Perhaps, but I love real ale, I'm not just settling for it. The range and variety of flavours continues to amaze me. Sure there are some stinkers, but the nicest alcoholic beverages I've had the pleasure to sup were all ales.

It's not just "some German law or another", it's the (http://bartasbrewtour.org/reinheitsgebot/) oldest food law in the world! ;)

I remember a WTO trade case (sorry if this is too tangential, but it was interesting to me) where the UK taxed wine more than beer, and the French argued you can't tax similar products differently if it's discriminatory to a foreign product (it allegedly ends up encouraging Brits to buy more UK beer than French wine, which is trade discrimination under classic trade law, they argued anyway). I mean the actual rule is you can't tax "similar" products differently if it raises the price for more foreign products (wine) relative to more domestic products (beer), so the foreign goods aren't on an equal playing field.

But the UK defense was that "British think wine is for special occasions, marriages and anniversaries, but beer is for any time. So we actually don't think of wine & beer in the same category; they're not competing products. So it's ok to tax wine more and it's not discrimination because they aren't "similar" like the rule requires." (Whereas of course in France they drink wine like water.) And probably they had some cross-price elasticity study to show it (i.e., CPE = A measure of, when you raise the price of A, at what price will people switch to B. The lower it is, the more they compete with each other as if indistinguishable. The higher it is, the more they scrap to hold on to what they want until they begrudgingly switch; so they don't compete so much. And sometimes they never switch. So apparently beer & wine has a relatively high rating, meaning they're not that in that much competition in the UK, at the time of the case anyway.)

But then the French came back with: "Yes, but Brits only think wine is special because it's so expensive *because of the tax*! Kill the tax so it's cheap as beer, and they'll start drinking it like beer." It actually wasn't a bad argument because they had some stats to show for it (when wine was cheaper, Brits did drink more of it), even though it amounts to French reading into Brit culture how they ought to drink... But it's the quirk of trade law that it has one country needing to read into the culture of another. I just thought it was interesting, the case really turned out to be a glimpse into drinking-culture, what is really intrinsic to your culture, and what is just an effect of the economics.

Is wine *really* special for you, or is it just because it's been expensive and you always import it? Or is the culture changing now that there's an improving UK domestic wine industry starting to blossom? Are people starting to drink wine more as an everyday drink? That's been happening in the US, with more quality US brands coming up. People probably drink "local" drinks more casually than if it's imported...

Get yourself a Boon Guise instead.