This is the NO DELI drink diary, wherein I struggle to document all of my beverage adventures, keep my Ænglish skillz intact, and unlearn basic HTML.
Things are not finished here. At all. That’s why this top post is so long – to ensure that you understand this.
Evidence that my otherwise refined tastes are totally situational (if that was in question, and if anyone was asking).
This beer lager märzen is one of few that I will now drink. Under protest.
Though my mind quickly goes numb at the sight of so much Deutsche Schrift, I can read all about this Rauchbier‘s impressive pedigree on the back of the bottle. Yes, “smokebeer”. It tastes like smoke! Because it’s smoked.
Then I had a V8 on a mountain in the middle of nowhere. :-#
Please excuse my quick-sketch skills of an artist, but no camera was nearby when I witnessed this scene at a[n unnamed] communal dining establishment.
To my surprise, this juice-like-beverage distribution ceremony was not conducted in total secrecy. So this is the sort of jernt I frequent now.
Meanwhile: I’m pretty enthusiastic over 110-proof (!) beer, but so-called ‘rouge taxidermy’, neotaxidermy, ‘ironic’ taxidermy, whateveryoucallit has always struck me as insincere, puerile, and desperate. The contrast leaves me with a break-even, non-opinion of this offering…
But at £500 per bottle, my non-opinion is irrelevant.
Finally: maybe ancient champagne isn’t impressive. But what if the bottles in question are ~230 years old? What if the bottles were stored under fifty-five meters of water for all those years? What if the water in question was, in fact, the Baltic Sea? Then? No?
I guess what impresses me is the diver’s first impulse after retrieving the bottle and discovering it was still full – he just opened it up and drank the stuff on the spot. Take note! That’s the kind of thoughtful, solemn reverence for the sanctity of artifacts one expects of such underwater archeologists!
Turns out this partay cargo was on a boat sent by Louis XVI to the court of Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg. It’s a complete anomaly of history (to say the least) that a scuba-diving Viking raider got to the Clicquot before Catherine T. did.
If you really need them you can contrive any number of melancholy reasons, both great and small, to drink wine. Especially with the proper bottle in-hand, it’s easy to get carried away with schmaltzy, tipsy metaphor.
I’m too self-conscious to indulge this sort of ceremony unconditionally, but sometimes I slip.
It figures that I’d find a resource for proper Moroccan-style mint tea so close to home, so belatedly.
Included with the price of the beverage comes an all-volunteer floorshow, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Scribbled inexplicably by drunk dirtheads for millennia, this diacritic is now available in your grocer’s cold case.
I discovered these two drinks on the same day, separated by a mere cubit on the shelves. Two model examples of “foreign-branding”-via-umlaut:
[The expected: syrupy -pectiny stuff. The tea was palatable, but I could live w/o all the other many Flavürs.]
inü. Not to be confused with the Innu. Or…?
I guess that explains all the cave-art graphics and the perfervid blurb on the bottle about ‘la tribu moderne‘, ‘les grands espaces‘, and ‘la pulsion ancestrale‘. Drinking blueberry juice doesn’t feel ‘primal’ to me. Fey maybe.
I wonder how may Innu work at inü? I hope they get a piece of the action here somehow.
