So much beer and so little time

In the last five days, I have tasted nine different sorts of beer. Seven of these were German, two were Czech. Apparently there are 5000 German beers, meaning that I have somewhere in the vicinity of 4993 to go, provided no new ones are invented in the meantime. As my trip is around 200 days long in total, if I taste around 25 German beers per day, I'll have them all tasted by the end of September. And probably have developed most of the symptoms of alcoholism but sometimes one has to make sacrifices.

The local lads have taken it upon themselves to introduce me to the best of the brews. I suspect my presence here is the perfect excuse to head down to the nearest supermarket and stock up on five or six different bottles in the name of education. At 30-80c per beer (AU$0.45-$1.10), in Germany you're hard pressed finding bottled water for a lower price. Yesterday, we gathered around the kitchen table to  kick off the evening with a Weissbier, apparently carrying on a centuries-old tradition of drinking the heavy brew with Abendbrot (the light meal Germans have for dinner, literally "evening bread"). In the olden days, when you couldn't drink the water, apparently all people would drink was beer, lending an historic significance to us drinking beer at odd hours of the day.

After the Weissbier came the various Pils and a crash course in the vocabulary necessary to critique them: "wuerzig" was "full-flavoured"; "herb" was "bitter"; "waesserig" meant "watery" and "sueffig" was "light and sweet". To keep all the beers straight, I implemented my own rating system of drawing smiley faces on the lids of the beers I liked and sad faces on the ones I found too bitter and watery. I ascertained that out of the three major beers from Berlin, Berliner Kindl is to be avoided but the plain old Berliner is very drinkable and the Schultheiss isn't bad either. The evening's winners were the Erdinger Weissbier that we started with and the light Augustiner we finished with, although it is possible that by evening's end, the ratings became a little more generous.

Luckily jet lag forced me to go to bed and forego the rest of the Augustiner and probably a hangover this morning. According to the boys, one should never mix too many beers in one evening, as it has the same effect as mixing spirits with beer and wine. It's therefore necessary to commit to one brew for the evening. The exception is when you have an ignorant foreigner who has 24 years of catching up on German beer to do. Then, anything goes.