Incoherent Scribblings

A Wine Drinker in Beer Country

I have a confession to make: I don’t like beer.

When I imbibe in alcohol, I prefer a sweet red wine or a shot of Amaretto. Beer is bitter, I have never much liked the taste, and it gives me wicked hangovers. As a college student, where drinking is about getting drunk, I drank beer because I believed the famous, “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it” claim. But I didn’t. I was never converted and now that I am over 21 and my major drinking exercises are in accompaniment to a meal, I don’t even pause to consider beer.

But the thing is, I live in Germany. And Germany’s favorite beverage is beer. The average German drinks about 138 liters of beer per year (that’s 36 gallons), with the average Bavarian drinking 50% more than the national average. April 23 is the Day of German Beer. There is even a “German Beer Purity Law” and drinking a beer with lunch is not frowned upon, in some places the ability to have a beer with lunch is the law!

Beer is a vital part of the German culture and experience, but in the two years that I have lived in Munich I have not drunk even so much as one sip from ein Maß of Weißbier! Of course, my distaste for beer has occasionally been a bit of a predicament here. For example, social opportunities can be limited as sitting in a beer garden with no beer, while doable, feels awkward. And of course there are the social functions where the choice of beverage is beer or… beer.

Even so, I have managed to get along well enough in Munich, but I guess I will never officially be a Bavarian!