Best Beer Bragging Rights

Who has Europe's best cheese? Ask a Frenchman, Italian, or a Dane about their cheese and watch the bloodbath begin. 

The best chocolate? Belgium, the Swiss, and the Dutch are too peaceful for a blood bath, but a Chocolate-Off might ensue.

Few topics bring out exceptionalism quite like the debate over who has the best beer, which I find strange. I come from a country that doesn't brag about having the best beer, just beer that's better than anything the Americans can brew.

After four years of painstaking research and over-sampling in bars and patios all over Europe (it was difficult, but I did it for you dearest reader), I have made a list in an attempt to untangle Europe's finest beer nations... in no particular order.


Germany
Germany has great factories, cars, public transit, and decent sausages, but their breweries are hamstrung by the country's Beer Law, which stipulates making beer with only hops, water, and barley. 

There are great tasting wheat beers and pilsners, and solid locals brews like Kölsch and Altbier. But! Germany has no stouts or frothy ales, no fruity beers, if that's your thing, or limited run seasonal craft beers.

So, the beer here is great, but Germany doesn't quite have the best beer, but it has the best beer laws, which is a wonderfully German thing to be good at.


Belgium 
Some might be angry at Belgium for holding up the Canada-E.U. free trade deal, but remember they have the best beers. 

Trappist beers, the dark beers, the strong beers that make you wobble on the way to the bathroom, fruity beers. They do everything and they do it proper, and not just proper-tasting, but also in proper fancy glasses. 

In a way, I'm sad about the successful free trade talks. Failed talks would have meant less beer for export to Canada and more beer for me here.

Fancy Boy Glasses in Antwerp!

France
There are no French beers. If a Frenchman wants a beer, he'll drink wine. If a tourist at a bar wants a beer, he is served a Stella Artois – from French part of Belgium, at least – and ignored the rest of the night. Or so I've heard.


Netherlands
The Dutch have a great business model: Make Heineken, and sell it all over the world for a ridiculous profit and go laughing to the bar to order a round of delicious Belgian beers.


Ireland
Guinness. It tastes like beer and coffee combined. Yay for Irish Beer Coffee! 


Czech Republic
Those crazy Czechs drink more beer per capita than anyone else. And it shows, because they have some good beers... and good beer bellies because you need somewhere to rest your beer.


Slovakia
The Slovak beer is almost as good as the Czech beer. But they're a mountain people, so they have local-made hard liquors. I tried some on a hike through Tatra. It warms your toes, face, and brain, and made me feel ike a lightweight. Don't mess the Slovaks' mountain juice.


Hungary
Another wine country, although it's underrated. Their beer is good. Not as good as the Czechs, but better than the Slovaks. My advice? If you're in Hungary, get the beer if you want, it's good, but drink the wine, drink the fröccs, hell, drink the palinka in responsible quantities – or irresponsible quantities if you want a good and/or bad story.

Poland
That beer before liquor rule applies to Poland as well.


Portugal
They drink their beer out of little bottles. Why? Because then you drink it quickly before it gets warm. This is important because their beer is nice cold, and mucky when it's warm. The Portuguese have also perfected the Buy-Two-Beers-at-a-Time Move to match the average drinking speed there.


United Kingdom
We make fun of their warm beer because we just don't understand. Then you're there and you're all confused by the beers with the strange names in the pub and in you point all confused at one of the taps and then you drink it and it's room temperature and you pause because you're realize you're an ignoramus and it's actually pretty good. 


Bulgaria, Slovenia, Bosnia, Croatia
They have their own national beers and they're all good. But I can't chose which one is best because they're all good and indistinguishable from one another and I don't want to take any sides and– oh my god, it's like a metaphor!

Beer.

Edinburgh and its Historical Ghosts

I could go on about Edinburgh. And the scotch. The architecture. The pubs. Oh, and the meat pies. The warm beer that actually tastes alright. The scotch... did I already say that? 

I heard about these wonderful things for years about the city, which propelled to the top of my Cities-To-Visit-Before-I-Have-Kids-and-Become-Too-Poor-and-Tired-to-Travel List.

Today, I'm telling you about something else: Edinburgh loves its historical ghosts. The city bleeds history – and has a lot of history about bleeding – and embraces it. All of it.

Here, they build monuments to poets and writers, not politicians and war heroes. There too many Robbie Burns statues to count, and there's beautifully Gothic, and monumental, the Walter Scott Monument.

The Walter Scott Monument.
Writers so rarely get this type of recognition.

It's not only the monuments that give you a sense of this city's strange love of its own history, warts and all – it's the stories they tell.

History in Edinburgh, and perhaps the rest of Scotland, is taught and told in yarns over pints in a pub or through ghost stories well after dark – all with that typically wry, ironical Scottish self-deprecation. 

If you are to believe the tour guides' theatrics, this city is filled with ghosts. The medieval city, most of which still eerily stands, was so crowded the dead were simply buried under the sidewalks. You're literally walking on the dead when you window shop along the Royal Mile.

