near enough be tracked by the substances they were consuming. If we plotted the strength of what they were taking next to their success, there would be a direct correlation line going up and up. But before there was acid and heroin in their final days, there were pub trips and post-show drinks as they started.
“The price of fame is not being able to go to the Phil for a quiet pint,” John Lennon once said about his favourite boozer, Philharmonic Dining Rooms in Liverpool. As the group went on to not only be famous but also to be the most famous band in the world, it’s easy to forget that they were once just mates playing small gigs in bars, pubs, and clubs, hoping to make it.
Long before the acid trips that inspired Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, or the stoned songwriting sessions introduced to them by Bob Dylan, things were relatively tame. Once they discovered more illicit substances, Lennon said, “We put down the drink and picked up the joint.” But before all that, the boys liked a good drink.
“I secured them an audition at Decca on New Year’s Day 1962,” their manager Brian Epstein recalled in his memoir. “They came to London and stayed at the Royal Hotel, paying 27 shillings a night for bed and breakfast. They were poor and I wasn’t rich, but we all celebrated with rum and scotch and Coke, which was becoming a Beatle drink even then.”
Deeming it the official “Beatle drink”, a rum and scotch and coke was the band’s favourite drink. There was a lot to celebrate in the world of the Beatles. Even right back at the very beginning, they always seemed to be on the rise, as if the world decided immediately that they would be something special. As they began their climb to the top, when their friendships were tight and their spirits were at an all-time high, ever excited by the future they were starting to see, they’d all toast with the same drink in hand like friends do.
Then, as those achievements grew alongside their pay cheques, the calibre of their tipples did too. First, it was scotch and rum on special occasions, beer as standard. Later, that would morph into champagne in limousines during their US tour. By the end of the 1960s and early 1970s, their splintered relationships were reflected in their separate drinks of choice. During the Get Back sessions, Paul McCartney would be nursing a whiskey, George Harrison would have white wine, Ringo Starr liked a Cognac, and John Lennon was onto much heavier things.
While the strength of their substances correlates with their success, the changing nature of their tastes and the separation of their orders also correlate to their closeness. By the time the band was collapsing, there were no more toasts to be had and no longer a collective “Beatle drink”.
Nowadays, Paul McCartney is a tequila fan, always requesting his signature ‘Maccarita’ while Starr says he prefers, “Just working out and eating carrots.” While they’re now a long way from the hazy days of the 1960s, the two still get together and hopefully still toast the old times and their lost friends.
