Taiwan Beer – some Stories

 

Don't read on if you are younger than 18 years
Consumption of alcohol is injurious to health
Be safe: Don’t drink and drive

I was looking through old notebooks late and found a label of Taiwan Beer (台灣啤酒), which made me think of times gone by, when I've been studying and sojourning in Taiwan. If you want to know more about today's beer on Taiwan (correctly in the Republic of China), please use the internet or look up Wikipedia [1]. I'll talk about times, when there has been only one beer under the label.

The name Taiwan Beer was adopted shortly after the 2nd World War. The production of Taiwan beer was assigned to the Taiwan Tobacco and Wine Monopoly Bureau in 1947. It is brewed from barley malt, water, hops, yeast and … ponlai rice (蓬萊米, pronounced péng lái mǐ). Well, when I've read the label I had been surprised as beer in Germany brewed only using  barley malt, water, hops, and yeast according to the Reinheitsgebot (purity order) of 1516. But Miller Lite is brewed with water, barley malt, yeast, hops, hop extract, and corn syrup, and Bud Light is brewed with water, barley malt, yeast, hops, and rice. So Taiwan Beer isn't much different from international beers if compared by ingredients. And putting away the reinheitsgebot, Taiwan Beer doesn't taste much different to Kölsch, the beer that's brewed in my hometown Cologne (Köln).

What is on the label besides 台灣啤酒? It says: 建設台灣，復興中華 - develop Taiwan, restore  China. And there is 麥芽精釀, which means malt craft brewing. There's more on the label like winning a prize, but we'll leave the label now.

We don't drink beer today
Some student and expats, both German and from the US had developed to quaff a few beer on weekends. So once I went to my friends' apartment in Jingmei and brought some bottles of Taiwan Beer. I was greeted: „We don't drink beer today!“ I asked if they joined the anonymous alcoholics, but it turned out that one of them recently made the acquaintance of a student. Actually she was the daughter of the producer of the blueish bottles for Campari. So we had Campari for talking and for watching „All the President's Men“ starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.

The New Fridge
One of the shop keepers in the vicinity of my friends suddenly had a new fridge. Needless to say that his shop and not the other one had regular customers.
This part of Jingmei only had some dead end streets because of the mountains.

Background actors
As for most of the students we sometimes did background acting. I've been in the movie „A Title rewon“ (錦標) from 1979. We were playing different crowd watching boxing bouts. As it had been the time of the Rocky movies with Sylvester Stallone, we were asked to stop calling the Chinese boxer (played by a younger brother of Bruce Lee) Roccy (as we were in ROC – Republic of China). And we had to cover all Taiwan Beer cans as we were playing being in the US.

這個瓶子不是我的瓶子，這個瓶子就是你的瓶子。
This sentence means: This bottle is not my bottle, this bottle therefore is your bottle. An american friend always bought beer at a certain store and when he wanted to get the refund, the shop-keeper told him: 這個瓶子不是我的瓶子 and he didn't get a refund. So once he went there in shorts and flipflops and the shop-keeper did it again. He had a bottle in each hand and started dancing, whirling the bottles and singing: 這個瓶子不是我的瓶子，這個瓶子就是你的瓶子。And then he smashed the two bottles on the concrete floor of the shop.


Links and Annotations:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_Beer

.