Dave’s Travel Blog

My sportswear purchases, as previously detailed, are pretty much limited to cheap denim jeans and sneakers at Wal-Mart. Rather than actually step outside and, y’know, do something or gosomewhere, I’ll refer you to Niña’s hike up Mt. Daguldol in The Philippines in her trendy new Columbia Sportswear outdoor gear.

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I ran across this photo spread in Outside Magazine today: Winter’s Best Jeans. If Outside Magazine can cover designer denims, is there any reason I can’t stretch the definition of “travel blog” to address the same topic? Other than that I can’t actually afford to buy designer denim jeans, I mean?

I’ve long been a fan of regular Levi’s 501 jeans, but nowadays they cost in excess of $40. Still, that’s a bargain compared to the $80 to $200 for the denims pictured in the Outside article, and I’ve been planning to shop for a new pair… for traumatic reasons which I may detail in a separate post.

A few days ago I spent a couple of hours browsing in Wal-Mart while waiting to have an oil change done on the car. Yeah, I know, “real men” change their own oil. But I didn’t want to risk staining my “pre-weathered” two-hundred dollar Levi’s Capital E Eco Hesher Regular Straight Leg Jeans, seeing as how they already look ratty enough straight off the shelf.

I’m kidding. I can’t afford two-hundred dollar trousers. And if I could, they’d better be something so sharp they’d put James Bond to shame in the swank department.

No, instead, I’m browsing around Wal-Mart and as I wander through the menswear department I notice “Faded Glory” blue denim jeans for $9.95 a pair. There’s another brand, “Rustlers,” for $10.95 a pair. I paused to check them out. Hmmm… not all that different from Levis. I tried on a few sizes and styles.

Here’s my take on those d@mned “relaxed fit” or “comfort cut” or whatever euphemism they use for “fat boy” pants. Or “phat boy” pants, I suppose, since they’re so popular with gangstas and hoodlums and guys who like to wear baggy pants down around their knees to show off their Underoos. Which, if they were wearing Underoos, might be cool, but usually they’re just wearing plain old boxer shorts. Whatever you call ‘em, and no matter how bad-@ss you think they make you, or your @ss, look, those wide-bottoms (as opposed to bell bottoms) leave you looking like that guy whose picture used to be in the Guinness Book of World Records. You don’t even have to click on the link, ‘cuz you know the guy I mean. (However, the wonders of the internet have made accessible, to my utter amazement, actual moving picture footage of that Guinness Book guy! )

But I digress. My question is: what is the difference between the ten-dollar “Faded Glory” jeans or the eleven-dollar “Rustler” jeans at Wal-Mart and the coupla-hundred dollar jeans promoted in Outside Magazine? I mean, is there a ten- to twenty-fold difference in quality? In fit? In style?

I must admit, I had to pass on the less expensive “Faded Glory” brand, because all they had in stock were the Guinnes Book of Records guy style, and go with four pair of the pricier eleven-dollar “Rustlers” regular-cut jeans. I mean, four pairs of jeans for the price of one pair of Levi’s 501s! Deal, huh?

I suppose buying eleven dollar jeans pretty much relegates me to the “trailer trash” heap for the remainder of my days, don’t it?

Seriously, I want to know: is there a valid reason to buy two-hunnert dollar “overalls”? Are there people out there who can tell the difference? If there are, are they people to whom I should be concerned about making the right impression?

I mean, okay, I examined these clothes fairly closely. Even I noticed a few differences. The smoothness of the zipper on the cheap jeans doesn’t quite measure up to that in Levi’s 501s, for example. But, there’s hardly thirty dollars worth of difference. Perhaps it’s small-minded on my part, but I can’t conceive of a zipper improvement that would warrant a one-hundred fifty dollar difference in price.

Maybe people pay the extra money because they want their clothes to look “worn out” without having to wear them out. If that makes sense. Which it doesn’t. I wore my new cheap jeans the next couple of days when I went power-tripping around town with Trippy, including a hot, sweaty, dusty off-trail scrabble through the brush and cacti to reach an abandoned machine-gun emplacement on a ridge above the Makapu’u lighthouse trail. The knees and the backside held up, so the quality’s there. The zipper didn’t come undone. Actually, the red dirt brushed right off, so they still don’t look “fashionably filthy.” Maybe that’s the problem with cheap jeans, they don’t get grungy fast enough. I shoulda worn them when I oiled up my bicycle chain this afternoon.

I guess I truly am “trailer trash.” Poor trailer trash, because even if somebody can clarify why I should be buying buck and a q denims, I can’t really afford to do that. Not without dipping into my beer money, anyway.

I did buy some genuine Converse All-Stars recently. Forty-two bucks for sneakers. I don’t know how “genuine” they really are, seeing as how they’re made in Vietnam. That would be the country in which we lost the war previous to the one we’re losing now. Where the Commies took over. In response to which we said, “okay, you win, so now, pretty please, may we move the production of the All American Chuck Taylor Converse All-Stars basketball shoes to your country?” Anyway, I don’t yet have a good photo of myself wearing my new All-Stars, but guess who else liked Converse sneakers? Yup, the Guinness Book guy! He even left ‘em untied, just like the cool kids today! That cat was “phat” before his time!

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I engaged in a discussion with a friend this evening via email in which I was lamenting the sorry story of the reaction I received from “other household members” to my desire to attend La Tomatina in Buñol, Spain, again in 2008. The logic of my intent was compared by my household members to the same logic employed by suicide bombers who murder innocent civilians. “It makes exactly the same sense,” I was told, rather harshly I thought, “to spend three-thousand dollars to go throw tomatoes for an hour” as it does to strap on a bomb and assassinate civilians. Indeed, it was intimated that attending La Tomatina was on par with the senseless murder of Bobby Kennedy or Martin Luther King.

