Just Like Milwaukee's Best

Before I came back one of the last things I did was to go on a brewery tour with Dave and Carrie. Apparently they do this every year in connection with some local newspaper and there was a reporter hanging around. The long and short of this all was that me and Dave got our pictures all over this local paper since the reporter mostly just hung around talking to us. Carrie acted as the translator most of the time. I'm not sure if any thing I said actually made it in the paper. I kept trying to compare the beer to Milwaukee's Best, aka The Beast, but I don't think that made it in. Snow, whose Changzhou brewery we went to, is now the most popular beer in the world despite it, A not tasting good, and B not being sold outside of China. The brewery tour itself was pretty boring and entirely in Chinese we went around and looked at a lot of vats which were apparently doing something. My main question was how could they rearrange all the vats and pipes to make the beer taste good. The best part of the tour was when they showed us the bottling place. It was about 100 degrees in there from steam cleaning the bottles and all the huge machines but it was really cool. Just seeing those huge machines whiz around putting tops and labels on everything was great. The amazing thing is that the rate at which the beer is being drunk has to match the amazing output of those machines and that's just from one brewery.

At the end of the tour was a tasting, which was interesting since I didn't know that snow made so many different types of beer, though honestly there wasn't too much difference between them. After that we had to sit through an annoying long video about the company before they finally started to play some drinking games. Most of these though were also pretty boring though there was a chugging contest that Dave won even though he threw up about ten seconds later about five steps short of the bathroom. The real fun came later when after sitting there for a while sort of regretting coming all the way out for this I decided that we needed to get the people together to play flip cup. Something else sort of boring was going on but I got up and just started to put out cups and call people over. I got a big crowd watching me than I had Carrie explain the game to them. For the uninitiated flip cup involves a line of people one at a time drinking a cup of beer and then having to flip it over. The flipping can take several tries so it takes longer for some people than others. The next person is only allowed to start drinking once the previous person is done and it forms a sort of race. We eventually corralled enough people into making two teams with me and Dave both playing. People understood the rules and the game was a lot of fun with Dave's team slightly winning. After the game we noticed a full but unattended cup on Dave's side of the table though so he may have had one less person. I got a great video of it and I'd like to note for the record that I got it on one flip.