Alex Zaitchik never drank so much beer before moving abroad...

Drinking beer is cool. You can pee forever on the stuff. If you drink enough of it, you can wake up dehydrated and sick, with slimy bile and little bits of puke all over your German girlfriend.

It can even make you want to date a German girl.

Thus the popularity of beer as wonder drug, a cheap combination of e and LSD: you hallucinate and want to touch people you normally wouldn't. The only time I ever shagged a German girl I was on beer. She was Bavarian.

Beer was first developed in ancient Sumer, where tribal leaders would sit around and tell Gilgamesh jokes and have sex with German chicks. Unlike modern beer, which comes in nifty bottles and cans, the Sumerians drank it out of clay bowls and cupped hands.

We do not know the quality of this ancient beer, but archaeologists do not think it was much better than today's beer. Some scholars believe it to have tasted similar to the human urine of the period.

Beer culture has effected me in many ways. Whenever I am with friends, I say "Guys, It Just Doesn't Get Any Better Than This". I say this because a major US brewery spent millions on this ad campaign during my childhood trying to convince the American proletariat that as long as they had cheap watery suds and the occasional fishing weekend, it didn't matter that their wages were stagnant or falling. This was the 1980s. The 1980's sucked in America. Sucked hard.

Because of these ads, I also tend to associate beer with a happy working class, and not depressed fathers on ripped couches worrying how they are going to make the mortgage. Which is what we like to call THE REALITY.

At 16 I started drinking malt liqueur because it was a dollar-twenty for forty ounces. And because of Boyz in the Hood. When the bottle was empty, you knew you were wasted. I especially enjoyed Crazy Horse because it was sweet, and was saddened when they went out of business.

Indian rights activists protested the name, but my p.c. sensibilities died faster than Sitting Bull in his teepee when I had my mouth around one of those wide necked bottles. (Sitting Bull was gang busted in his teepee.)

What is the relationship between beer and Globalisation? Trade liberalisation in the Americas has had the dual effect of making Corona beer cheaper, but also less desirable, as Mexican workers vent their frustration with job insecurity by pissing in the beer vats. It is a well-known fact that Mexicans enjoy their beer with slivers of lemon in it. They also take long wasteful naps, known as "siestas."

Canadians and Germans also like beer. Germans drink it out of big glass steins; Canadians out of blue and white aluminum cans. Germans drink it at beer festivals; Canadians at Mapleleaf games.

Whereas a Canadian will not hesitate to urinate against a wall in public after drinking beer, a German will typically piss his pants and later wring them out over his toilet. While a Canadian will drink beer out of a plastic cup, the German views such behaviour as boorish.

A Russian will drink beer, but prefers vodka for historical reasons. Finns like beer; the Chinese, on a whole, do not.

The greatest beer film of all time is Strange Brew. The most exciting Bud Bowl was 1990, when Bud Light beat Bud with a dramatic OT field goal.

When drinking beer, remember three things: friends don't let friends drive drunk, your breath probably stinks, and while beer is a human institution that spans the ages, the piss all over your Polo shirt will be dry in an hour. Burp.