On Saturday, Jeremy and I did something we frequently talk about but rarely wind up actually doing: we nipped up to Borough Market in London for a spot of food shopping.

Though it’s located right near London Bridge station, which is very convenient for Brighton, we tend not to visit the market unless we’ve stayed overnight in London for some event. But on Saturday, we forced ourselves to get up at an ungodly hour (well, like, 8 A.M.—that’s ungodly for us, especially on the weekend) to catch the 9 o’clock train to London.

We had loose plans to meet up with other people at around 10:30, but since everyone else was running late, we plunged into the market by ourselves to take advantage of the fact that the massive lunchtime crowds hadn’t shown up yet. I’m glad we did, too; at 11:00 the market was quite manageable, but by 1:00 it was so crowded that it was almost impossible to move.

Borough Market is popular for good reason: it’s a foodie’s paradise. You can pretty much feed yourself for free by wandering around and trying the samples from all of the stalls, but if you have money to burn, you can pick up some really fab foods both to eat at the market and to take home. I had scarfed down a cinnamon danish, a smoothie and a coffee on the train up, but that didn’t stop me from sharing a venison sausage with Jeremy, eating the most amazing, gigantic, delicious roast pork sandwich with apple sauce and really salty crackling, drinking a big cup of hot apple cider, eating some chocolate brownie, sampling numerous different cheeses, testing different olive oils and vinegars, and then having a pot of tea and a piece of plum cake at a nearby tearoom.

We also bought quite a few things to take home with us: sirloin steaks from wild, grass-fed cattle; some Stichelton blue cheese to go with the steaks; a small haunch of wild venison from the West Country; some oak roasted tomatoes from the Isle of Wight; two packages of German sausages (Krakauer and Thüringer); and—most remarkably and unexpectedly—a six-pack of German beer.

This was not just any beer, mind you. As Jeremy and I wandered through the market stalls, we suddenly saw a familiar figure looming ahead of us on a banner, namely:

The Schwarzwaldmädel who graces the label of Rothaus beer from the Black Forest!

When Jeremy and I lived in Freiburg, Rothaus Tannenzäpfle was our—and pretty much everyone else’s—beer of choice. It seems that, since we moved from Freiburg, the rest of Germany has discovered just how great this regional beer is. And now, thanks to Veesand importers, who had this stand at the market, it looks like Rothaus is poised to hit Britain as well.

This is great news for two people who have never really come to terms with the warm, murky brews favored by the British. As much as I might enjoy the occasional IPA in a pub, nothing beats cracking open a fresh, frosty, slightly bitter Tannenzäpfle. We did that just last night to accompany a yummy bean soup I made with smoky Krakauer sausage, and it was scrumptious.

There are a lot of things I really don’t miss about living in Germany, but I’m happy that the equally long list of things I do miss has just gotten somewhat shorter—thanks, surprisingly enough, to the quintessentially English Borough Market.