Lime in my beer!!

Bangalore is a treasure cove for Beer drinkers. I do not know about other cities but, in Bangalore we surly get the widest variety of beers possible - Belgian (Chimay, Chrisotphel,Orval & many more), Irish (Guiness) , Mexican (Corona) , Japanese (Asahi), Malaysian (Tiger), Thai (Malaysian), Australian (Cooopers) and many others. And each of these countries surly has its own quaff culture for their Beers.

I have been noticing in many bars across, people drinking Corona with a lime wedge at the mouth of the pint bottle. I assumed it to be a Mexican drinking culture thing. Not until I had a customer at Take 5 recently asking for a KF beer with a lime wedge, did my mind start thinking if its really a Mexican thing or does it do something different to the beer drinking itself.

Some Mexican research shows that the lime wedge in a beer pint was a marketing kick of a beer seller. So far, due to myth or shame, that individual has never come forward. Another says the lime’s acidity helps cut the slightly sweet corn flavor of the beers. Another says that the cans of beer would be stored in dusty conditions. Tourists naturally wanted to clean up the mouth of the can and they found a wedge of lime to be the perfect solution. Apparently this way of drinking is popular only with the tourists & Mexicans don`t drink that way. This explanation makes some sense.

Still another account says the wedge of lime could be laid on top of the opening to keep flies from getting into the beer. Then again, the most plausible story might be that early bottles of Mexican beer were reportedly sealed with linerless caps, resulting in a ring of rust on the bottle rim. A swipe of the lime and the bottle came clean.

I tried some KF at home with the lime wedge, and boy I liked a new limey flavour of the beer for sure. While in India its still starting up, I would say, beer lovers outside have come full circle, so much so that they wear T-shirts with NFL slogans - "No Freakin` Lime". They do not like lime in there. Some think its a hoax. Imagine the bottles going in for refilling and the bottlers trying to pull out the lime wedges from them!!

So what ever the story might be , looks like our very own KF is soon to get onto the band wagon of Corona. Would you like to drink it that way??