Hops and stuff

As you may recall, I don't like beer. Sure, girly, fruity beer that doesn't taste like beer is fine, but is that even beer anymore? Beer is about the hops, right? Well, I went to the Heineken brewery/museum in Amsterdam to find out. I shouldn't say that I went there so much as I was guilted into going by my friends (whom Amie and I met up with in Amsterdam). It was a good experience, though. I learned about marketing, I tasted Heineken beer, and came out a wiser woman. The "Heineken Experience" is a perfect marketing ploy. It's the ideal money-maker. First you pay to get into the "museum" in which the first stop is a series of those large picture boards behind which you can take pictures with your friends. You continue on a bit, reading (or more likely not reading) bits of texts and quotes scattered about the giant propaganda images of smiling Heineken owners and manufactures. We spent a long while in the green room with chairs so comfy and so steeply reclined that you it's hard to get up again. Why? Because once in the chair you have your own personal TV in front of you on which you can watch constant Heineken commercials from different years dating all the way back to the 70s. For someone who thinks that the commercials are the best part of the Superbowl, this was an interesting part of the museum. You can't forget, though, that you're basically paying to be told that what you're paying for is good. We went through the "brewery" part of the museum and tasted the beer before it went through the fermentation process. It essentially tasted like barley syrup, which, incidentally, I thought was better than the cold, green-glassed Heineken that features in the ads. The Heineken workers also explained to us that it was the hops in the beer that give the final drink that "Heineken flavor."

After we were "made into beer" in a mock-Disney ride, we got to "taste ourselves" in the next room. A bartender had us describe, look at, smell, and finally drink our beer samples, explaining the "special qualities" of a Heineken beer along the way. It was here that I learned one of the more interesting facts of the excursion: the "head" (yes, the tour guides took full advantage of that word to induce giggles among the crowd) of the beer, or the foam, is there as protection. It preserves the bubbles inside the glass and keeps the beer fresher, longer. The head is the most bitter tasting part of the beer, and most people don't enjoy drinking it. According to our guide, lady beer-drinkers tend to like beer a bit less as they take smaller sips and catch more of foam (and therefore the bitter taste) than the men, who gulp it down. So, she said, we had to gulp our beer. It was at this moment, when I gulped my Heinekin, that despite the millions of dollars worth of propganda all around me, I don't like Heinekin beer. No, let me rephrase: I hate Heinekin. Some beers are tolerable at least, but beer is over-bitter (even under the foam).

I don't think my friends minded that I didn't like it, though, because they got to share my sample beer plus the two free beers that I got in the "bar" (yes, they had two large bars and a sort of mock club area as well) at the end of the museum. If you like beer, you like Heineken, or you like looking at how companies advertise, this museum is worth it. In the end, I enjoyed it. It was sort of like fun-land for beer-drinking adults, and even though I didn't like the beverage, I enjoyed some of the other parts of the museum, and I had a good time with my friends.