Germany is famous, or at least well known for its trade fairs. They host many of the largest in the world, the international auto show in Frankfurt, the CeBIT computer fair in Hannover, and Annuga, a food and beverage industry affair is held every three years in Cologne. Annuga takes up the entire Cologne conference centre (Messe in German), which is no small feat since it seems to take up the entire east bank of the Rhine. Michelle works for a brewery here in Germany, Holsten, and as an industry employee, she got two of the normally 85 DM tickets on the house. Her mission was to come to Cologne and check out what the competition was doing in the way of packaging. Look for fancy new bottles, caps and labels etc…. I thought we'd just walk around for a couple of hours, talk to a company or two and leave. I was wrong. Some companies had areas (you can't really call them booths) the size of a decent family home. Entire bars, wooden floors, furniture and all had been transported from all over the world for this fair. Thousands and thousands of companies, selling every manner of food and drink. Chinese companies selling Mao Tai, Americans selling popcorn, Brazilians selling Caipirinha mix. Anything and everything was here somewhere. I even tried Absinthe, the Czech liquor illegal in North America. They say Van Gogh was drinking it when he cut his ear off, that it makes you crazy. I tried the tiniest sip of it and concluded that people must already have been crazy to drink it. It's like liquorice flavoured antifreeze. Other show oddities included a breakfast drink from Finland which mixes milk, orange juice and an egg. I hadn't had enough Absinthe yet to try it. I am however still asking myself, why? Orange juice and milk never got along in the first place, and now you've got to throw a (possibly) raw egg in there just to thicken it up a little? I thought the vodka flavoured spray foam deserved a mention too. The guy at the stand showed us, it's a little can like the whipped cream you buy at the corner store, except it sprays a vodka foam. Crazy. We also found a beer company dating practically to the middle ages from Bavaria claiming to be the oldest brewery in the world and the Original Budweiser. It seems that a Czech brewery has been using that name for centuries, and in several countries, including Germany, has forced its American namesake to sells its products under other names. Michelle then introduced me to the beer companies flagship products in the Middle East, fruity malt beverages. Brewed like beer, without the alcohol and with flavours like apple and peach. Not bad actually.
After our tour of the drinks floor, we decided we had done our part, there weren't any really exciting new beer packaging developments. One of many companies selling a beer/coke blend had chosen to put their brew in a bright blue bottle with a pudding can style pull top, but that was about it. Now it was on to the food floors. We were pretty full after the meat and poultry halls, after the fish and frozen food it was clear that neither lunch nor dinner was going to be a problem, and by the time we reached the special section (where country themed displays were set up) we were stuffed and thoroughly exhausted. I figured that we had been walking non-stop for six hours, and so had probably covered at least ten kilometres. It was amazing that amongst all the thousands of displays and kilometres of show space, that they hadn't found room for a single chair or bench.
