Does your drink of choice have interesting history?

That's Westvleteren 12. Supposedly the best beer in the world.

actually stayed at the westmalle abbey for a weekend once, monks who live there are genuinely some of the nicest people I've ever met, and the majority of their profits go directly to a wide variety of charity organizations
fun fact though, the beer they drink is a special version not available for distribution which has a significantly lower alcohol level

You could say that

thefanatics.com/web_blog.view.php?web_blog_ID=169
>Simpson thought somebody had won a card game until the plane’s captain announced Boon had consumed 52 beers...Boon went on to average 55 on that tour.

I assume the beer was VB.

Trappists are so cool.

Tea so yeah. Favourite type is either Earl Grey or Pu-Erh

Fucking 'Straya. Gotta love 'em.

Non-alcoholic: Sassafras tea! When American colonials didn't want to pay tax on tea from china, they made their own tea out of the Sassafras root, which provides just as much caffeine. The same flavoring became popular in Root Beer. Nobody I know can stand the taste but I think it's delicious.

Alcoholic: pulque. I add some mashed banana into mine which tempers the bitterness. Its pretty good because it gets you fucked up and pretty much can't give you a hangover.

Regular: Soju! It's like 3 USD for a litre of 45 proof. By *far* the most efficient way to get drunk.

>Chimay is...

Absolutely delicious.

>daily drink

Water, nuff said.

>low alcoholic
Saaremaa tume - dunno, probably doesn't have any interesting history
>medium alcoholic
Jägermeister has a cool story
>strong alcoholic
Various highly smoked whiskeys, whiskey has cool history as well.

Nice Sam Adams glass. How's the IPA?

Dewars was the first and still one of few mass produced whiskeys that doesn't make you out to be hill trash.

checked

I always wondered about this. IPAs were purposefully made too hoppy for their taste in the hopes of would keep some by the time it landed in Asia. However today's beer hipsters require it to be drank fresh in order to get all the bitter up front. The original IPA brewers would think their a bunch of idiots.

That said, I've really grown to like Goses which is a old German style.

WATER ONLY

This entire family is fucking nuts.
Yes it's piss but it's my piss.

Oh yeah, the old and kinda forgotten german styles are the best (I'm actually drinking a gose at the moment, there are few drinks as good as it for the summer heat. Although trying to convince people that a sour and salty beer can be tasty is rather difficult).

As for the styles - berliner weisse and adambier are definitely something to try, given the occasion

The IPA loses little of its bitterness and most of its hippy aroma.

What hipsters drink are mostly US-hop ladden beers, giving aromas you would not get with the more subtle English hops, used in the original IPAs. Compare, say, Cascade or Citra with Challenger.

Though can really tell a good IPA from a shitty one that hides defects with hops when the aroma fades. Doesn't take a genius to dry hop a crappy malt body.

Tl;dr IPAs lose aroma, not bitterness over time; original IPAs were far removed from modern kin anyway.

t. Homebrewer

Kompot
No

Fanta
A bit of Nazi stuff but besides that nah.

>tfw you can't buy dutch beers here

Isn't it just invented during nazi Germany? I mean, the creators didn't had their NSDAP card and wheren't secretly gazing jews in their basement, right?

Yeah, that's pretty much it. Not really that interesting upon reflection. At least we got a Fanta ad commending the Nazis out of it in recent years.

White Russians are like, from the 50s or 60s or something, not a lot to say about it other than The Big Lebowski.

Cool. Thx for sharing.

I really wish I could stand beers, but just a sip and I'm near vomiting. Such cases.

But it is interesting. It shows that despite wars, life goes on, unrelated innovations can be made, time doesn't stop

Try German wheat beers (Hefeweizen) or maybe Belgian fruit beers (Kriek or Frambois). Maybe even a sour farmhouse beer.

Not all beer is big lager - there's something for almost everyone once you gaze past the facade.

There's a lot of wanking about the German Beer Purity Law, but it's all bollocks that limited European beer to just one type for centuries. Luckily Belgium kept various weird and wonderful historical beer styles alive.

In a very real sense they maintained originally French beer recipes involving fruit and spices alive, while beer essentially died in Frace due to prevalence of wine. Same with German recipes that perished in Germany proper due to the Reinheitsgebot.

I've actually heard that tea emerged around Fujian in the Five Southern Dynasties or even as late as the Sui. Kinda weird to imagine the Han dynasty and Three Kingdoms dudes never drinking tea. Not sure about that though.

Vodka

Alcoholic, Soju. It's that hard alcohol taste and ability to get drunk but I'm man enough that it goes down really smooth, much more enjoyable than vodka or something.
Historically it's interesting how it reached Korea. When Goryeo was a vassal of the Mongols, Mongol troops occupying Korea would drink Arak, an alcoholic drink they picked up in their conquest of Persia and the Middle East. Somewhere some time some Mongol troops bro'ed it up with some Korean locals who really liked the Arak they were drinking and so they learned to make it and it became Korea's national drink. In one of the towns historically associated with soju production in fact even one style is still called Arak-ju.

How old are you? I couldn't stand beer and would stick with cider and spirits, then when I was about 19 I had a beer at a barbecue to fit in with the lads and it just tasted incredible for no reason at all.

Nah I've tried, I just can't get into it. There was some Belgian one I could stand and didn't get sick from, but I can't remember what it was.

About to turn 23, I can drink wine and hard liquor just fine but I don't know what it is about beer that just destroys me.

they're belgian you goofball, the dutch can't make decent beer.

Courage's Imperial Russian Stout

Similar story to India Pale Ale made with more hops to retain taste for export to the East India Company. Peter the Great liked the stout in England on a visit and had it made stronger and shipped back to St. Petersburg.

Reason I like Courage>Old Rasputin is that Courage is the successor of the original brewery that Peter the Great had his shipped from although I'll confess I get it very rarely.

You tell me.

...

Nonsense. Tea is prehistoric. Maybe you're talking about autistic Tea ceremonies, which had its height in the Sui=T'ang Era and nowadays only practiced in Japan.