The truth: Steffi Lemke ice cold

Goodbye to the Adenauer times: The Federal Environment Minister is taking action, the die has been cast, a new ordinance regulates beverage cooling in summer.

Ice cubes for everyone – Eisbär shows how it can be done in a roaring hot summer Photo: Reuters

So much for the typical green Cancel Culture! On the contrary, as Federal Minister for the Environment and top green consumer advocate, Steffi Lemke has now canceled an age-old taboo, yes, she easily let it flop into the dustbin of cultural history. Consumers in Germany can look forward to a wonderfully cool summer of freedom – liberation from outdated taste bans.

The minister has now signed a decree that officially authorizes German citizens to use “plenty of ice cubes in wine and beer as well as in mixed drinks containing wine and beer” without fearing legal consequences, local bans or even physical violence.

Lemke, who has been Minister for the Environment and Consumer Protection for a year and a half, has a problem: Since she has been on the cabinet bench, she has not only lost popularity, but also her notoriety. Over 75 percent of Germans who recognized her at the end of 2022 no longer even recognize her name, let alone her face. In order to change this, the native of Dessau recently got together with a Bonn PR agency. As a result, Lemke bravely sided with modernity and unconventionality in a fierce ideological controversy. In this way, the Greens should, among other things, find a connection to the living environments of young people and to emancipatory projects.

“Everyone who fights on the pleasure front full-time or part-time knows the problem,” said the minister recently before the silent federal press conference. “Summer is here, roaring heat is torturing your body. It’s actually the most natural thing in the world to throw a few ice cubes in juice, soda, or taurine energy drink as an antidote. Why shouldn’t this also work for alcoholic beverages like beer and wine? Only because it is ostracized and ostracized in our society! Because people are immediately looked at crookedly and blatantly excluded. We now want to change that together!”

Cartel of popes and innkeepers

According to Lemke, a powerful cartel of taste popes and restaurateurs in association with misbehaving and decency woofers has managed over the decades to establish an impenetrable taboo around the complex issue. “But what’s always fine with long drinks and cocktails or whiskey and gin is only cheap for me with my little wine in the evening on the terrace: there’s a handful of ice cubes coming in,” the minister now freely admitted. “All the conceited Wessis can still watch it like that. I won’t let the snooty elite ruin my evening after work!”

At the federal press conference, Lemke referred to the change in social values, which – from casual Friday to gay marriage to Apple Vision Pro glasses – had triggered many exciting developments: “Adenauer’s musty times are finally over.”

She herself observed how people had their white wine served “on the rocks” on brutally hot summer days. It is the task of green politics to trace such resistant trends and, if necessary, to transform them into concrete government action. As Minister for the Environment, she decided to approve the relaxation of morals, which can be found everywhere and which has been found to be good, by decree.

In legal terms, this also means that beer or wine drinkers who ask the service staff for a few ice cubes for their drink can no longer be thrown out of the bar on end due to the ban on discrimination. They should no longer be made to feel guilty by socially superior people or prominent scene types who sniff “It’s not possible!”, “Gagging!” or something similarly derogatory. This sudden libertinism after decades of oppression met with overwhelming approval out on the streets, as several passers-by interviewed confirmed.

Healthy taste for free eaters

“People can no longer be taken for fools and dictatorially dictate everything just because the fine fascists up there have gotten their heads around it,” says Axel Schürting from the Saarbrücken grassroots movement Die FreiEsser, for example. His buddy Thomas adds: “Healthy human taste prevails. I also take my Maggi bottle with me everywhere.”

Gourmet Roger de Winter from Bremen, on the other hand, is happy that he can now clack ice cubes against the walls of his wine glass in the starred restaurant. The gray mottled bon vivant complains: “At 255 euros for a large plant, it should always have been important.”

However, many wine sommeliers and beer connoisseurs are skeptical. One, who doesn’t want his name in the paper, points out that ice-watered wines tend to taste abysmal and calls the newfound freedom a “huge leap toward barbarism.” Torben Gantic, water worker from the Eifel, throws this argument off as “nonsense”: “Beer and wine always consist of 80 to 90 percent water. We should worry about the rest!”

On the other hand, Jupp von Sokolowski, landlord of the Dortmund beer tavern, wants to go two ways. There won’t be any ice cubes in his Pils in the future either, but: “If you want to bring some from home in midsummer: you’re welcome!” Oktoberfest needed a dozen ice cubes in each measure, that would be an additional 5,000 hectoliters of water a year. Water that is then missing in old people’s homes and hospitals!”

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