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So I told my husband to grab me an import while he was at the bottleshop today. Actually we like to call them “specials”. As in: “you want a special as well or just the slab?”. We are so classy.

I was hoping for Kingfisher which is an Indian beer - according to my brother who is currently in India. He was bragging that a Kingfisher only cost him 75c! FWOAR!!!! 75c????!!! Jesus - never mind about not drinking the water overseas - you’d brush your teeth with beer at that price!

However, it was nowhere to be found at our local bottle-o so instead my husband came out with a Birra Moretti, which I instantly recognised as Amanda’s “Mafia” beer from a couple of Saturdays ago!

So, I’m about to steal her thunder and review it…

As the name suggests it is an Italian beer (Birra Italiana!). It’s a lager and is a fine drop I must say.

Got a nice clean “bite” to it. It is very crisp - although not as crisp and clean in taste as a Stella for example. I would call the flavour short - and by that I mean that there is no lingering aftertaste. Pretty much what you first taste is what you get. It’s a nice beer. Nothing wildly exciting to taste - but that also means there’s nothing to offend either! Very drinkable and would be delightful with a summery BBQ or seafood.

And it does have have a Mafia man on the front… although now that I’m looking at it sober and not in a dimly lit bar being mesmerised by the way the light reflects off the heavily tanned bongo player’s forehead, I realise that the man on the front looks a little bit too drunk to be in the Mafia.

That just makes Birra Moretti all the more attractive to me because there is one surefire way to advertise beer and that is to advertise that it gets you drunk!

I would like to propose a toast:

To Hobart Myer.

More than a store, more like the hub of our beautiful city’s shopping.  Home of the nicest public toilets and babycare room in all of Hobart. The best place to find kidswear on perpetual sale. The only place in the world where I have ever seen a pair of Steve Madden shoes sell for under one dollar. (It’s actually true.) The only place my husband would ever shop. Home to the hottest change rooms this side of the equator. And the last remaining store where sales people actually WANTED to help you in the womenswear section.

A place to meet. A place to walk through.

A place that was just always there.

Until 3:30 on Saturday when it all started going pear-shaped for poor old Myer. I guess they’ll speculate as to the cause of such a devastating fire that appeared to start during the busy trading hours in full view of patrons and staff alike. I expect they’ll never really know however, due to the intensity of the fire and the fact that it left virtually no evidence.

The old building has been gutted and thusly demolished.

Streets are still sealed off and the face of our shopping precinct has been changed forever.

It is a sorry sight.

Dear old Myer. You have left a void in our city and a void in our hearts.

Charge your glasses/stubbies/cans/casks and say a hearty thanks to Myers. For just always being there.

Even if they did have the heating in the change rooms about 15 degrees too hot….

Maybe they should check that out…. could be a contributing factor….

Yes - this beer is good. Very good.

It’s smooth, clean, easy to drink and professes to be “Probably the best beer in the world”.

How could you not love a beer that has that slogan actually printed on its carton??!!

I’m so impressed! Carlsberg know their beer is good but aren’t self-righteous enough to say so. Those Danes are so polite! They don’t want build it up just to disappoint you, they don’t want to presume to know the inner-most workings of your taste buds - they just want to hint at the joy that awaits you inside the slender green bottle without making promises that may not be fulfilled.

So thoughtful!

Such a gentile disposition!

They need not have been so cautious in their description. It is a great beer.

The best beer in the world? Hard to say, but definitely better by the slab.

Now that’s saying something…

Probably.

Seriously, how good were those prawns? But yes there was a lot of garlic and chili and salt.

OK I am the other laydee friend who went out to sample some Spanish Tapas and some Spanish Beer and possibly a few more beers along the way, but who really keeps count. I have been asked by our happy beer loving blogger to put my 5 cents worth about a few beers we may have sampled!

Ladies be damned as we called it, or Estrella Damm is also known as was given straight to us ladies and the Mahou straight to the men. It was clearly beer for the ladies! Now I’d better just say that I am not quiet the hardcore beer drink-en gal like my friend here, I don’t down a slab in a night, but I do enjoy the odd beer and I’ll just say I know a good beer when I taste it! And the Estrella Damm was a very good beer. It went down beautifully, it was very smooth, it soothed my poor throat after the garlic chili salty prawns (note to Jems… was there actually prawn in there?) There wasn’t even any after beer burps when it come back up your nose, not from the Estrella Damm any way…. That was the other beer I drank. I certainly will be very keen to taste it again.

Along with another beer I sampled that night…. and there were many, and wine, red and white. But Jems wants to hear about the Mafia Beer I tasted at a very cruisey little bar later in the evening. This place was fantastic. If you didn’t know it was there…. well you wouldn’t know it was there except, from the beefy guy at the door. It had this very mellow trio playing. The singer was a super tanned guy banging the big bongos, he was great but the guitarist and the base player just looked awkward like they knew they weren’t as good as the singer and they weren’t. At this stage in the night I had had a lot to drink and something about this scene made me think about Magnum PI and being on some sort of luxury yacht. Magnum PI in a good way.

Right so… they had a menu of drinks more like a book of drinks. I chose myself a drink , Moet & Chandon $150 a bottle. Sadly, my husband hadn’t heard my request over the bands version of “Fly me to the moon” , So he choose a beer for me and Jems I’m sorry but I don’t remember what it was called only the picture on the front - A Mafia man in black suit and tie and one of those Mafia hats, white straw type thing with a black ribbon, oh and the beer was made in Italia!! now I think it tasted good, remember I had the chili garlic prawns (or the chili garlic) and I think it had a slight bitterness to it, but apart from that it was good too. Not however as good as Estrella Damm.

But give me time and I will go and have another taste and I’ll keep you posted!!

