A week with my family on a sunny Greek island does not include any great expectations for beer hunting. Sure, I know there are micro breweries in Greece, a few of them with very respectable beers. I had even sent off an e-mail to Corfu’s own micro, asking if they could deliver a few sample bottles to my hote, but I had not received any answer.
So I was quite content in sipping a few pints of Alfa and enjoying a can of fairly decent Greek versions of German pilsener. But then I managed to wander a few meters down the beach from the hotel, where there was a very inviting sign.
Maybe there is a God after all. At least a minor Greek one.
What I love about Greek is how with a minimum of knowledge you can work out what something means – so if you know that ‘zythos’ (as in Zythophile) is an old word for beer, you can easily translate ‘mikrozythopoiïa’.
I’m afraid that minimum of knowledge is mostly eroded from the Norwegian curriculum!
I wish they’d use zythos or a derivative instead of μπίρα. That MP-as-B arrangement gives me the willies.
Apparently under the Colonels there was an attempt to stamp out on ‘non-Greek’ words such as μπίρα (“beera” for the transliterationally challenged) and to use ζγθος, “zythos”, instead, but it never caught on except in the word for “brewery”. The worst bit of transliteration I know is “μπουτηκ” (think I’ve got that right), “mpoythk”, pronounced “boutique”! Of course, the reason Greeks have to use “mp” for “b” is that in modern Greek the letter b is pronounced like the letter v in English, but if you listen to spoken Greek, the way they say the letter p is much more “voiced” than in English, and closer to the way English-speakers would pronounce a b anyway.