40 Years in Beer (Book II) Part 54: New Albanians on beer holiday in Old Albania (1994)

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40 Years in Beer (Book II) Part 54: New Albanians on beer holiday in Old Albania (1994)
“Follow me” to the terminal in Tirana, 1994.

Previously: 40 Years in Beer (Book II) Part 53: The birth of Samichlaus at Zürich’s classic Brauerei Hürlimann (1994).

Our flight from Zürich to Tirana got into the air, and I found myself strangely nervous, as if I’d finally be meeting a long-distance pen pal in person. What if we didn’t like each other’s looks?

The notion of Albania as an object of fascination began during a European history course in university, when it dawned on me that as modern nations go, it had appeared on the map very late in the game (1912).

In due course, having aligned myself with a band of malcontents, we launched an independent collegiate fraternity, declaring ourselves to be Albanian as opposed to Greek in recognition of the historic enmity between these two Balkan peoples.

The Motherland, or Fatherland, or some such.

My first glimpse of real-world Albania came in 1985. I was lounging on the deck of the ship traveling from Greece to Italy, eating gloriously oily tuna straight from the tin with a camp fork and washing it down with a can of Dutch Oranjeboom beer, when the hazy shoreline of Albania became visible to the east.

After confirming our whereabouts on a nearby map – the Greek island of Corfu could be seen to the west – I gripped the railing while investigating the shadowy headlands in the distance.*

One of Hoxha’s bunkers; photo credit: Atlas Obscura.

It didn’t look like very much was there, only barren mountains sloping down to the sea and an occasional village. Not one of the thousands of bizarre concrete pillboxes erected by the dictator Enver Hoxha, supposedly as defense emplacements, was visible from the ship.

I already knew that Albania was inaccessible to Americans; nonetheless, an existential question suddenly arose, one that was completely unanswerable at the time.

Was there beer in Albania?

Soldier, 1994.

Two years later my journey through Yugoslavia took me to Lake Ohrid, an ancient freshwater body of water on the border of the province of Macedonia (now independent North Macedonia) and Albania.

Albania was on the other side of water, and I daydreamed of taking the public bus to the last stop on the border, where maybe at least the grim...Read more