Wired Cola

[This is the first of what should be several notes about Greece; I'm doling them out in pieces because you people have short attention spans. Enjoy. -RjC]

This menu is atypical, but it has to be said:

Yes, you can get beer other than light lagers in Greece, including even some very nice Belgians if you're willing to pay the price (which looks bad, but that 17-Euro beer is a 750; compare this to prices at Stella's on Commercial drive, and they're not that bad, really.

No, wait, I just did the conversion in my head, and that's about a $27 beer. But their price for WiFi access was only 2 Euro/hour.

Greece is traditionally a wine-drinking country, and wine is generally the cheaper option. In some tavernas, the house wine competes on price with bottled water. I'm not joking. At one point we went to the market to get a nice bottle for our relatives as a thank-you gift, and concluded that nothing on offer was expensive enough to have constituted a generous present (we settled on a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black).

Back to beer. I can drink wine, but like beer better. It's widely available and widely consumed, but the above menu is an exception; go to any taverna, café, or street-corner kiosk (public liquor consumption was a giddy-making naughty-feeling pleasure for this Vancouverite, though more often theoretical than actual) in Syros and look for beer, and you'll probably find three or four of these beers available: Amstel, Mythos, Heineken, Alfa, and Kaiser Pilsner. I think I ate at one place that had Fischer (drinkable) but not Kaiser.

All of the big five are pale lagers (derisively, "macrobrews") except Kaiser, and pilsners are essentially a sub-type of pale lagers. Here I have rated them from least to most drinkable:

Alfa: domestic light lager. TLO's uncle made a funny face when I ordered it one night. I made a funny face after trying it.

Amstel: Dutch light lager. In Canada, Amstel Gold is commonly available and pretty nice. This is not Amstel Gold. This is not so nice.

Mythos: domestic light lager. Greeks may tell you Mythos is pretty good. I believe this is mostly because Mythos is easier for Greeks to pronounce than Heineken.

Kaiser: German pils. Not bad. Would drink it happily.

Heineken: Dutch light lager. Yep, the most familiar beer on this list is also the tastiest. I'm not going to claim it's the beer of choice for all purposes, but if it's a hot day in Greece and you want something to drink with lunch, go with Heineken.

The local supermarket (Marinopolis, aka Champion) had a surprisingly good selection of interesting beer available. To be blunt, they had more and more interesting Belgians and dark ales than my local BCLDB has.

And they were all pointless. I took quite a few home to drink (just because I was so excited to find them) and decided that 8% dark ales best served at 7C were a ridiculous, unpleasant affectation on a hot day in Greece. These are my favorite beers here in Vancouver, but by the end of my trip I just didn't bother. Maybe on a cold day in the winter.

So there you go: fly to Greece, drink Heineken, be happy. Comfort yourself with the fact that half of the food you eat will be merely very good, and half the food you eat will taste like some Platonic ideal of the Greek food you've eaten in your local Greek restaurant.