Friday, October 4, 2013

Reading notes: Beer in Switzerland

I just wrote about beer from Southeast Asia when this interesting article on the beer industry in Switzerland popped up in Feedly.  For a brief couple of months in my early twenties when I was between ideas about "what" or " who" I wanted to be when I grew up, I worked as a waitress in a small town restaurant in Switzerland where I served a lot of beer and learnt that names for the different size glasses that the beer could be ordered in. At the time you could get a glass of beer, a glass of red wine or a glass of coke or a cup of coffee for the same price. Considering very little coke got ordered during my days as a small-town waitress I wasn't surprised to learn that Switzerland has the highest concentration of breweries per capita. Below is the great little graphic from the article ( which has several other very cute beer graphics-- worth checking out)  to demonstrate this fact, I suppose it is somewhat surprising that the Swiss beat the Germans on this.


However as the article also points out Swiss beer drinkers are not very adventurous when it come to what they drink, they tend to stick with what they know. In fact that restaurant I worked at only served one kind of beer.  The article is basically bemoaning the lack of craft beer in Switzerland but it doesn't really sound like the Swiss feel like they are missing out. Perhaps this is why its so telling that the main point of comparison for the article is the US which tends to be so novelty hungry.


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