Swiss Beer Sucks

Just look how underwhelmed Jon is
to be drinking Swiss beer

Two months after completing my year in Switzerland, settling back into life in the U.S., I find myself really interested in how memory works. Particularly, how while I'm having an experience, it's hard to know what's going to have lasting meaning. Or how what feels like a crappy time in the present moment is sometimes recalled later with fondness. A lot of things that were hard or annoying for me abroad now seem like wonderful experiences in retrospect. Drinking Swiss beer is not one of those experiences.

A musician Juna played with on a professional gig (really good player and really good drinker, this guy) said he bet that Swiss beer must taste so good to us. Au contraire. In Switzerland, if you want a beer, you just walk into a restaurant or bar, order "a beer," and you get a beer. No questions asked. Every town has its own brew, almost always a lager that, I will admit, is almost guaranteed to be better than Budweiser no matter where you go. But "better than Budweiser" isn't saying much, and that's really as good as it gets (except for the VERY occasional and hard to find craft beer which I personally only ever saw in bottles). Usually, thankfully, there is also the option of some kind of wheat beer on draft, and that or cider is what I would order. Oddly, I've had better Swiss craft beers on draft in America than I ever had in Switzerland. So it exists. Somewhere.

Hoegaarden--not Swiss

The most fun part of discovering Basel's lager, Feldschlösschen, was performing the tongue gymnastics required to pronounce it, not drinking it. It's brewed in a magnificent factory that looks like a castle. But it still sucks. I could not wait to get home...for the beer. I celebrated my September birthday with a trip to a local Connecticut liquor store for 10 different craft beers. I did not drink them all on my birthday. But just the fact that I can go almost anywhere in America--even small town Connecticut--and find delicious American craft beer both in bottles in the store and on draft in restaurants and bars speaks to this country's beer superiority over Switzerland. Sorry, Schweiz, but we've got you on this one.