One pass to drink them all!

Five is a bitter-sweet number, folks. Beerfest Asia was FIVE days long. And now its been FIVE days since it ended. Its official. We finally admit it. The beer feast is over. The music has stopped. The beer-stained ‘Beer Heals All Wounds’ slogan T-shirt needs to go into the wash. And we are paying the price of having had such a good time.

For the tens of thousands of folks who attended Beerfest Asia 2010 it would have been an awesome event that just ended and its 364 days to the next one. Sadly, this is not the case for everyone. Not the 175proofers, at least. For us, the withdrawal symptoms have just begun. The reality has begun to sink in that its back to real life. And going back to work is a tough cure for this pain. Its been a looonnng FIVE days. Well, to make this better, we’re gonna pen some sweet memories of the best beer feast these guys have been to ever. And this is great training for when the 175proofers head out to Oktoberfest later this year in Munich. Well, the best we can do is to share some of the digitally captured memories with you guys in the hope that it will help ease the pain (ouch!) for us. This will be cathartic, I’m sure. Here goes.

The hallowed tunnel to beer heaven...

Beer hall days... 5 days to be exact

and there were (beer) angels...

and hippies...

... bring out the hula hula - tasty Hawaiiian beers which conjour up the sunny island taste

...delicious Magners pear cider brought in by 6 Drunk Men

and the ocassional yuckky beer - Jaz from Malaysia...

religious beer... Almighty from Grand Ridge

getting some air guitar time with this Stella Artois inflatable beer accompaniment...

'Doc, I have a liver ache...'

Somersby Apple Cider from Carlsberg - a cider the ladies will like too

... bring out the hula hula. Great tasting Hawaiian beers which conjour up the big island magic

Wychcraft. Good looking, good balanced English beer. Hoppy but flavourful. My fave of the nite. Find it at East of Avalon in Singapore.

The smoothest cider you'll be drinking - Green Goblin Oak Aged Cider from the UK. We like. Find this at East of Avalon too.

We feel the desperate urge to rush to East of Avalon for a Goliath. For our bigger-than-man-sized thirst.

In America this would be a sports team, in the UK, more sensibly, its a malty full-bodied dark amber beer. Foutyniner from Ringwood Brewery UK. Avail at EoA. But why isn't it spelt 'fourtyniner'?

Stone Beer - feel that way after a dozen

We know how that must feel if you brew a fine brew like this. A good American craft beer.

Matso's Mango beer - not as girly as it sounds. Refreshing, not overpowering.

Last one for the night and fest. Draft Bitter from Grand Ridge. Good tase and value microbrew from Australia.

If you’ve come this far in the post, I suspect that you like beer as much as us. And you’ll feel our pain when we tell you that we bulk bought a mixed batch of beautiful craft beer from Grand Ridge during the beer auction for a great price but lost it in the back of the cab after we got off. That almost ruined Beerfest Asia 2010 for us. But thanks to this post and the photos we didn’t lose, we were able to relive those FIVE glorious days again and share them with you now. Well done SPHere Events for organising this. My special heartfelt thanks to Mandy and her super trooper team who made everything so enjoyable via their hospitality. Can’t wait 360 days to the next one. Cheers to that!

Update: Andre reminded me he sometimes orders a Guinness and Cider, also known as a ‘Poor Man’s Black Velvet’ (A ‘Black Velvet’ is Champagne and Guinness). Ok – proves my point that if the pure hard cider we have here is so good, why bother mixing the Guinness in?

Theory: Alcoholic drink made out of fruits = healthy and tasty, right? Hardly. I dislike fruit beers for one and for cider, the only one we usually get on tap is Strongbow. That’s too dry for my liking, to be honest. So by a twist of fate, I have been accidentally exposed to more cider in a month that in 5 years – as if to drum into me that there is some decent cider out there.  There’s been Magners which I drank a bottle of at Molly Malones, Bulmers (courtesy of my wife’s good mate working in a alcoholic beverage company) and Strongbow which I drank from the tap at The Apartment, a nice restaurant bar at trendy The Curve in Kuala Lumpur.

Now Strongbow, apart from being a very ‘commercial’ or ‘mass’ tasting cider on tap, is also quite dry and not full bodied. Does anybody feel different?

Magners Irish Cider, has a more ’boutique’ feel, as does Bulmers, also from Ireland. Good to know that Magnus is doing its part to keep the Irish agricultural industry healthy, at least the apple growing bit. For WM Magners is Ireland’s biggest purchaser of apples, accounting for a substantial proportion of the entire Irish apple crop. The difference between Magnus and Bulmers is that the former is drier that the latter – and dry is not my fave style of cider. Its the same when I drink wine – I like something not too dry, neither cloyingly sweet.

Not too dry - the way I like it

I have tried other ciders in the past including Woodpeckers (from the UK) picked up at the local Cold Storage supermarket as well as very tasty, refreshing Swedish Kopparberg pear ciders from Ikea (of all places, but you’ll score a good deal there. Why, have a cheap hotdog at the cafe too while at it!). Maybe that’s why I used to have very mismatched furniture at home. But  the last time I tried to pick up more Kopparberg during a furniture shopping break, alas, they didn’t carry it anymore. However, I did discover that Kopparberg is a town with a live webcam and where a meteor hit it millions of years ago. Maybe the meteor was thirsty for a cider?

Nugget: Kopparberg is a locality and the seat of Ljusnarsberg Municipality, Örebro County, Sweden with 3,189 inhabitants in 2005.^[1] It is famous for one of the most valuable postage stamps in the world, the Treskilling Yellow from 1857-July-13, Kopparberg’s (wooden) Church (voted #1 in Sweden in 2006), and Kopparberg Cider, now the number 1 selling pear cider in the UK and worldwide. (Source: wikipedia)

Furniture shopping at Ikea used to be a better experience (credit: wikipedia)

Anyone out there with a cider story to share? Apple, pear or other fruit?