I was thinking about that when I was dropping my 6 year old off at some hobbies earlier - it’s pretty much expected to have learned how to ride a bicycle before starting school, and it massively expands the area you can go to by yourself. When she went to school by bicycle she can easily make a detour via a shop to spend some pocket money before coming home, while by foot that’d be rather time consuming.
Quite a lot of friends from outside of Europe either can’t ride a bicycle, or were learning it as adult after moving here, though.
edit: the high number of replies mentioning “swimming” made me realize that I had that filed as a basic skill pretty much everybody has - probably due to swimming lessons being a mandatory part of school education here.
I’m Danish. Opening beer with a lighter or other things that aren’t technically a bottle opener.
Everything’s a bottle opener.
When I built my house I made a bet with myself that I’d never open an end-of-the-day-beer with the same thing twice. I managed. I included the chainsaw, the backhoe and the crane (although I cheated that one and asked the operator for help).
Opening bottles with your phone used to be a thing too. Most used Nokias from the 32/3310 era in Denmark have scratches at the bottom from people not doing I properly. I’ve seen some people open beer with iPhones, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
A bottle of beer or a can of beer?
Bottles. It’s similar in The Netherlands, it’s a bit of a sport to open beer bottles with anything and everything, except dedicated bottle openers. Quite popular are Bic lighters, other beer bottles and the edges of tables.
Beer cans usually have pull tabs, they’re just soda cans with a different brand on it.
I’m American and this is how it was when I was in college and went to parties. I rarely, if ever opened a beer bottle with a bottle opener. My bic lighter was the most common tool, but as you said, learning how to improvise with whatever was on hand was key. It was a proud day when I found that the trucks on my longboard had a sweet spot for cracking beers open
A bottle.
A bottle. As some Dutch person said in another comment, cigarette lighters, edges of tables and another bottle are popular options. Please don’t use your teeth. I have a nice, rounded tooth that I used to use for opening beers when I was younger - I was lucky I didn’t damage it more.
The entire reason behind the unending popularity of these
So how do you open one without a bottle opener?
You grab the neck of the bottle tightly with your dominant hand so your finger a thumb is holding the cap tightly. Then you take the lighter in the other hand and wedge it in between the dominant hand and cap. Squeeze tightly and use the lighter as a lever.
Leverage and fiddling around
Pretty much, yeah.
Perhaps the easiest (and most flashy) is a wooden table top. Wedge the cap onto the edge, and the smack it with your palm. This method is widely discouraged, especially on your host’s dining room table, as it usually takes a small chunk of wood off the edge and damages the table.
Like the Dutch, Germans have an impressive lexicon of commonly-known ways to open beer bottles without a bottle-opener.
Just do the same move on the 20 bottle plastic case you bough the beer in. The cases are sturdy and the breweries dont care for the scratches
Good idea! I’ve never seen those used here in the US (our beer tends to come in cardboard cases or kegs - we call those plastic created “milk crates”), but if we did, the trick would probably be better known.
Everything here is cans or twist-tops, anyway.
From a logistics point of view we need to keep the population density and shorter ways in mind. In Germany we have a deposit system for the crates and bottles and because of the short ways and high deposit most of them find their way back. But with a thousand miles between brewery and customer that system becomes tricky to implement. Also cans only weigh a fraction of a glass bottle.
So for a local brewery that is only distributing locally glass bottles in crates are a good system, but not so much for longer ranges. Also a reuse system needs a critical minimum size to be viable.
It was interesting to see how much locality there was in the beer consumption. I wouldn’t call them monopolies, but with a few exceptions, it seemed to me that people tended to drink beer from local breweries. I was living in Munich, and I don’t know if the close proximity of the breweries had a greater impact than in the countryside. I noticed it most when I first visited Dresden, and all of the beer was suddenly different brands.
This guy has around 60 YouTube episodes showing how to do it. Have fun!
https://m.youtube.com/user/BeNuzzer/featured
TIL
Hold up - as a Canadian, this isn’t a skill everyone learns in/around high school??
What if you do it wrong and you make the lighter explode, taking a finger with it
Why would it explode?
Cigarette lighters don’t explode that violently if they’re punctured. The greatest hazard would probably be getting plastic in your eye. If you do it wrong the lighter usually just gets scratched.