Oh beery me

Today's been a good day. The weather has been sunny and spring-like, and the carrot and coriander soup I cooked for dinner turned out nicely. However, that's not the topic of this post. The topic is, as you may have accidentally already guessed, beer.

Before dinner, I sometimes like to crack open a beer. OK, the secret's out. I'm a pre-dinner drinker, at least occasionally. Today, after surveying the fridge, I ended up opening a Weiss-Gold from the Meckatzer brewery in Allgäu, which is a part of Bavaria south of Augsburg. This was a good choice. "Weiss-Gold" literally translates as "White Gold", so no prizes for guessing that this beer isn't among the darker varieties.

I've tried this beer before, so I knew roughly what the experience would be like. However, this is one of those rare beers that tends to delight you every time you drink it, so I was yet again enjoying myself as I sipped my way through. It's a very bitter beer, but also with a nice malty body, which makes it one of the few golden beers that deserve the description "full-bodied".

I reckon that the brewer tried to make a traditional export, but as he was bringing his hop bag towards the kettle to add the required modest amount he slipped on a banana skin discarded by the apprentice he had fired just a couple of hours ago because the apprentice had been getting it on with his wife behind the brew kettle when he wasn't looking because he was busy investigating why the sales of the traditional export beer had been falling. In a beautiful twist of fate, this resulted in him spilling just the perfect amount of hops into the kettle to make this wonderfully refreshing and satisfying beer, which then revived the sales and saved the brewery from bankruptcy.

I hasten to add that this is just a theory and it's possible, though unlikely, that I'm wrong.

If you're trying, like I am, to limit the amount of beer you drink on ordinary weekdays, one of the easiest ways of achieving this is to ensure that you never have more than one Weiss-Gold in the fridge. On the other hand, any fridge would feel very incomplete without at least one bottle in it. A bit like Paris without the Eiffel tower. You're delighted that it's there, but if there was more than one it wouldn't be quite the same experience. That, of course, is where the similarities between my fridge and Paris end. For starters, my fridge has - unlike Paris - good beer in it.

Anyway, 'nuff said about beer for now. I'm actually off to cycle, with my lovely wife, around the Allgäu for four days during Easter, and perhaps, by complete coincidence, we'll find a nice cycle route that goes past a brewery or five. I'll be sure to report on the findings and experiences from this excursion on this very blog. But don't hold your breath. Mostly because it's very difficult to drink beer whilst holding your breath.