Champagne in cans
This is a test post on this last day of February to see if I can make any of this stuff work. If I can, I should think less about background colors and align-left, and get on the content.
There is wheat beer here. To the east of the isogloss it is pretty expensive. To the west, a mere 59 Europence will get you a delicious tallboy. In a can.
I don’t like our local supermarket, which is called Mercator. Mercator is a Slovene company, which is to its credit, but it operates somewhat like Wal-Mart, moving in and pushing little shops out of business. Which is definitely not to its credit. It is about the only commercial enterprise in Slovenia which is ubiquitous, and that kind of sameness is to be avoided. So I don’t like to shop at Mercator. Perhaps coincidentally, I also don’t like Mercator’s projection. It distorts Greenland. And forget about Antartica.
So not too long ago I began doing the food shopping across the border in Italy. I found that the prices were about the same but the selection was a good deal more interesting, especially in the area of vegetables (and pasta shapes). I also found wheat beer in cans.
I had never seen wheat beer in cans before, and I was dubious. This is the sort of wheat beer that contains the yeast, which accumulates at the bottom and when poured out leaves the beer deliciously cloudy. In fact, the wheat has a lot less to do with the deliciousness of wheat beer than the yeast does. The best wheat beers have flavors that are subtle but aromatic, with hints of clove and even banana-like esters that are a by-product of the yeast eating the sugars in the wheat and excreting alcohol and CO2. Wheat beers should have very fine pinpoint bubbles of CO2 forming a creamy head that rises high, white and craggy when the beer is poured. When Napoleon’s troops entered Berlin and tasted the beers brewed with wheat malt around that city, they called it “the champagne of the north.”
So I was dubious that a good wheat beer could come in a can. But it can. Oh yeah, it can.
