Three of my favorite things in one place. Could I be any happier? I’m currently sitting in the Northwest Worldclub in Tokyo, waiting five hours for my flight to Honolulu, where I have a thirteen hour layover before I take another redeye to Los Angeles, where I’m connecting home to Detroit. Total time in transit? About 36 hours.
But at least I’ve got this beer machine to keep me company. I have a feeling we’re going to become great friends in the next five hours.
Oh, my beloved Australia scores again!
An Australian has been fined after buckling in a case of beer with a seat belt but leaving a 5-year-old child to sit on the car’s floor, NY Times reports. Police said they were ”shocked and appalled” when he pulled over the unregistered car Friday in the central Australian town of Alice Springs and saw a 30-can beer case was strapped in between two adults sitting in the back seat of the car. The child was also in back, but on the car’s floor. The driver was fined 750 Australian dollars ($710).
”This is the first time that the beer has taken priority over a child,” said the police officer in charge.
I hate to break it to them, but I am quite certain this is–sadly enough–not the first nor the last time beer has taken priority over a child.
The world is definitely about to get fully automated any day now. Just yesterday, I blogged about a German restaurant that’s based solely on automated service: no waiters, no tipping.
Today, I have a new culinary efficiency concept for you: the self-tapping pub. Leave it up to the Czechs–the world’s biggest beer consumers per capita–to invent a pub, where you don’t even need a waiter to get your beer. What waste of time!
The customers at “The Pub“, as the automated pub is actually called, can tap Pilsner Urquell beer from brewer Plze??ský Prazdroj at their tables, and a computer device on the tap keeps track of the standings of all tables in beer drinking. The scores are then projected onto a screen in the bar, Czech Business Weekly reports. The system enables customers to keep track of the beer drinking scores of all tables not only in the bar they are in, but also in all bars of the same chain across the Czech Republic. So far, they have branches in Prague, Pilsen, Hradec Kralove, Brno, Liberec, Karlovy Vary and Tabor.
The bars have Web cameras so that customers can see their competitors in different bars in the chain. They can also select which bar they would like to be in a beer drinking contest with and can send short messages via small screens on the tap. Needles to say, being able to see how much everyone else is drinking only promotes the competitive spirit among the pub guests. And that, I guess, is the idea.
The concept, started by two 24-year-old Czech men three years ago, has been been a smashing success in the Czech Republic. The chain might apparently soon be expanding to Poland, Russia and Italy.
The German brewery industry just announced that beer consumption in Germany is falling…again. In eight of the last nine years, beer consumption in that country has declined.
This is a country that takes beer seriously: there are over 1200 breweries there alone. The peak of consumption was in the 1980s, when Germans drank 156 liters of beer per capita per year. The numbers fell in 2007 by 3.5 liters, to a mere 112.5 liters for each man, woman, and child.
The only year with an increase? 2006, when it hosted the World Cup.
The reigning world leader in consumption? My home country of the Czech Republic, where we downed 158 liters per person, or over 104 pints every second.
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