Tag: Deutschland

I saw a terrible reminder of the history of Berlin whilst walking down the street. Bullet holes left on building walls from World War 2 could be clearly seen.

My friendly tour guide in Berlin kindly suggested to us all that we never try the local brew, called a “Berliner Weisse”. He claimed it was supposedly a horrific abomination of beer and should never be consumed by anyone.

To me, that felt much like telling me not to press a big red button. I must press the big red button! In this case, the big red button was a rather horendously bright red coloured beverage. It was spiked with a pungent raspberry taste. I actually like raspberry, but my tour guide was definitely correct. Beer and raspberry do not mix 😛

I met up with my old chemistry colleague Vikas in Tübingen, Germany. We met at the University of Otago many years ago and it was nice to catch up once again. We had some genuine German food from the region and had a beautiful view of houses beside the Neckar river. Tübingen is a beautiful university city with beautiful old historic buildings; I highly recommend visiting if you are in the area.

I visited München (aka Munich) in the heart of Bavaria. I made a new friend called Jen at the hostel I was staying at. With the help of Jen’s amazing timing, we saw the famous Rathaus-Glockenspiel, a strange feature on the München town hall which chimes and re-enacts two stories from the 16th century to amuse passers by.

I tried the famous Oktoberfestbier. It tastes somewhat like other beer except it was served in a mug.

I visited Bonn, Germany around 2009, but I was mostly just passing through on my way to Köln just north of there. This time around I had a proper look, including taking a bus tour (note: bus tours in Germany are for old boring people and are best avoided). Whilst in town, I had some awesome beer, including a slightly strange but tasty brew called a “kristall weiss”, which is basically a regular weissbier, but it’s filtered so it looks like regular beer.

After having more beers than is a good idea, I headed over to the Bonn Münster, a church in the Bonn city center. It looked quite spectacular in the evening. It was built in the 11th and 13th centuries.

My lovely friend Nadia (the original English one, not the Norwegian one), decided to try beer for the first time. She however made the n00b mistake of deciding to try cheap nasty Norwegian alcohol free beer. This was never going to go well. I insisted she needed to try proper alcoholic beer, preferably from Germany, Belgium or the Czech republic. I don’t think I’ll ever get her to try alcoholic beer, so since I was in Germany where they seem to serve alcohol free beer in every bar, I decided to have a bash at comparing two supposedly identical beers to see if it were actually possible to get a drinkable alcohol free beer.

I found a bar in Berlin which served one of my favourite brews, Erdinger Weissbier, alongside it’s alcohol free equivalent, Erdinger Weissbier Alkoholfrei. The bar tender served them both up in identical glasses and didn’t tell me which was which. One had a distinct wheaty hoppy taste, the other tasted like Weissbier and got me drunk. Conclusion … even high quality German beer tastes bad when it’s alcohol free.