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.

Thanks to merze (Flickr)

One of the really great things about Germany besides – obviously – the beer, is its penchant for seasonal vegetables. Germans really understand just how pleasant it is to punctuate the otherwise somewhat amorphous flow of the year with food: while other countries speak of winter, Germans talk of the Grünkohlzeit or “curly kale season”; what the British or French might call late spring/early summer is known here as Spargelzeit or “asparagus time”. And what other people generally refer to as “the onset of spring” is known throughout Germany as Bärlauchzeit.