We went out on Saturday night with friends to have tappas which was really lovely - although I was burping paint stripper for most of the night. The salt! The garlic! Oh my - what a great meal! Chorizo, mushrooms in garlic sauce, octopus, chilli prawns and probably heaps more but they were the main offenders I think - at least they were the ones that were seeping pure garlic out of my pores 12 hours later.

And what better accompaniment to this vibrant explosion of flavour than Spanish beer? There were two on offer: Estrella Damm and Mahou, so the two laydees sampled the Estrella (women - be damned!!!) and the men-folk supped on the Mahou.

I think myself and my laydee-friend felt that we had hit the jackpot with our Estrellas, while the boys seemed non-plussed with the Mahou. On one hand the Estrella was crisp, gentle, inoffensive, and a typical lager style beer which complimented the intense food beautifully and on the other, the Mahou was an intriguing flavour. One that might be best sampled alone - so the true nature of the beer can shine. As you would imagine it was totally over-shadowed by the food so it was nearly impossible to review it accurately. Hell - I could barely feel my tongue after dinner - I could have been drinking drain cleaner and i wouldn’t have noticed, God knows I was belching it. Heaven help the bar staff at the pubs we attended post-tappas - poor bastards!

However, I really felt that the beer was most refreshing and I can’t wait to try both beers again - except maybe without the first two layers of my tongue missing this time - because I really think each of them has something beautiful to offer in the wonderful world of import beer.

Also would the record please show that my husband who normally has full immunity to hangovers suffered the Headache from Hell for the whole of the next day as he had indulged in a bottle of wine with the other two…. while I stuck to beer the whole night and mircaulously rose at 6:30 to tend to one nausiatingly chirpy 17 month old without a hint of of the Dry Horrors!

Hahaha! That’s Right! I WIN!!!!

You know I’m a Cascade girl right? I mean, I’m totally one eyed about it - Cascade Draught is my absolute favourite beer on the planet.

Well, I have some deeply unsettling news for you….

Our last slab was Boags. At my request. I know, please don’t abandon me - I made a mistake ok? Everyone has had a moment of passion where they do something rash, something emotional and that was mine.

It all started because of a bad experience we had at the Cascade Brewery Visitor Centre on Father’s Day. I won’t go into it in detail but it was basically a mish-mash of incompetance, misinformation and very poor customer service and it resulted in us walking out on our booking. I was so mad. I am usually a very easy going patron - I don’t send meals back to the kitchen, I ALWAYS thank the staff and tell them it was lovely even if it wasn’t and I HATE to make a scene. So you can see that the experience must have been pretty bad for us to leave without even eating.

So I got so lively about it all that I decided to switch brewers and turn to my arch nemesis Boags. My reasoning was that we drink so many slabs of Cascade a week that gradually over a year the brewery would damn well miss our custom.

Once I sobered up and began thinking rationally again I realised that this was a preposterous form of protest and that the only person suffering would be me because I was drinking crappy Boags. We bought a slab of The Northern Beer anyway - and drank it - but I didn’t like it. Even while I felt moderately smug about our purchase, the smugness and satisfaction quickly evaporated every time I had to actually drink one.

So the moral of this story is: your favourite brewery can do whatever they like - they can even employ an entire workforce of full-frontal-lobotomised monkeys, (and I think a certain Visitor Centre actually does), and there’s not a darn thing you can do about it because they make fucking good beer.

I am drinking out of a new beer glass. A new “Perfect Beer Glass”.

It has Tooheys New printed on it but I don’t care - it’s a good shape. I like it.

It came from a fabulous shop in Queensland called The Beerless Bar. I know! Normally a concept that would deeply upset and concern me but this shop was GREAT! It had all kinds of bar paraphernalia and it housed my new Perfect Beer Glass. I was in a happy place!

Anyway - back to my new Perfect Beer Glass… it actually came as part of a two pack. Initially I thought - “No good. I only want ONE Perfect Beer Glass.” But after much consideration and browsing I decided that two was probably an economical buy. I thought I would take one glass back home with me and leave the other for safe-keeping with my parents in the event that anything untoward happened to my glass then they could offer a near-immediate replacement.  I also didn’t want two of the same glass in my house because then I wouldn’t have the Perfect Beer Glass I would have One Of Two Possible Perfect Beer Glasses.

I don’t like to share.

And my husband is the clumsiest person I have ever met and I didn’t want to give him the opportunity to destroy two glasses at once.  Interestingly he only seems to be clumsy with my belongings. I can rattle off all sorts of my favourite items - usually and unfortunately made of easliy breakable substances - that have met with a high-impact demise: my favourite vintage blue bowl, my favourite vintage blue plate, one of a set of my four favourite latte mugs, and finally the Absinthe glass that I had imported from the U.S. as a gift for the Husband of Hands with Many Thumbs for Christmas.

I usually hear a dull crack from the kitchen (it’s rarely a spectacular affair) and the quiet but slightly desperate sound of my husband panicking… and then I know. Something else that I love has just bitten the dust.

So, you can now see why I was:

A. reluctant to bring anything into my house that I atually like

and

B. pretty thrilled at the fact that these glasses seemed to be hotel standard and made of 2.5 inch thick bullet-proof glass.

Having said all this I am now obliged to tell you that my new Perfect Beer Glass is still in one piece.

HOWEVER…

it has been put in the dishwasher by someone attempting to be tidy and now the lovely glossy Toohey’s New logo has been eroded to a deeply upsetting matte. It’s so horribly matte that it makes me think of blackboards and hence fingernails scratching down blackboards every time I touch it.

It’s so off-putting that I’m having the second glass sent down as I write.

I can only hope that Husband of Hands with Many Thumbs keeps said hands to himself this time.

I’ll keep you posted…