There's the legend of Bloody MacKenzie, whose mausoleum is said to be cursed and – because you must include the young 'uns – is a stone's throw away from a school. 

There's the pub in the Grass Market named after a woman who was hanged and then miraculously came back to life. There's the death and suffering Edinburgh's vault, which housed the city's poorest, most desperate during the Industrial Revolution, not a great time to be poor.

The other pub named for Deacon Brodie, the cabinet-maker who robbed the homes he built cabinets for and was hanged on the gallows he built. If the Scots are known anything it's their gallows humour.

These stories and many more about battles and betrayals and the barbarism, ages ago and in the recent past, show this city embraces the ghosts of its past – and the mysterious rolling fog and the darkly romantic Gothic architecture just fits naturally with it.

Edinburgh's Castle.

Just in case a duel breaks out,
there's lots of weapons on the wall.

The gloomy view from Edinburgh Castle.

Strolling the streets

The best way to discover a city is walking it. Strolling down streets and into distant districts, and in Edinburgh's case, up a hill and cliffs – Arthur's Seat and the Salisbury Crags – overlooking the city. On foot, we visited the Botanical Gardens and the nearby Stockbridge neighbourhood, with its cute storefronts and Georgian houses. With a hot coffee in hand, we also discovered Leith, the city's old port and working class area.

Some might prefer seeing a city from station to station on the underground subway or getting the summary on a Hop-On-Hop-Off tour bus, but all we need is two feet and heartbeat.

Discovery Walks stop for nothing!
Even the rain!

The Salisbury Crags

Deep thoughts after the walk.

Ghost Sighting

We booked a tour in Edinburgh. Usually we avoid the tourist-y things, but we compelled to do it in such a spooky, superstitious city.

We heard ghost stories in the Greyfriars graveyard and visited vaults built into the South Bridge that were built for storing merchants' wares but eventually stored people in horrendous conditions. At one point we heard footsteps running past the door of the vault we were in, even though no one else was in the tunnel.

After the eerie tour, we walked through the Old Town and snapped a few photos of the dark, quiet, deserted street on our way to a pub for a night cap. I turned around and snapped a random photo behind us.

Look closely, crossing the street in front of the church.

Upon closer examination, you can see what could be an odd reflection of light, or a ghost, crossing a street. 

Here's it looks like in the un-enhanced close-up.

Is it a ghost? Kata thinks not, but I think so – this is a city that embraces its history and the ghosts that come along with it.

Autumn's Beautiful Awkwardness

Something happened in the Dorf while we were away in Scotland: Autumn.

It's too easy to hate on autumn. Yes, it's the season before winter, but that isn't autumn's fault.


It is just the most awkward season. Is it the end of the summer or the beginning of winter? Should I enjoy fall colours or rage at the coming winter. When it's cold enough for sweaters in the morning and hot enough for shorts in the afternoon, everyone walks about with shorts and a sweater in the often vain hope it gets warm enough to ditch the sweater.

Some hate autumn. I like it. 

Maybe it's because my hometown is a city filled with trees, so every October you're treated a dizzying display of reds, yellows, and browns. Or maybe I welcome the colder weather to thin out the casual patio goers, so it's easier to get a table. Leaving only kindred spirits defiantly sipping their pints in the chilly weather!

My Carolinan Forest upbringing (look it up) makes me accustomed to a September that's pretty much another month of summer and an autumn prettiness that lasts into November. 

In the Rhineland, the summer lurches into autumn earlier than my Southern Ontario homeland and the pretty part is over quickly. Then a dank, dark, Dagobagh-esque dreariness rolls into the region and refuses to relent until April.

Despite its short-lived stay, autumn is great in Germany. Canada fights its annual culture war over putting pumpkin spice into everything, while Germans add seasonal mushrooms to everything. Pfifferling to be exact, not the magic kind. 

They put Pfifferling in the sauces, the soups, the pizza, on burgers. But unlike pumpkin spice in Canada, Germany has a social contract about not putting it into everything: Pfifferling has its place in German society and that place is not a latte or a cupcake.

This is also the season of Oktoberfest – admittedly, like lederhosen, this is a Bavarian thing, rather than a German thing – but Dorfers are still happy to gather around the standing drinking tables at their nearby bars for a frothy alt beer. 

My social feeds might fill up with Canadian angst about pumpkin spice or the coming winter or the crappy weather, but I like to remember this is the season for hockey, cosy sweaters, afternoon hikes through the woods, and, yes, even seasonal mushrooms.

Sure, autumn is darker and awkward and makes people wear shorts with sweaters to catch that sliver of warm sun before the darkness sets in – but that's exactly the attitude you want from a drinking buddy an outdoor drinking table. Cheers to the ten to twelve days of autumn before winter comes.

Autumn looks alright at the bars on the Rhein Promenade...

But it looks great outdoors.