Tag: drinks

Geroskipou Beer Festival

I came across the announcement for the Geroskipou Beer Festival somewhere in my Facebook stream.  Being a big (literally) fan of beer, I couldn’t not post it.  Even with the heavy heart after all the previous beer festivals I’ve been to in Cyprus.  This one seems to follow the general pattern: 5 EUR entrance buys you one beer.  You’ll pay for the rest, and there are about 40 different ones to taste.

As these festivals usually go, you’d probably overpay for the beers, and the variety won’t really be of 40 different brands.  Judging from previous experiences, small can of Keo, large can of Keo, small bottle of Keo, large bottle of Keo, and a draught Keo – are five different varieties and not one.  Heck, I’m not even sure I can list 40 different brands even if I’ll remember all the beers I ever drank or saw on sale in Cyprus!

Just for the fun of it, I’ll try .  First of all, the local ones, obviously: Keo, Carlsberg, and Leon.  Mythos from Greece.  Then the usual suspects: Hoegaarden, Guinness, Krombacher, Stella Artois, Warsteiner, Veltins, Heineken, Beck’s, Budweiser, Pilsner Urquell.  Then slightly less usual suspects: Kilkenny, Caffreys, Erdinger, Konig Ludwig and Konig Ludwig Dunkel, Weissbier, Franziskaner, Amstel, Grolsch, Fosters and Bavaria.  Then a few Belgian beers: Blanche, Duvel, Kwak, Leffe (blonde, dark, and red), Chimay. A touch of Mexico with Corona and Sol. Ciders, although not technically beers, are almost always present at beer festivals – Magners, Strongbow, Woodbecker and Somersby.

How many are these? 38.  Throw in a couple of non-alcoholic names that I don’t know, a coupe of Asian (Chinese and Japanese names that I cannot remember), and, just to get rid of any doubts, a couple of nice ones from Bavarian Delikatessen shop – those names are tough even for Bavarians.  There you go – 40 or so varieties.  Now, can you imagine all of them in one place?  I can’t.   Not even in supermarkets which offer a great variety these days.

Somehow, the more I think about this festival, the more I think it’ll be like the others.  What do you think?  Is it worth driving all they way over to Geroskipou just to get the same beers you can get in any Limassol pub or supermarket?

78 pints of Guiness

This blog (in Greek) shares a receipt from some Irish pub, where people had quite a party.  The total amount is in Norwegian krone (NOK), which translates to about 2,555 EUR.  But it’s not the total amount that is interesting here.  Rather the list of drinks.  In particular – 78 pints of Guiness.

What does that remind me of?  The 99 bottles of beer song.

On pseudovariety

Kottke has a link to an interesting article, with much more interesting visualization of soft drinks industry.  The article discusses pseudovariety.  That’s when you think you have a lot of something, when indeed you really don’t.  Like with all those soft drinks on the shelves of every supermarket.  You think there is a whole lot of them, when in fact most of them are brands of either one of the three major companies.

One other example of pseudovariety that came to my mind was from the field of politics.  Think about it.  There are usually a number of political parties and presidential candidates at every election.  All of them spend hours and millions of dollars to promote themselves, demote their competition, and explain to you how different they are from everything you’ve seen to this day.  But in reality, most of them are pretty much the same.  You can see it from the way they talk, the way they work, the way they lie, the way they approach difficult problems, and the way they talk about simple things.

It often seems like you have so much to choose from, when in fact, you really don’t.