With 16 only Beer, stronger alcoholic drinks only when 18 Years old.
That’s the official age for stronger alcoholics. Most 16 year old already drink the hard stuff.
This is inevitable, but they cannot buy it themselves in a store. The owner risks having his store closed and having to pay a large fine if he sells alcohol to minors.
Theoretically you’re right, but from my experience a lot of cashiers don’t care if you’re 18 or not. Some do and ask for your ID, but especially in the more rural areas it generally isn’t a big problem to buy harder Alkohol. Of course the shop is risking a fine but I haven’t heard about any sort of market getting fined for selling Alkohol to minors.
Grew up in South America and underage drinking, though illegal in theory, is pretty much the norm.
I grew up in the US, and the only person I know who didn’t drink as a 15 year old is a 33 year old who still doesn’t drink. Lol.
Most people I knew started in college. 15 is a bit young. Only knew a handful of partiers who drank in high school.
As a non-American, every single American teenage movie I’ve ever watched tells me this is untrue.
I mean getting alcohol for an underage party is the whole plot of Superbad.
in Germany at 16 it is not underage drinking, you can legaly buy beer and wine.
Funny story about that.
When I was a kid, 15+ years ago, my parents told me about somebody that did that here in Texas with their son.
The father took his underage son to a restaurant and was able to get him a beer. During the meal, the father went to the bathroom and the son took a drink of his beer. A cop was sitting nearby and arrested the kid for underage drinking because the father wasn’t in the presence of the son so it was no longer “supervised”.
Ah, yes, Germany! The land where there are no alcohol issues because everybody is by default drunk.
I was just making a stupid joke. Playing with an old stereotype. It’s germans and beer and us and our mustaches.
That is good to know. My own country had a serious issue with alcohol and we managed to curb it in less than 10 years.
The recent surge revolves around binge drinking and hard liquor, when it was originally around wine. And supposedly women are drinking more than men, nowadays.
I think every other country has this joke about themselves, “haha we’re the biggest drinkers”
The day after I moved to Germany I went to the hospital emergency room with what was later diagnosed as a kidney stone and stomach infection.
I was given over the counter painkillers and some cramp medication and told to drink lots of beer to treat the stomach infection by the doctor.
I am serious. I asked about the complications drinking on the pain meds and he just said it was OK.
mixing those meds with alcohol fucks your liver
Was “fuck your liver” as in “once is enough to fuck your liver” or as in “do this every day over a month to see any significant damage” kind of thing.