19. Kirin

I was beginning to realise that to try and do 365 new things in a year is a bit of a tall order. It would be easily completed if I had endless funds and wasn’t going to have to spend much of my time working here. With that in mind I decided that I was going to have to be a bit creative with the challenge and incorporate something that I hadn’t considered when starting; alcohol!

Before leaving the UK, Dom Jolly had a fantastic TV show called “Dom Jolly’s Happy Hour” where he travelled the world trying all kinds of booze with the locals and basically getting pissed on the TV channels tab. I didn’t want to copy this but I thought that I might start listing beers and wines that I drank in Oz and give you my totally uneducated and purely subjective comments on each of them.

For the beer I came up with 5 aspects to rate them on which are “Cost” (which I realise varies from place to place but it’s a rough indication of the average price), “Smoothness” (obvious I guess), “Piss-Factor” (how likely you are to get drunk on it due to it’s alcohol content and the size of the bottles/measures/cost etc), “Aftertaste” (self explanatory and really only any use during the first couple of mouthfuls) and “Coolness” (not how chilled it was but how cool I felt drinking it).

Each of these has a score of 1 to 5. For example how cool would I feel ordering an alco-pop? I’d give that a 1. How cool would I feel ordering a Stein of German beer? Well I’d give that a 5 (like I’m sure Merry would have in Lord of the Rings, when he discovered the beer in the Prancing Pony came in Pints).

For the wines… well I thought I’d just give you some chat about what I thought of all the new ones I tried.

Anyway, the first new beer I tried was Kirin (hence the title of this chapter).

Cost 3
Smoothness 4
Piss-Factor 3
Aftertaste 1
Coolness 4

A very tasty Japanese beer that I had with some brilliant noodles at the “Wok on Inn” in Rocks Square. It may well have knocked Sapporo off it’s number one spot in my Japanese beer top 10.