Illuminati-R-Us

Then there was one particular German beer that might be of interest. Perhaps Arneb is familiar with Hamburg?

In any event, it came from Hamburg, but I believe this particular beer was not available in Germany, it was exclusively for export. It was called "Saint Pauli Girl", and the bottle featured a logo with a picture of a Saint Pauli Girl all dressed up for a another hard day at the office.

At some point, I acquired (I don't remember how) a Saint Pauli Girl beer wall poster, which had an extra-large picture of the Saint Pauli Girl, who was herself extra-large in certain ways.

Edited to add - apparently some inaccuracies in my story, it seems the beer if available in Germany. And it wasn't named after the famed district in Hamburg, but after the Saint Paul Friary. The young lady must have worked there.

I haven't seen St. Pauli Girl beer in ages. It was a popular import back in the day when Lowenbrau and Heineken ruled.

Enzo wrote:I haven't seen St. Pauli Girl beer in ages. It was a popular import back in the day when Lowenbrau and Heineken ruled.

I knew a lot of people who absolutely loved Heineken; I was never that keen on it myself. I didn't dislike it, I just didn't think it was all that great.

The lion's brew, Löwenbräu (I added the umlauts for you), I have not seen in a long time.

One of the local products here is Tiger. I don't know whether that is seen much around the world. It's not really great, but it's not bad either. It's cheap by our standards, where alcohol is phenomenally expensive. When I went to Berlin some years ago, and they charged me for a beer, it seemed so low, I wondered whether it was the full amount, or maybe just the tax or the service charge?

Cue up the Dennis Hopper Heineken spiel from 'Blue Velvet'.

PABST BLUE RIBBON!!!!

Very pleased to hear it’s as I hoped, and there’s good stuff in good supply. I totally get the distinction between sipping beer and lawnmower beer, and it’s a great way to express that difference.

Tiger beer is very common over here, it’s in all the curry houses and supermarkets. It’s pleasant enough for what it is.

Lowenbrau used to be an import, then (I think ) Miller bought rights to the name and started brewing Lowenbrau in the USA, not like it was the same though...they "Americanized" the recipe. SInce that ultimately failed, it isn't made here. I heard real Lowenbrau was being imported again, but I've never seen it.

Enzo wrote:Lowenbrau used to be an import, then (I think ) Miller bought rights to the name and started brewing Lowenbrau in the USA, not like it was the same though...they "Americanized" the recipe. SInce that ultimately failed, it isn't made here. I heard real Lowenbrau was being imported again, but I've never seen it.

[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Löwenbräu_Brewery]Löwenbräu_Brewery[/url]

It looks like Löwenbräu was exported from München to the US, then produced domestically in the US by Miller, starting in 1975. That ended in 1999, and for three years, the North American product was produced in Canada by Labatt. It appears that Miller modified the recipe, while falsely claiming the beer was Reinheitsgebot compliant. The Labatt product was supposedly the same as the German product. After 2002, it was back to being imported from München, but as the article notes, "on a much smaller scale than had been the case before the Miller deal". In 2012, Labatt reacquired the brand, but at least one person is claiming the recipe in Canada is now different than the München recipe.

So from 1975 to 1999, and possibly again from 2012 until now, the recipe was different than the German one.

And apparently the board doesn't allow dirty ferrin characters in URLs. I can Anglicise the name when I type it to remove the umlauted characters, but I can't change the URL.

Мастер wrote:
And apparently the board doesn't allow dirty ferrin characters in URLs. I can Anglicise the name when I type it to remove the umlauted characters, but I can't change the URL.

Did you try copy & paste? Usually when I find characters that don't exist on my keyboard, copy & paste works ok.

g-one wrote:

Мастер wrote:
And apparently the board doesn't allow dirty ferrin characters in URLs. I can Anglicise the name when I type it to remove the umlauted characters, but I can't change the URL.

Did you try copy & paste? Usually when I find characters that don't exist on my keyboard, copy & paste works ok.

I did copy and paste. It's not a matter of being unable to find the characters - it's that the board seems to reject them as part of the URL. In my post with the link to the Löwenbräu Wikipedia page, the board rejects the entire URL as invalid. I could remove the offending characters, but then the URL will be inaccurate.

(In this post, I typed the umlauted characters from my keyboard - no problem there.)

Furners shouldn’t be using the bloody internet, clearly.

Löwenbräu

TEST.

URLs can only contain ASCII characters.
This handy tool does a conversion if the browser or board fails to do it properly.

Halcyon Dayz, FCD wrote:URLs can only contain ASCII characters.

How barbaric!

Halcyon Dayz, FCD wrote:Löwenbräu

Most excellent!

Oh, wow. You can't even do it in Moderator HTML, either.

Reminds me of an American friend and colleague who made a face when he overheard someone at a conference (here in the UK) ordering Bud. When he saw me laugh, he said, "I wouldn't even order that in America!" and then went on to talk about the craft beers. I take the point about wanting different things at different times - when we lived in the US, my preferred quaff of choice was Coors, followed by Miller.

Something else I noticed was that the US craft beers tend to be stronger than the ones here - closer to the Belgian tradition. As - except in Belgium - I don't normally go much above 5%, this means that if I do drink US beer, it tends to be of the supermarket variety.

Richard A wrote:Reminds me of an American friend and colleague who made a face when he overheard someone at a conference (here in the UK) ordering Bud. When he saw me laugh, he said, "I wouldn't even order that in America!" and then went on to talk about the craft beers. I take the point about wanting different things at different times - when we lived in the US, my preferred quaff of choice was Coors, followed by Miller.

Something else I noticed was that the US craft beers tend to be stronger than the ones here - closer to the Belgian tradition. As - except in Belgium - I don't normally go much above 5%, this means that if I do drink US beer, it tends to be of the supermarket variety.

Is it possible this person was ordering the Czech Budweiser?

Good question, but sadly, no they weren't. The logo was all too distinctive. You can get Budweiser Budvar here, but it's not as widespread as the Murican Bud.

But the mention of Budvar reminds of a funny story. Back in the 1980s, when the UK was still a member of what was then the EEC, an English brewer got upset that the German Beer Tax Law (popularly referred to as the Beer Purity Law) kept out beers that didn't comply with the strict requirement that they must contain certain ingredients but nothing else. Heineken had had a similar problem and now had an additional one. Their instincts were for promoting European unity - on the other hand, there was money involved, plus another Dutch instinct is to stick it to the moffen. So ... they joined in the British complaint to the European Commission, who duly brought an action before the European Court of Justice. Which rejected the German argument that their people drink a lot of beer and therefore need to be sure it doesn't contain harmful additives and said this infringed the EEC principle of free movement of goods. Fast forward a decade and the Czech Republic is now an EU member state and so they're also entitled to export their beers to Germany without scrutiny of what's in them. BUT Budvar saw a marketing opportunity - and put on their labels, "Budweiser Budvar complies with the German Beer Purity Law".

Talking of which, I seem to recall that Budvar - and Pilsner Urquell - were never as widely available in the fraternal GDR as they were in the reunited Germany. Hmmm.

One word for an answer: Devisen!
They also produced, but never saw in their own shops, some of the most popular pieces of IKEA furnitute.