Skip to main content

Prost! A guide to the Swiss beverage aisle

The beverage aisle in Swiss grocery stores is a bit different from the US. Here are some beverages that almost all stores carry:
  • Rivella - A soda that tastes like someone dissolved Smarties (the US kind) or SweeTarts in carbonated water. It's made with milk whey, which gives it a slightly tangy "is that an artificial sweetener?" flavor. It's often referred to by label color. It's available in red (regular), blue (diet), green (green tea - tastes vaguely like ginger ale for some reason), orange (peach), and, in the early summer, pink (rhubarb, which is delicious). If you visit Switzerland and want to try it, I guarantee that a local will be willing to buy you a bottle. This is because most Americans really don't like it, and the Swiss enjoy our "What WAS that?" reaction. I'm a weirdo who liked it the first time I tried it.
  • Sinalco - While the company makes many flavors, Orange is all you'll commonly find in Switzerland. It's vaguely like Orangina, but sweeter with less pulp. Or, if you're not familiar with Orangina, mix Orange soda, 7-Up, and orange juice in roughly equal portions.
  • Mezzo Mix - Made by Coca-Cola. Tastes like 3 parts Coke mixed with 1 part orange soda. If you do this yourself, it's called a Spezi.
  • Tonic water and bitter lemon soda. You can find these in the US, but they're usually only used for mixed drinks. Here, they're popular drinks on their own. They tend to be a bit less brutally bitter as a result.
  • Coke, no Pepsi. While Pepsi theoretically operates in Switzerland, I haven't seen it anywhere in Zürich. Coke is widely available, and they run constant promotions, but they still get the second-tier shelf space. The product that's called "Diet Coke" in the US is called "Coke Light" here.
  • Red Bull and a generic equivalent. Most stores have 6 packs of Red Bull for about 10CHF, and 6-packs of their generic version (often in 2-3 different flavors) for less than 3CHF. Some kiosks and larger stores also sell ok.- energy drink (the most Swiss name ever).
  • Half a dozen mediocre beers, often including a store brand. There are microbreweries here that turn out really good beer. Germany and Belgium are right up the road, and they make hundreds of great beers. Instead of carrying any of that, you can count on your local grocery store carrying a few local macrobrewers like Feldschlössen instead. You need to go to specialty places to find good beer.
  • Panaché - a mix of beer, lemonade, and sometimes herbs. In the US, this is often called a Shandy. 



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Chromecast conceptual model

Google makes a device called Chromecast . It's a relatively inexpensive way to turn any TV into a "Smart" TV capable of playing movies or music. It's a clever bit of engineering, but I've run into a few people who have trouble understanding how they work. The key thing to understand is that the Chromecast is the device that's actually receiving and playing the movie (or whatever), and your phone is just the remote. Here's how the process works at a high level: You start watching a video on Youtube 30 seconds in, you decide that you'd like to watch the rest on your TV, so you press the "Cast" button. Your phone stops playing and tells the Chromecast "Get this video directly from Youtube and start playing at the 0:30 mark"  When your phone initially asks the Chromecast to start playing, it also specifies a "default thing" to do when the Chromecast is finished. If the Chromecast is playing a Youtube video, it might...

Fixing Linux Audio

This is somewhat technical, and it's aimed at people who use Linux and are comfortable editing files from the command line. I was looking for a quick fix, but discovered that most of the documentation out there is wrong. So, I had to research what it all meant, figure out what the correct settings were, and write it all down. For the Impatient If you use Linux, and you're just looking for a quick way to make your sound better, add these lines to /etc/pulse/daemon.conf or $HOME/.config/pulse/daemon.conf   default-sample-format = s32ne default-sample-rate = 192000 high-priority = yes default-fragments = 8 resample-method = speex-float-10 I've tested this on Fedora and Ubuntu with no problems. Also, if you're using an external DAC (if you're not sure, then you're not using one), be sure that it has sufficient power (either plugged directly into the computer or into a powered USB hub. DO NOT plug it into an unpowered hub or dongle. A...

Audio upgrade: Schiit Fulla 2

I recently purchased a Schiit Fulla 2 . I was on the fence about it for a long time, but it's held up well, and I'm pretty happy with it. So, here's a small product review. I should probably mention that I'm generally skeptical about "audiophile" anything. I've known too many people who spend way too much money on voodoo like "oxygen-free speaker cables". This makes me reluctant to trust reviews or spend money on anything that I can't test for myself.  I've heard good audio. I go to concerts. I know what music is  supposed to  sound like, and it wasn't what I was getting from any of my computers, even with decent headphones, lossless audio codecs, etc. On the other hand, we have some  Sonos speakers , and with those speakers and a good audio source, music can sound really good. Since I wasn't getting that level of quality at the computer, it meant that there was something between the computer and my ears that was part of ...