Beer appears to be the national beverage of Germany
I’ve just returned from a 3-week visit with my friends in Rostock, Germany. Rostock is a port city on the Baltic Sea. It has a population of around 250,000. This time of the year, the sun rises about 3:30 am. and does not set until 11:00 pm.
Rostock has several huge supermarkets where there are rows of shelves holding all different brands of bottled German beer. That’s really not surprising since Germany has some 500 breweries. Whenever I arrived in a super market parking lot I could always see both men and women pushing shopping carts which among groceries also contained cases of bottled beer. In the checkout line most people were buying lots of bottled beer.
At restaurants you won’t find a table where Germans are not drinking from very tall glasses of beer. That’s the way the beer is served. What surprised me was that a lot of Germans drink non-alcoholic beer. It’s almost as if beer is the required beverage with a meal.
The Germans drink their beer warm. There is a misconception that they warm up their beer. By warm beer they mean beer at room temperature. That’s probably why I saw no canned beer for sale.
From what I observed, it’s beer uber alles in Deutschland. Wine comes in at a distant second.
And ‘This Bud’s For You’ was a no-show in Rostock.
I’ve come back to the good old U.S.A. with a larger beer belly than the one I had 3-weeka ago.
1 comment:
The German's have their faults, but they know what is important to them. I remember reading a paper some years ago that postulated, with some authority, that beer is largely responsible for Civilization in general. Cuneiform is the oldest known written language. A fair amount of it has survived as it was "written" on clay tablets, many fragments of which are extant. It has been translated. About 80% of the available material directly concerns the making, sale and distribution of beer. From the records it seems that agriculture was begun not for the preparation of grains for the making of bread but for the making of beer.
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