Have Internet Will Travel Traveling the world, wherever there's WiFi. The adventures of two freelance digital nomads.

Kelly and I are fans of sharing the big beer with a couple small glasses. It’s something we picked up in Brazil at the many restaurants where you get a seat at a plastic table in the middle of the sidewalk or sometimes in the middle of the street. You even get a giant beer cozy to keep it cool. It’s often a little bit cheaper, and there’s something very communal about it. 1 beer/2 glasses is often one of our first translations into the native tongue.

Bintang is the staple beer of Bali. Available everywhere, it’s your typical pilsener around 5%. At times it seems everyone in Bali is wearing a Bintang branded shirt. Good flavour, except for the one I had that tasted like gasoline. The locals get 2000 Rupiah ($0.02) for returning the bottles, and I guess even power washing the bottles won’t remove the tang of gas. *Note, this image wan’t taken by Kelly. We must have forgotten to take our own picture after having a few too many Bintangs.

Bali Hai Beer is utterly tasteless. It has no flavour whatsoever. We poured this one out.

The only thing with less flavour than Bali Hai Beer was Bali Hai Draft Beer.

Anker beer was quite good. Pretty similar to Bintang.

Kuda Putih was my favourite alternative to Bintang beer. It had good flavour, and I got some kind of juvenile pleasure from saying the name with a bad Balinese accent. Plus, check out that alcohol induced horse rage!

Storm makes 4 great beers. The Tropical is a nice fruity ale. The Golden, a light hoppy ale. The Brown, a sweetly smooth dark ale. And the Pale, is a good well… pale ale. Harder to come by, we didn’t stumble across these too often and actually had to make note of the few places to get them. Even the corner stores and grocery stores didn’t seem to stock them.

Bali and the rest of Indonesia is undergoing a liquor shortage due to the government crackdown on illegally imported alcohol. As such, import liquor is expensive and major brands can be hard to come by. A 26 ounce bottle of Canadian whiskey was more than $50, as were most bottles of wine. As such, I opted to try a local brand for a few dollars.

When it’s this bad for you, they call you Mister. It appears that the downside of drinking local alcohol stocks is the monumental hangover the following day. I don’t know if there are some serious impurities in there or what, but two or three ounces of this put the hurt on me the next day. Maybe it was the green tea they suggested I mix it with by taping a can to the bottle? An odd taste. Not one I’ll be repeating soon.

Cheers!