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| Angelika/Mike Schilli |
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Michael When you're looking for European groceries in San Francisco or the Bay Area in general, you go to "Trader Joe's," an almost alternative supermarket chain where lots of happy people stand behind the registers, and sometimes the shoppers even help pack their own groceries--unheard of! In any case, the store has many things that are hardly available elsewhere in America: good German blue cheese (Cambozola), English cheddar (Stilton), or French cheese (Roquefort), excellent beer (Mendocino Brewing Company, SLO Brewery, Dutch Grolsch, and I even spotted Weihenstephaner recently), and unsweetened, whole fruit juices.
In the party scene, it has somehow become common in recent years for more and more sugary drinks for adults to flood the market. These drinks have an alcohol content similar to beer but also delight the taste buds of the fairer sex: for example, "Mike's Hard Lemonade," which tastes quite good, is lemon soda with vodka. As a newcomer on the shelf, I recently noticed "Hard Ice Tea" by the company Bison in the flavor "Peach Rooibos" at the "Trader." "Rooibos" is a very popular reddish tea-like drink from South Africa, which tastes somewhat rougher than conventional black tea, and when mixed with alcohol, it develops such an incredibly delicious aftertaste that you could drink bottle after bottle. Top product!
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