I developed a taste for the ‘Diesel’ in Berlin about 20 years ago. It’s beer and coke. I heard somewhere that it comes from the teens hanging around the American Sector after the War - mixing the exciting drink of the glamorous American exotic - everything had to have Coca Cola - with standard German beer. The myth is great, whether or not it’s true.
Ideally, it should be made with Weissbier for my taste, but I couldn’t get any in the current Coronaviral climate, so I did it with Birra Moretti. I know: is this what we’ve come to? Will this misery of self-denial ever end?
Anyway, it was still a little bit of fizzy, ditchwater coloured, heaven.
I’ve learned not to ask for one in the U.K. as bartenders get confused, bemused, or even sometimes offended. Some people call a mixture of beer and cider a Diesel - that is incorrect. The technical term for that is ‘Snakebite,’ as can be confirmed by all eighties goths, and testified to by their multicoloured projectile vomit in Northern Working Men’s Club cobweb-encrusted discos.
Snakebite will certainly not be served by most bartenders these days, because it will fuck you up faster than Crystal Meth.
Anyway, I had my first real Diesel when absolutely shitfaced at 3am at a pavement bar in Prenzlauerberg. At the time, I had decided I wanted it with diet cola because I was on an alcohol-only diet. The barmaid thought this was insane, which indeed it was, and ignored me.
I later had Diesels in around 2000, on a return visit to Berlin. They became a late-evening/ early morning drink of choice in Tacheles, a massive squatted former department store with an expansive courtyard strewn with junk sculptures, including an old spitfire, on Oranienbergerstrasse. (Now closed, demolished, replaced with chichi designer shops.) We used to go up to the bars and strange parties of unclear provenance, and artists’ studios, based in the largely windowless old departments upstairs. I will always remember the striking poise of the DJ: a 6 foot tall, wafer-thin, white German girl with long chestnut hair that covered half of her face. She wore a set of headphones bigger than her head, and was playing a barnstorming Motown set while everyone sat around on reclaimed leather sofas and smoked weed. Her body gyrated to Detroit rhythms like a twanged rubber band.
At 3am, we would move on to Diesels so we didn’t fall over. And then, we would go down to the balcony at the first floor, just above the courtyard, and watch the sea of rats that would swarm up from the undergrowth to get the remains of currywursts, frites and cocktails from underneath the empty chairs and tables.
This was both deeply uncanny, and somehow impressive and enouraging. Prost, my rodent friends. I always have sympathy with vermin.
By the time we returned to Tacheles later in 2009, not long before it was closed, the rats had been joined by thousands of American tourists - you know, the young people with identical hair who dance with their hands in the air because it’s what they’ve seen on TV shows about going to nightclubs.
I preferred the rats.
But their forebears did bring 50% of the Diesel with them.