I have a customer database table contains customer name (ex: John Doe), another column for customer ID number, other columns.

I have a beverage database table also contains customer name, plus the type of beverage they purchased (wine, beer, cocktail) in the same text field (ex: John Doe beer).

I must use the beverage table to pull only the beer drinkers (keyword is beer, if you've been drinking), and then list them by their name and ID number from the customer table. 

So there must be a join between the tables.  A join on strings.  I've tried for weeks with no luck.  Is it not possible to join on text strings?  Such as a condition "Select Beverage.Name where if instr 'beer' and "Customer.Name" then Customer.Name and Customer.ID" etc?  The goal is to get the ID and other info from the customer table only for the beer-drinking subset of customers in the beverage table.

No, I have no other fields in the Beverage table. Getting dup names is not an issue. I'm using CR 2008. I have to match text strings.  I can already get the beer subset.  Now I just need to connect the Beverage table to the Customer table.  If you're matching a text string do you put the text field in quotes even though it's already in curly braces?  And it's conditional, right, so I need an If-Then statement?  Do you say If instr {Beverage.Name} "{Customer.Name}" then {Customer.ID}?  Do you say If {Beverage.Name} LIKE "{Customer.Name}" then {Customer.ID} ?