When I lived in the UK, a good friend (also from Hawaii) made sure I received one of the valued bottle top openers (round handle one - not in the post card) when they were distributed at a big get together one evening. The unofficial drink of the softball team was green bottle, so it was through the team that I got to learn of 'red star' green bottle and green bottles that didn't have the star colored in on the label. The former being the better quality. Did you know that? I didn't. But after finding that out and conducting my own experiment, I could sure taste the difference between the two. So much so, that when I went to Cambridge with friends for my monthly pilgrimage to Pizza Hut (it doesn't sound as bad as it is - it was a classy and very good PH), we would always order a couple of pitchers of green bottle red star. It was smooth and very refreshing!
Over the years, green bottle was replaced by red and white cans, or blue cans or bottles, and even yellow bottles (you beer folks out there can probably figure these out), and I still like my certain Japanese and Okinawan beers along with select microbrews from the Pacific Northwest.
Last week, a friend who goes over to Europe for work took a tour of the green bottle factory in Amsterdam and brought back a post card, a bottle top opener, and a rubber band that held a couple of tokens for free samples. He said he was going to mail the postcard back, but figured since he'd be back in the islands faster than the postcard, just brought it back in person. That, and who knows if the bottletop opener would've even made the whole trip attached to the postcard. That was pretty cool of him to do that.
Finally, I was at a farewell luncheon at Aloha Tower Marketplace towards the end of last week for a friend heading back to the mainland. A couple of other good friends and I turned the conversation to beer briefly and I mentioned green bottles being back in my inventory. In the usual banter and chiding I encounter whenever I'm with them, they said that I'm turning more local instead of being a 'coconut' because I now have a ''green bottle' in hand and my foot in the sand' - a reference to a Jawaiian song that came out last year. No problem - they can speak to the subject since one friend is from the Big Island and old school Aloha and Hawaiian, and the other is a Mexican who looks like a Samoan with a last name to make you think that he's from the islands. Both are still on the same canoe paddling club I used to belong to and we often talk about how society on the island is gradually becoming more indifferent and calloused, sometimes alluding to Jawaiian music infiltrating today's 'yutes' and even our peers to where they don't seem to know who they are anymore. 'Jawaiian has nothing to do with Hawai'i!' my friend says. Don't get him started on the sovereignty movement either unless you want to hear a dissertation on it being a concocted urban legend. True - there are some legit gripes and complaints about the way things are run, but some topics have taken a life of their own -- something I'll leave for a face to face conversation over a beer rather than out here in blog land. Anyways, I took that as a compliment, since a lot of times I get teased for not having a solid pidgin accent but looking local. As one of my good friends at work says, 'you talk like one boy scout!' Because if you didn't see my face and heard my voice, you'd think I was a haole guy from the mainland. All good.
So green bottles - good stuff. Happy to bring it back and have it around at the end of the day.
