The internet is making you stupid, stupid!

Beer Heaven

Looking back at American beer

I've been back to Germany for 11 years now. One thing I really appreciate and something Germany is really known for is good beer. But I have to tell you: I am really starting to miss (good) American beers.

And, yes: there is such a thing as good American beer. On the commercial end of things I always loved Samuel Adams. They have a web page but in typically U.S. style they make you register to prove you're 21+ before you can even see the web page. Downer. Not that I condone drinking for minors. In terms of learning to enjoy and consume alcoholic beverages moderately and responsibly, I prefer the German model. Age 16 for beer and wine, 18 and above for everything else.

While stationed in Leesville (Fort Polk) with the U.S. Army I had a favorite Louisiana beer: Turbodog made by the Abita Brewing Company. Occasionally I'd get myself a huge bucket of steaming hot crawfish and corn, a cool drink from Frozen Spirits and a sixpack or two of that beer. I'd eat the whole bucket of crawfish on the porch of our Leesville apartment building and later our woodland house north of Leesville. Crawfish and beer belong to the few happy memories of Louisiana; few only because we didn't spend all that much time there. It seemed we were always deployed somewhere. First Haiti, then Fort Chaffee, Arkansas for gunnery training, then the National Training Center in the Mojave Desert (Fort Irwin, Nevada) and then Bosnia with stopovers in Hungary. Of the three years I was stationed in Louisiana I spent very little time actually being there.



Photo: a local German Doppelbock beer and the family stein with the von Halem coat of arms on the lid.

Revisiting the past

I took a few minutes to reread some old blogposts from 2008 and 2009. Now that is a lot fun. I tend to forget what happened and rereading even the short blurbs in the blog kind of brings it back. I guess I'll have to back it all up sometime soon before it gets lost in google's cloud.

I've started backing up the tweets from my German twitter account (5000+ tweets). Unfortunately I started that too late and the first few thousand are lost. So I couldn't even tell you what my first tweet was. I suppose twitter still knows and I hope that one day they'll allow access to the older stuff as well.

Blogging is a nice way of journaling, albeit less personal than a private journal would be. But feeding a blog certainly provides for the necessary impetus to write at all, from time to time. That's an impetus I do not feel for a private journal.



photo: my sister Sibylle's sculpture in the pond in the castle garden (in the background).

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