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Last night I had to open a couple of Stellas in the dark… (never mind why!) and you’d think it should be easy but I assure you it isn’t! It made me think of all the times I’ve been caught without a bottle opener but still with the overwhelming desire to drink the import in front of me…

I remembered the time I was at my friend’s 30th and we had to use a dessert spoon to open our bottles… you kind of lever the spoon against the 3rd knuckle of your index finger and supposedly the top just pops of effortlessly.

Bollocks.

I tried it and although I did manage to open my beer, I damn well needed to skoll it as pain relief after I felt a divot come out of my metacarple bone! It hurt sooooooooooo much - I immediately bruised, swelled and had to pretend neither had happened just to save face infront of the boys.

Then there was the time we got stuck bottle-opener-less again and were pulling the bottles sharply down onto the table so the top just caught on the edge of the table and would hopefully fly off somewhere around the room… except my husband got too carried away and ended up smashing the top AND the neck of the bottle off. Nice one.

Oh yeah, and my cousin taught me to open a twist-top with the underside of my forearm… never mind that I could just have done it with my freaking hand and avoided the bottle top sized bruise on my wrist - I can open a bottle of beer with my skinny little forearm! Yeah! That’ll impress the men-folk!

Anyway - I got into the Stellas without too much trouble and was just thankful I was using an implement actually designed for opening bottles and not cutlery, a table or my own skeletal frame!

Cheers

These last two weeks have been really strange… it’s been a fortnight of catching up with old friends - and I mean OLD friends: friends I haven’t seen since school! First my dear friend Robbie came to stay. Robbie is part of my family and I love him with all my heart. When he left I cried like I haven’t cried in years. He’s gorgeous although a little timid. Which delighted Felix The Great no end as he thundered around the house causing earth tremors in neighbouring countries while Robbie looked politely uncomfortable! But for some reason the two of them got along really well - it’s like kids can pick the people who are least comfortable with children and then make them their favourite. He also ended up calling Robbie “Doff” for no apparent reason…

Then I met up with my school friend Vanessa whom I haven’t seen in 10 years. Fuck that makes me feel old! But when I saw her - she looked just the same! It was good to see her again - didn’t realise how much I missed her and her almond eyes and her inability to sit still and do one thing for any longer than 10 minutes (thanks for the indigestion Ness!)…

While I was out with her we dropped into the Quarry for a drink and I GOT ASKED FOR ID!!! I am 28 years and 9 months old! HAHAHAHA! I told the dear little bar girl that she would laugh when she saw my birthdate, she didn’t but she looked embarrassed!

Must have been mighty dark in that bar I think…

And then the real surprise happened on Sunday. We went to see The Cat Empire at Moorilla and it was a SENSATIONAL day! Absolutely gorgeous weather, great music, dear friends and MOO BREW!!! Ah such perfection…

So I was gradually getting drunk and sunstruck when someone sort of “hovered” up to me and said “Jemma? I THOUGHT it was you!” and it was my old friend Adam from school whom I haven’t seen in at least 12 or 15 years! I nearly died! It was so good to see him again and meet his lovely fiancee Coby. They’re a great couple and I drunkenly invited them back to our place to drink our beer… which they did!

What a day - I drank Moo Brew for 6 hours and Corona’s for another 6… reminisced with Adam, slurred to Coby, laughed and had a great time!

Impromptu drinking at its finest!

That’s all for today.

xxx

Last night I tried Bitburger for the first time. It was a lovely dry little drop. Quite hoppy and flavoursome. The reason I tried it was because our local bottleshop is having a competition to win a BeerMate but you have to buy Bitburger or Heineken to enter.

Aha! What’s a BeerMate I hear you ask? I know you’re probably thinking that you already have several BeerMates chilling nicely in the back of your fridge but this BeerMate is different…

We’ve always fantasised about having our beer on tap and enjoying a freshly poured 10 oz each evening. The thought of it makes me tingle. But the logistics are frightening. I can see why pubs are still operational because it would take an act of military precision to install a beer tap in the standard kitchen and keeping the keg cold creates a problem that would fry the brain of a quantum physicist.

Well, ok it IS possible but so much trouble that no respectable beer drinker could be bothered.

So the Sunbeam BeerMate is the answer to the age old problem of how to get a fresh icy cold beer poured straight from the keg in you own kitchen without having to turn your house into a pub and employ bar staff. It’s ingenious. And, in our society of the gadget-guzzling-consumer I guess it was only a matter of time before someone invented it and someone decided they needed to buy it.

Basically it’s a household appliance designed to hold a 5 lt keg and to chill - that’s right CHILL!!! - the beer at the same time. It’s about the size of a domestic coffee machine from what I gather and seems to be infinitely more useful! (Says she who nearly went spare without her coffee machine when it spent a week in the shop being fixed - some might say due to a problem caused by overuse…)

My addiction to all things stimulant aside… I think I would like to give this BeerMate thing a try. But at $600 a pop I won’t be buying one on a whim - think I might have to win one. Which means a lot more Bitburger!

