Time to get serious

Every so often, any blogger with respect for himherself must cover a serious subject, like global warming, the war on terror or the rampant corruption in FIFA. Today it's my turn - I'm going to tackle a subject which gives me very little joy and which in many ways I wish was not a necessity on this planet: alcohol free beer.

When I was a lad, there was no such thing as alcohol free beer, though we had something called "Vørterøl" in Norway, or wort beer in English. The wort is essentially a mixture of water and malted barley where the sugars of the malt are dissolved into the water by raising the temperature, before the wort is hopped, cooled, fermented and developed into a nice or nasty beer. If you simply don't let the wort ferment, but just bung it in a bottle and ship it off to the supermarket, you get this sickly sweet drink which tastes horrible but is probably a nutricious replacement for baby milk.

Lately, breweries have discovered that the taste improves if you brew a proper beer and then subsequently remove the alcohol. The standard method is to boil the beer to let the alcohol evaporate, but there are some tricks such as creating a vacuum in the boiling chamber which enables the process to be done at lower temperatures, allegedly preserving more of the real beer taste.

The fundamental question is: why do we need alcohol free beer? There are dozens of perfectly good alcohol free drinks on the market, most of which are cheaper, healthier and better-tasting than petrol. It's a bit like vegetarian "bacon" made from soy or lava or whatever - you really want the real McCoy, but you can't have it for whatever reason so you settle for some substandard rubbish that lets you fool yourself into thinking that you're having the real McCoy.

Having said that, I have a confession to make (I'm not a catholic, and that wasn't the confession, but I seem to confess a lot in this blog lately so I thought I'd just point that out): I've been drinking a fair bit of alcohol free beer in recent months. Not nearly as much as the proper stuff, but perhaps 2-3 bottles a week.Why, oh why, have I fallen to such depths? I don't drive, I'm not an air traffic controller, and I don't plan to compete in the next Olympic Games (unless Norway wants me to). Well, the reason is that I'm trying not to end up on the slippery slope where I start having a couple of beers a day, leading to three or four, and then before I know it I'm a regular down the local pub here, wearing lederhosen and guzzling beer out of massive litre glasses with my friends Fritz, Hansi and Gumpert. Actually, that sounds rather like fun. Hmmm. Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that I've decided to have one or two days a week completely without alcohol, just give the old liver a bit of a rest.

Having made this decision, I went about the task of finding an alco-free beer that tasted OK. My expectations were low, and as I was slowly tasting my way through the surprisingly extensive selection from the local supermarkets, I realized that this was going to be painful. They were basically all crap. Every single one had this weird sweetish taste as well as a massive hole where the taste of good beer should be. It makes your taste buds go crazy because you expect so much more, yet there's potential there and the promise of better things to come. After a long time of trying and failing, I settled on the one beer which taste reminded me most of beer, namely the Rothaus Alkoholfrei Zäpfle. It's not half bad, and it fulfils the main requirement: it's more refreshing than water.

The other thing to mention is that alcohol free beer here in Germany costs more than the normal alcoholic ones. This fact is impossible to understand for a Norwegian brought up with alcohol taxes so high that you are forced to save up all your pocket money from your childhood to be able to afford beer when you finally become a teenager. I therefore asked a German to explain this to me. He said that the reason is that alcohol free beer costs more to make. But what about the alcohol tax, I asked meekly. Well, there is very little tax on beer because it is seen as a staple product - like bread or milk, he said. At this point my brain malfunctioned completely, but I somehow recovered to finally understand why the Germans almost always get to the final in the World Cup. It's because they play efficient football and always win penalty shootouts.
Not bad for a brain that just malfunctioned.