Hmm, beer… (Image: BM)

“Oh God“, I hear you cry, “he’s writing about beer again!” Well, with three of my posts in the last year having beer in the title and my recent post on bottle deposits, you might think the topic has been covered as much as it can.

Yet far from being ashamed, I stand by my record! After all, there’s a good reason I drink so much beer in Germany: it’s the sheer variety, the fizzy excitement of discovering a new brew almost everywhere I go.

Our resident Bavarian with his first glass of the morning. Photo Nicolette Stewart.

Beer.  Pretzels.  Sausages dipped in sweet mustard and horseradish.  Sound like fun?  Probably.  Sound like breakfast?  Probably not.  But in Bavaria weissbier or weizenbier (both names for wheat beer), weisswurst (white sausages), and bretzeln (pretzels) are a long-standing brunch tradition.  And the name of the game is Frühschoppen.

Perhaps you remember the great cheap beer taste test of 2009.  Well it turns out one night, six people, and 15 of the cheapest beers that we could find wasn’t going far enough.  It was time to go advance to the next level in German beer connoisseur-ship and tackle wheat beer, with a side of sausage and pretzels.

The mission was simple. Five people, fifteen of the cheapest beers we could find, and a blind taste test. It was a cheap beer taste test because we were broke, and since we were almost always broke, we considered ourselves something of cheap beer experts. The good, the bad, and the ugly – all tested in the Land of Plentiful Beer.

So it started with a scramble to gather up all the empty bottles and cans since the last venture into beer consumption so that we could take them back to the grocery store for “Pfand”. (Pfand=bottle return money) Three people, three sacks of bottles, three stores. We’d procrastinated with the shopping until it was too late to get to the really, really cheap grocery stores (Plus, Aldi, and Lidl, for example), so we went to Rewe, Tenglemann, and most importantly (though deceivingly expensive) the gas station. We ended up with about 13 euros and 15 beers.