A Little Swedish Epiphany.

I was never one for regarding lager as beer. For me, lager was a pale imitation of beer. Beer needed to have colour, body and a strong, hoppy taste, and my taste was for a good British bitter beer. And if it was brewed in my home county of Staffordshire, so much the better. (I made an exception for Guinness so I suppose it must be connected with the water. The Liffey and the Trent clearly have something going for them.)

That all changed with the operation (which was exactly one year ago today, by the way.) After the operation I found bitter beer too heavy and moved over to lager for the lightness. The problem was that lager lacked colour, body and taste, but I persevered for practical reasons which I needn’t go into.

Tonight I tried a Swedish lager called Pistonhead which, although typically lacking taste and colour, at least has body and is more palatable than most of its genre. I found this surprising and a fit subject for a bout of musing: why would Swedish lager have more body than most of its ilk? And then the answer came to me in a flash:

The words 'body' and 'Sweden' match. See the following picture of a Swedish woman police officer making an off-duty arrest and you’ll see what I mean.