Needless to say, I’ve since been in somewhat somber spirits. My friend’s response to the situation: “there’s nothing you can do about it… except have a beer.”

Good advice, that. As I sat sipping my Samuel Adams Brown Ale I found myself wondering, if attending La Tomatina is as purely evil as blowing up civilians in Iraq or Pakistan or London or Afghanistan, then since I’m drinking beer, I should be drinking a seriously evil beer. Sure, Arrogant Bastard uses an evil-ish marketing theme, and the Rogue Dead Guy brand features a dead guy on their label, but when it comes to truly evil beer the ultimate question has to be: what would Hitler drink?

Because I have no life, or at least, what little life I have I prefer to devote to frivolous, pointless, time-wasting daydreaming rather than to more practical, albeit prosaic, matters like housecleaning or car-washing, I have spent the last ninety minutes researching Hitler’s Favorite Beer. Now, the answer to most factual-type questions can usually be found within moments through a properly key-worded internet search. Not so Hitler’s favorite beer. Rather, a combination of research, reasoning, and deduction on par with that of a Dan Brown character were required to resolve this issue. And resolved it is, at least to my satisfaction. Here, then, are my conclusions, and the reasoning behind my selection of the most likely candidate for Hitler’s Favorite Beer.

My first source was joesixpack.net, where I learned about Rocky Balboa’s favorite beer, as well as the preferred libations of other quasi-fictional characters, like James Bond, who has, so I read, forsaken “shaken, not stirred” for Heineken. As an aside, Heineken, I can state from personal observation, is the favorite half-empty beer bottle for drunken army soldiers to throw from the windows of speeding cars in the dead of night to shatter on sidewalks and in bike lanes for joggers and children on bicycles to navigate through the next morning. Somehow, I can’t picture Hitler doing that. Besides, Heineken is Dutch, not German, it’s a pale beer, and it’s force-carbonated. Hardly the stuff of The Master Race.

As a fictional character in a short story by Richard Grayson, a youthful, handsome Hitler prefers Beck’s beer. Other sources suggest Beck’s was a staple aboard the Third Reich’s U-Boat fleet during the Second World War. My research suggests, however, that Beck’s is not a likely candidate for Hitler’s “favorite” beer. His preference was for, and his experience was with, true München Bavarian beers rather than sailor’s beer from Bremen.

Some sources describe Hitler as an ascetic eschewing spirits, but the bulk of historical documentation suggests The Führer “drank beer and diluted wine frequently.”

The Beer Hall Putsch is often marked as a significant turning point in Hitler’s political career. Back in Hitler’s youth, beer halls in München were popular gathering spots for the public, and served as convenient locations for large gatherings, including political rallies. Two of Hitler’s “favorite” watering holes were located in München. “Munich’s most historic drinking sites include the Hofbräuhaus and the Bürgerbräukeller, both of which carry local associations of everyone from Adolf Hitler to the boy or girl next door,” notes Frommer’s travel site.

The Bürgerbräukeller, even in Hitler’s time, was a subsidiary of Löwenbräu. Could Löwenbräu, then, be Der Führer’s brew of choice? This is unlikely for two reasons. One reason: the Bürgerbräukeller was the site of an attempt on Hitler’s life in the late 1930s. The location was never rebuilt after a bomb intended for Hitler badly damaged the structure. More significantly, however, several sources suggest Hitler preferred dark beer, and Löwenbräu does not not brew dark beers.

Hofbräuhaus, however, has been brewing beer, including dark beers, since the 1500s. This location, too, was known as one of Hitler’s hang-outs. While the current Hofbräuhaus web site fails to mention Hitler, a quick Google search for Hofbräuhaus reveals numerous travel blogs in which the writers inevitably note that the brewery tours highlight the well-known connection with Hitler. Significantly, Hofbräuhaus still brews a traditional dark beer. This beer may well indeed have been one of Adolf Hitler’s favorite distilled beverages.

Period sources suggest that as Hitler’s power grew, his tastes became more refined. “After he became prominent he had a special dark beer of less than 2 percent alcohol content especially brewed for him in the Holzkirchen Brewery of rural Bavaria.” The Holzkirchen Oberbräu Brewery is still extant, having been saved from oblivion some years ago by a concerned group of brewing connoisseurs and investors. Among several varieties produced today is a mild, dark beer closely matching the description of Hitler’s “especially brewed” dark beer. Holzkirchner Laurenzi Export Dunkel, from the brewery probably commissioned by Hitler to produce a custom beer particularly suited to his discerning palate, may well be the closest beer available today to that preferred by The Führer himself.

While München’s Hofbruau Dunkel likely lubricated the proto-führer’s inflammatory rhetoric in the early days of his ascent to political power, my careful, scholarly, brown ale-inspired research suggests Hitler’s beer of choice was a mild, dark, low-production craft beer from the heart of Bavaria akin to Holzkirchen Oberbräu Brewery’s Holzkirchner Laurenzi Export Dunkel.
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P.S.: just for the record, if you check the Wikipedia article on La Tomatina, you’ll see a photo of some guys greasing a wooden pole. That’s my photo. Out of the hundreds of thousands of people who have attended La Tomatina over the past few years, and out of countless thousands of photos taken of the event, only two photos appear at Wikipedia, and one of them is mine. I guess that makes me some kind of authority, huh? Nevertheless, it’s frivolous, pointless, and utterly evil for me to consider a return trip. So much for Dave’s contribution to world knowledge. I wonder if Albert Schweizer’s relatives gave him grief for going to Africa? More to the point, maybe I should forget Tomatina and plan for Oktoberfest; I’ll spend a month in Bavaria tipping back liters of Holzkirchner Laurenzi Export Dunkel, Hitler’s Favorite Beer.

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