Monteith's radler - One fat hen, couple of duck..

...and on this Contiki bus trip around New Zealand a certain 27 year old with no plan whatsoever took each day as it came...and needed a week to recover once it was all over.
Midway through though he discovered radler and fast forward roughly ten years to now, it's time to try it again and reminisce.
But would it bring back memories of hungi dinners, bays full of islands and fond memories of a cute librarian? Let's find out!

Yes the bus trip was a completely random idea at the time. Finding myself single, my best mate's wife (she works as a travel agent) helped book me six days of fun, sun and whatever the land of the long white cloud could throw at me.
Which was a lot actually: Kayaking, zorbing (getting thrown down a hill in an inflatable ball half filled with water in one of the most chaotic baths I've ever had), a Hungi dinner, cruising round the Bay of Islands, cave dwelling, shopping, everything.
The tour guide hooked up with one of the bus passengers, there's was a guy everyone nicknamed 'Silverback', I met a girl who's nickname was 'Satisfaction' (I kid you not) and I came home so sick, I didn't do anything for a full week so I could recover.

Good times. When I holiday, I really holiday.

Being one of the older passengers at the time I knew a few more drinking games (a personal fav was 'One fat hen') than most so nights at the pub would be spent passing on this fine knowledge to the younger generation and quaffing through copious amounts of radler in the process. 

How would it fare ten years down the track though? Let's kick it into gear and find out!


What can I smell here?: Zesty lemon. Almost smells like a fresh batch of lemon butter. Nothing that suggests there's much beer going on here.

What am I tasting here?: More lemon flavoring. It's not the kind of raw lemon intensity that will pucker your face up faster than you can say 'boy howdy is that sour' though. There's hardly any beer (bier) in here to really comment about. I proved this by getting my wife to take a sip and her reply was 'not bad' which means there can't be any beer at all because she is just not a fan. It's a sweet mix for lemon fans that a brewer might have waved a beer near. Possibly.

Overall: It's sweet, it's still at 5% ABV and it'd be perfect on a 40 degree day (Celsius, not Fahrenheit - that'd be around 100). However I'm glad to say that my beer palate must have really hit the books since then as I don't find it half as appealing anymore. I still will drink the other five in my collection though as it's not flat out undrinkable. It was good for the memories...but that's about it.

1.5 Contiki Bus Trips out of 5. 

Still at 10 bucks for a 6 pack, it does help with the home brew beer operation in terms of having some bottles handy when capping..

Ninja edit a couple of weeks later: The more of these I drank, the less I wanted to drink them. The syrup is overpowering and the taste is pretty awful. I'm going to revise my score now:

1 out of 5 random Contiki bus trips..

This is part 1 of 2 of "Almigo gets on a bus in New Zealand and completely forgets everything about what he drank". Here is the second part: Ode to Steve the bus driver and his bag of Tui..