Mayonnaise is French or Spanish in origin. Mustard-based condiments may have originally been invented in ancient Rome, but since then, Germany has developed a lot
of different kinds of mustard.
They also have lots of different kinds of
sausage. Often a sidewalk food truck will have just one or two kinds of
sausage, maybe with just one or two kinds of mustard to put on it, and there are also regional specialties, but if you add up
everything in Germany, it's an amazing variety of sausage. And mustard.
And
of course, Germany has beer. Great beer. A small amount of bad beer
compared to Murrka, but also huge amounts of amazing beer that doesn't
cost much at all.
I
used to tell people that beer was invented in Germany, but I was
mistaken. (I used to tell people all sorts of things which were inaccurate, and you know what? I probably still do!) People in the Middle East were drinking beer 10,000 years ago,
in the earliest towns built from stone. By 2000 BC there were huge beer
festivals in Egypt, where everyone would get very very drunk and dance
maniacally and have sex in public. The attitudes of ancient Egyptians about sex were very different than ours today. Don't get me started.
Knowledge of beermaking doesn't appear to
have gotten as far north as Germany until 800 BC.
But
mead remained the most popular northern European drink well into the
Middle Ages. Generally speaking, beer and wine moved north alongside the
Latin language, reading and writing, and Christianity. And in some
areas it didn't replace mead as the most popular booze for a long, long
time after that. And, as you may know, there are still people who make mead and
grow beards and sing wimpy folk songs.
I've never had mead. Unless I have, and I was so drunk that I don't remember it, which is possible.
I'm talking about afficianados of fine beers, as opposed to people who drink a lot of Bud Light or Miller High Life before making their YouTube videos, or videos about drunken parties, or something like that.
Okay, let's get something out of the way: Yes, I was in Alcoholics Anonymous for a while, in the mid-90's. And a good thing I was: I had been drinking much too much, and with the help of AA I dried out for a couple of years. I also met a lot of wonderful people through AA. I have absolutely no regrets about the AA period of my life. And maybe there are some people who really can't drink moderately. Turns out, I'm not one of them. Turns out, I enjoy drinking one or two beers and then stopping for the day. This was something I had never even tried before joining AA. Before that I had always drunk much too much. "Having a beer or two" had been a euphemism, for me, for having a dozen or two.
Also, these days, besides meaning it literally when I say I'll have "a beer or two," I don't have a beer or two every day -- or even every month. I think it's been about six months since I drank any beer. I had a beer -- literally. One -- to celebrate having survived major surgery. Does my looking for interesting beer critics mean I'm going to drink more? Not sure that it does mean that.
Onward: yesterday I finally did something I'd been meaning to do for a while: looked for videos on You Tube featuring beer connoisseurs. WARNING: There's no particular reason to think that I might be good at telling a beer connoisseur apart from a non-connoisseur. Keeping that in mind, and keeping in mind that I've been looking for less than 24 hours now, my favorite YouTube beer channel so far is Chad'z Beer Reviews:
Yes, that's Chad'z with a z instead of an s for some reason. Chad has a lot of videos in which he has one glass of one brand and variety of beer and describes it in-depth. Then there are some yearly ten-best and ten-worst videos. In these Chad does not list what he considers to be the very best or very worst beers in the world, but the ten best or worst which he had for the first time during that year. And Chad, although he definitely seems to enjoy fine beers, also reviews mass-produced beers and tells you how much worse they are than the good stuff. (One thing I remember from one of the year-end videos is the warning that the word "Ice" in a beer's name is always a bad sign.)
I'm curious about the good stuff. But I will defintely not be drinking a lot of the very finest (according to Chad) beer soon, unless, of course, I suddenly become wealthy very soon: a lot of the stuff on the ten best list goes for $10 or $20 a bottle or up. That's right: $10 or $20 or more, not for a 6-pack, nor a 4-pack, but for one (typically 24-oz) bottle. In the 2018 ten-best video, Chad named Samuel Adams Utopias, 2013 vintage, number one. It sells for hundreds of dollars per 28-ounce bottle. It's also 30 percent alcohol by volume. That's 60 proof. That's almost 10 times stronger than some beers. That's stronger than most wine, as strong as some hard liquor.
Most of the top-ten stuff Chad reviews, that stuff going for $10 or $20 or more for a 24 oz bottle, has more typical alcohol content: 4.5 to 7% by volume, around in there.
Some of the beer Chad considers the best is available at prices more familiar to us Joe 6-pack types: Sam Adams New England IPA made one of his yearly ten best lists, and in February 2018 Sam Adams announced a suggested retail price of $8.99 to $9.99 for 4 16-ounce cans. According to Chad, Sam Adams is the best American mass-produced brand, head and shoulders above most of the others.
It is becoming less unusual for the finer beers to come in cans instead of bottles. That may be news to you if you're old like me and haven't been a beer-hound lately, like me.
Yesterday I saw a beer-tasting video from Epicurious which I will not link here, because it made me angry, and I don't want to make my readers angry in turn. It was series of comparisons of a less expensive vs a more expensive beer: a cheap IPA vs an expensive IPA, a cheap barrel-aged beer vs an expensive one and so forth. The labels were removed from the bottles and cans to make it a blind tasting. I have nothing against the beer critic. He seemed very knowledgeable. He preferred the more expensive beer every time. Prices ranged from under $1 per bottle or can to over $10.
What made me angry is that they never showed the labels! We were never told what beers this guy described in such depth and with such know-how! At the end the beer critic encouraged us viewers to "get out there and have some fun!" Well, I have more fun when I have more helpful information, there's no question about that. I'm TIRED of thrashing around in the dark with no clue, with beer as with life in general. Again, I'm not mad at the beer critic. One piece of information which I do not have is whether he realized that Epicurious, who presented the video, was never going to show the labels.
