I was thinking about that when I was dropping my 6 year old off at some hobbies earlier - it’s pretty much expected to have learned how to ride a bicycle before starting school, and it massively expands the area you can go to by yourself. When she went to school by bicycle she can easily make a detour via a shop to spend some pocket money before coming home, while by foot that’d be rather time consuming.
Quite a lot of friends from outside of Europe either can’t ride a bicycle, or were learning it as adult after moving here, though.
edit: the high number of replies mentioning “swimming” made me realize that I had that filed as a basic skill pretty much everybody has - probably due to swimming lessons being a mandatory part of school education here.
Perhaps the easiest (and most flashy) is a wooden table top. Wedge the cap onto the edge, and the smack it with your palm. This method is widely discouraged, especially on your host’s dining room table, as it usually takes a small chunk of wood off the edge and damages the table.
Like the Dutch, Germans have an impressive lexicon of commonly-known ways to open beer bottles without a bottle-opener.
Just do the same move on the 20 bottle plastic case you bough the beer in. The cases are sturdy and the breweries dont care for the scratches
Good idea! I’ve never seen those used here in the US (our beer tends to come in cardboard cases or kegs - we call those plastic created “milk crates”), but if we did, the trick would probably be better known.
Everything here is cans or twist-tops, anyway.
From a logistics point of view we need to keep the population density and shorter ways in mind. In Germany we have a deposit system for the crates and bottles and because of the short ways and high deposit most of them find their way back. But with a thousand miles between brewery and customer that system becomes tricky to implement. Also cans only weigh a fraction of a glass bottle.
So for a local brewery that is only distributing locally glass bottles in crates are a good system, but not so much for longer ranges. Also a reuse system needs a critical minimum size to be viable.
It was interesting to see how much locality there was in the beer consumption. I wouldn’t call them monopolies, but with a few exceptions, it seemed to me that people tended to drink beer from local breweries. I was living in Munich, and I don’t know if the close proximity of the breweries had a greater impact than in the countryside. I noticed it most when I first visited Dresden, and all of the beer was suddenly different brands.