The Cheapest Bottle in Amsterdam

I took a bike trip over to the fanciest joint in town for a guy looking to treat his liver on a budget: Vomar Budget Supermarket. If you recall my widely-revered article about cheap beer from earlier this year  -- The Cheapest Beer Challenge: Amsterdam -- then you'll also remember that Holtland beer was for 76 eurocents a liter the main motherfucker juicing up that bitch. Amazingly, Vomar supermarket has marked down the price of Holtland by a whopping 15.8%; that means that a half-liter can has gone down from 38 to 32 cents.

But of course, it's not always that Holtland is in stock. There's so much demand for the stuff that three or four big spenders come with their fancy ten euro bills and clean the place out in the morning; it's even harder and less guaranteed on weekends. However, it seems that Holtland is in for a fight in the coming months.

I was looking around this morning, seeing if I could beat the Sunday rush, when I did a quick scan with the calculator in my brain and noticed a bottle proclaiming that it was: 20 cents a pop. I was so excited that I immediately dumped 10 bottles of Holger into my shopping cart; here we had a beer that came in a fancy, real glass bottle... and with no spelling mistakes, to boot.

Best enjoyed on a balcony or under a canal
I got to the checkout lane and discovered that I needed to pay a 10 cent "statiegeld" -- something which I would later learn was a deposit -- which bumped the price of the 10 bottles from 2 euros to 3 euros. Fortunately I had 4 euros in my pockets, so I didn't embarrass myself by buying more than I could pay for. At first I felt deceived at the ridiculous 10 cent deposit, but since I'll get it back, it's ok.

Anyway, I got home and decided to taste that motherfucker, see how smooth the taste of that first bottle of Holger was. It tasted like drinkable beer. I wish I could write more descriptively about the palate, the aroma, and the aftertaste of the beer, but I have almost no taste buds and my father beat such fancy concerns out of my mind while growing up, beatings which I now appreciate because they make my love of beer much more genuine than any other man I know.

But not only do I love the beer, I love the bottle. A simple piece of paper that can easily be removed makes for discreet drinking in all of those Amsterdam alleys*.

*There are no alleys in Amsterdam, you have to discreetly drink it under a canal like the one pictured above.