Social Drinking

[Yora]

Well, since now we're bragging about microbrews I'm just gonna leave this here and point out that Albuquerque also the really awesome local food is nice and spicy and goes great with a good brew. I know there are probably dozens of lists with different top cities, but since we're bragging I'm just going to conveniently ignore those.

You made this a chellenge, so sorry: I've been living in upper franconia for the last seven years, and here we have 200 breweries for 1 million people. There's no place in the world that gets even close to that.

Also, I think combined upper, middle, and lower franconia not only have more breweries than the entire rest of Germany together. They also don't need the rest of Germany to be the country with the third-most breweries in the world, after China and the United States.
California may have slightly more breweries than upper franconia, but they are also almost 40 times larger.

Speaking of declining a beer, in my experience this is not a problem at all in Germany. Good friends might gently push someone to at least try one once, but that's it.
However, I have heard and read a lot about certain places in asia, where it's more complicated. In societies where direct criticism is considered to be highly disruptive and improper, problems still need to be adressed and people have to compare their oppinions and feelings about them. In such circumstances, being somewhat drunk has been established as the socially accptable way to adress such problems. If you say something inappropriate, it is not rude or an insult when it was just some drunk rambling. But that only works when everyone is drunk and everyone makes themelves exposed. It also means you can't be exactly sure what was said by whom and how it was meant, but the next day everyone still has an idea what things anger and trouble people. Without first hand experience, I am not sure how drunk people actually get when drinking with coworkers, but since the whole thing is a show anyway, I suspect that it is the appearance that matters most. And I think most of the time people don't actually get completely wasted. But it's something that is very difficult to get out of in an elegant way. If you don't drink, you don't trust the other people and they make themselves vulneable to you but you don't do the same in return. Which probably makes alcoholism a much bigger problem. You can't really say "sorry, I am an alchoholic, I can not participate in this tension releasing activity".