Oh well - there are worse things a person might die of… like lack of caffeine…or a perfectly installed tap and no way of refrigerating the keg…

Have you ever reached a point in your life where you’ve just stopped what you’re doing and asked “well, how did I get here?” (Some one should so write a song about that….)

You just wonder at what point did your life degenerate into such a filthy quagmire that drinkng before the sun is even up becomes not only a viable option but a damned attractive one?

I should set the scene before you conclude that I’ve finally slipped cheerily into the arms of alcoholism…

Yes it is 8:32 am. And yes I am indeed drinking beer. I would like to say in my defence that I don’t have any choice. You see, the day started for me with dear Felix barking his lungs up across the hall and then deciding that if he was awake - everyone should be and thusly shouting at the top of the lungs that I had previously believed had been coughed up. This all happened at 5:18am.

THAT IS STILL NIGHT PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I tried to go back to sleep. I really did. But it’s so hard when an 18 month old child has the uncanny ability to make noises that would put large gardening machinery to shame. And I’m talking stump-munchers here. So finally because I guess he felt sorry for me (and possibly because it didn’t look like I was going to ever get up) my husband rose to attend to the noise disturbance and left me in bed. I still couldn’t go back to sleep. I dozed. In between the thundering of toddler feet on the wooden boards in the kitchen and the sound of plastic-ware being reefed out of the cupboard and thrown at any object containing the most capacity for echo and reverberation.

So I got up. reluctantly of course. And now that I’m up, my husband has decided that he needs a bit more sleep so has returned to bed, (aw diddums!), and my son has eyes that look like piss-holes in the snow and is clearly exhausted so I’ve packed him back off to bed too… leaving me alone and having had only one coffee.

And as everyone is sleeping I can’t make another one because the grinding of the beans would wake people in the next suburb let alone people the next room.

It’s too early for anyone to be on Facebook.

There’s no way I’m cleaning at this hour.

So, I feel I have been left with only one choice: to drink a beer alone and whilst still in my pyjamas.

Bintang. An Indonesian Pilsener. Nice. Quite dry. Curiously refreshing at this hour.

In fact if any of you are considering alcoholism seriously, then I would definitely recommend this beer as a nice starter for you. Goes down quiet easily first thing in the morning.

There’s nothing really remarkable about this beer other than the time at which it is being consumed. But it’s good and I would have it again.

Possibly even at this hour.. if fact I’m enjoying it so much I’m considering making this part of my routine - screw the second coffee! I’ll just have a pilsener thanks!

And welcome to the hazy, neurotic world of drinking problems Jems…

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!

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.

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!!!!

Last night I sampled Anchor beer which appears from my half-arsed investigations to be imported from Asia - Cambodia I think. (I had no idea they were a beer-producing nation. They they are now on my Places To Visit list.)

Upon first tasting it I thought it distantly resembled Stella Artois but after a few seconds more I realised that it has quite a strong after-taste. It’s a pilsener so by nature it’s quite crisp and clean, but it seems to have a quirky little bite to it. I think it tastes caramelised - like burnt sugar. Sort of sweet but bitter too - like artificial sweetener used to taste before they removed the carcenogens…. Not unpleasant at all but certainly not a beer I would be likely to buy by the carton.

Although if it was on special and came with something free I could surely be talked into it.

Tonight I sampled Erdinger Champ. It was the first and probably not the last time I’ll have it.

For starters it comes in what initially looks like an unassuming bottle. There’s no way I would actually choose it based solely on its packaging. However, having got it home I discovered something very cool…. the underside of the bottle has a dip in it that is perfectly bottle-top shaped. Upon even closer inspection I found detailed instructions on the side of the bottle describing exactly how to take the top of one bottle off with the base of another!

I like their strategy - you gotta buy two bottles!

And it does actually work - although it does take a bit of effort so I wouldn’t recommend leaving the bottle opener at home.

So after my excitement gradually dwindled (it took a while - I love a good gimmick), I finally managed to actually have a taste. And I was quite pleased. It’s very mild in flavour which is not what I was expecting at all. I think because my main wheat beer experiences have revolved almost exclusively around Moo Brew’s wheat beer (it’s called something in German starting with H but I inevitably end up calling it Hilfenhousen or Shizenhousen or something not German-sounding at all in a really bad German accent. After all - who really cares?) . The Moo Brew wheat beer is very strong in flavour and has a lot of sediment. To be honest I don’t love it. I know people rave about it but it just doesn’t do it for me. But that’s another rant for another day………….

Back to our friend Champ here… It’s so mild it almost has no taste. I think I can detect a kind of sweet, flowery aftertaste. Maybe.

Or maybe I’m just being wanky.

Anyway, it’s a bit bland as far as wheat beers go. Beer in general really. But I liked it. Nothing to dislike really. And it comes in a cool bottle.

That’s got to count for something.

The stew was passable but nothing compared to my previous effort. I suspect this was the inclusion of margarine as opposed to our full-flavoured fatty friend butter. Mmmm butter. No matter how much beer you put in - when it comes to flavour, alcohol is no much for artery-clogging, heart-stopping, palate-pleasing lard. That’s right people. I said lard.

So learn from my mistake and don’t waste good beer by mixing it with margarine.