Suspiciously good beer
– I hooked up the tap and started pouring myself a glass first. I had to have a taste of the good stuff. The beer was absolutely perfect, but I thought it looked a bit dark and tasted far too good to be alcohol free beer.
So recalls Rune Nesland Askekjær, who that 17th of May evening was volunteering for the welfare committee. He had been given the job of pouring what was supposed to be alcohol free beer for his colleagues. His suspicion that this was not the case was passed on to Birger Sørland, the Catering and Administration Manager. Sørland was going to phone the brewery and check, but it took a while before he came back.
– Right, all good then, thought Nesland Askekjær, and carried on serving. – I was praised for serving the best beer they had ever tasted on Gullfaks B, and some people came back for another round.
Sørland eventually returned, out of breath and red in the face. – Rune, Rune, you must shut off the tap. We have been sent the wrong keg. It is Ringnes Gold Eksport [now Ringnes Extra Gold] that is on tap.
Nesland Askekjær suggested he could just say that the tap had broken down, and that for the rest of the evening it would have to be Clausthaler from cans. Clausthaler it was, but simply closing the tap was not enough, Sørland thought.
– I more or less yanked the glasses away, so the beer sloshed over the sides.
Beate Gunhild Thorsvik, who at the time worked as a service assistant in the catering department on Gullfaks B, duly followed Sørland’s command to quickly collect all the glasses. She then had to call Gullfaks A to find out whether they too had received extra strong alcoholic beer instead of the alcohol-free kind. They had, but Thorsvik cannot remember whether they had already started drinking it.
Thorsvik adds that Sørland was probably worried about what might happen if people started to get tipsy. – Imagine if someone got hurt. That would have been a catastrophe.
Fortunately, that was avoided. Instead, it turned into a good story – told over the night lunch and at other get togethers, about the time they served what was described as “damn good beer”.
This text is based on written and oral communication with Rune Nesland Askekjær and Beate Gunhild Thorsvik in November 2023.