And even the mass-market German beer is better than the mass-market British stuff which I am sure has cats involved somewhere.
LOL Don. It is an evening of laughter it seems.
Well, soon the Easter will be here. Then we will have some very good, strong 0.5 L beers in Superbrugsen called "Willemoes Påske Ale" (has a dark green label). They are often on sale before Easter (3 for DKR 40-45) 
When she occationaly drink a beer my wife likes dark beers, so I´ll remember that offer. Strong, you said.
Maybe she´ll get some funny ideas! Let there be Easter soon!
I have heard that UK are famous for making beers thinner than water. 
Good English beer works very well for me. Scottish beers not so much because they are too strong and too sweet. Strong beers in general I find to be unacceptably sweet.
But I'd bet on Fuller's London Pride against any beer anywhere. Or better still, if you can get it, Fuller's ESB. If you get the chance, try them.
If you like ridiculously strong beers, look out for Tactical Nuclear Penguin which is brewed about 50km from me.
I think it is revolting, but it is the highest alcohol beer ever brewed at 32% alcohol by volume. And 125 euros per litre.
It is €150 for personal purchases if items are in low volumes and if not seen like reseller import. Taxes and other import duties for items above this limit.
Customs may still hold it to inspect if the price declared is true but many goods passed without problems if under €150. Some say declaring even a $400 camera as gift and lower than $100 may let it pass through the customs without problems. But some customs may have memory and count your incoming packages and mark you as a trader. My goods from China never stopped at customs with their cheap bubble wraps, gift labels, and $10-15 totals, even though 7 packages arrived at the same time. :)
Yes, real love in a canoe stuff. I don't like yellow beers, I always feel that they are what happens after a lot of beer.
But the best British beers are very, very good. They are just hard to find. Here's a list of my favourites:
Spitfire. Brewed in Kent where most of the UK's hops come from. Very bitter, very good.
Badger's Golden Glory. Fruity flavoured. Wonderful stuff
Badger's Golden Champion is even better, but hard to find.
Fuller's ESB. Brewed in the most expensive brewery anywhere, the site of the brewery in Chiswick in London is worth hundreds of millions of euros, maybe a billion euros. They refuse to sell the site and move elsewhere.
Fuller's London Pride. Again brewed in Chiswick.
Boddington's Bitter. Used to be brewed next door to Strangeways Prison in Manchester. This is a mass-market beer but is good.
The Scottish mass-market beers are best avoided. McEwans IPA is the closest to drinkable of all of them, but cats are still involved.
And for a strongly recommended Irish beer, Guinness that was brewed in Dublin. If it was brewed anywhere else, smile a lot and walk away in a hurry.
Thanks Don for the very thorough information of better english beers. I occationaly come
to the UK and its always nice to know what is best to eat and drink.
Another thing that bit me last week is that the German customs don't use the exchange rate valid on the day of purchase, but determine it for a whole month in advance. When I ordered the PICKIt2 and a ZIF-Adapter from Hong Kong, the exchange rate was good enough to keep the whole order slightly below 26.30€. With the official rate, it ended up at 27.26€, so I had to pay 19% import duties, 5.18€.
But of course, the customs officials being German, I had to explain what this thing is used for, so they could determine the category of goods to classify this thing as. Not that it would have mattered, as the value was well below 150€ and they couldn't have levied any custom duties at all. It took us about twenty minutes to come to a conclusion. The whole thing had the air of an absurd comedy about it... I think I'll have to write it down, here you go:
Dramatis personæ
O1: Customs official #1, a jovial elderly civil servant, who seems to enjoy doing his job
O2: Customs official #2, a young, bright eyed woman, kinda cute.
Me: a poor flashaholic, who just wants to get his programmer, so he can start messing around with PIC MCUs.
Act 1:
Our hero enters the customs office to retrieve a package sent to him from the other side of the globe.
Me: Hello I'd like to pick up my package please. Here's the PayPal invoice, it's in £.
O1: *leaves to fetch the package from the storage room*
O2: *takes the receipt and calculates the value in €*
O1: *comes back with package* Here you go, would you open it please?
Me: Sure, no problem.
O2: We have to charge import tax, it's more than 5€.
Me: *silent* Damn!
O1: *looks at the contents of the package and tries to match it to the items listed on the invoice*
O1: So, what does this thing do?
Me: It's used for programming microcontrollers.
O1: *consults big book of customs rules* It's a computer?
Me: No, it just puts the program into a chip.
O1: It tells the chip what to do? *starts browsing The Book again*
Me: You could say that.
O1: *points into The Book* Category XYZ, device for controlling industrial machines!
Me: What?! No, it's just a chip, not a machine.
O1: But it tells the chip what to do, right? How does it do that?
Me: Well, it writes the machine code into the chip.
O1: *more browsing The Book* So, it's a copying device?
Me: Hmm, sort of... in an abstract way.
O1: *more browsing* Ah, category YZX, device for copying magnetic or optic media...
O2: *starts typing*
Me: No, the data is stored in flash, electronically.
O2: *stops typing*
O1: Hmm... *more browsing*
O1: *still more browsing*
O1: Could it be called a storage device?
Me: No, the data is stored on the MCU, not the programmer.
O1: So the copying is done on the chip?
Me: *reluctantly* yes...
O1: *points into The Book again* Category ZXY, device for controlling electronic duplication machines.
Me: Fine, I can live with that.
O2: *starts typing again, computer emits error noises*
O2: I can't enter that code, the computer won't accept it.
O1: *looks at The Book, looks at the calender hanging on the wall* Oh, right, it's 2011 already.
O1: *goes to the filing cabinet and fetches The New Book* Let's look up the new code... *starts browsing for a minute or two*
O1: A-HA! The new code is ZXY-a.
O2: *starts typing again*
O2: *still typing*
O2: *typing*
O2: *typing*
O2: *presses a key with an air of accomplishment, a printer starts warming up*
O1: *has been reading in The New Book meanwhile* There is no computer connected to this thing, right?
Me: *jaw drops* Of course there is, you can't use this thing without a computer!
O2: *aborts the print job*
O1: Oh dear... *starts browsing The New Book again*
O1: Okay, category ZYX-c, computer controlled electronic duplication machine.
Me: Fine, whatever...
O2: *starts typing*
O2: *keeps typing*
O2: *still typing*
O2: *starts printer*
O2: *fetches four pages from printer, starts filling out the official receipt, green, with a big federal crest on it*
O2: *applies official customs stamp to receipt, signs receipt, staples receipt to printed pages*
O2: That will be 5 Euros and 18 Cents, please.
Me: *hands over the money, grabs the paperwork*
O1 & O2: Bye, have a nice day!
Me: Bye! *leaves*
Epilogue:
Our hero crosses the parking lot in front of the customs office, unlocks his car, sits in the driver's seat. He stares into the void for a few moments, then starts reading the paperwork, still clenched in his hand. After a few more moments, he starts chuckling, then laughing out loud. Bureaucracy really is one of the strangest things in the universe.
Imported goods (other than alcohol or tobacco) with a value less than $1,000 are exempt from import duty and GST (VAT). Coincidentally there is a noisy campaign by retailers at the moment to have that limit reduced.
Here is almost the same as in Spain.
The diference is only on the charged money from beying processed. Can be 3€ for a small package, or 12€ for a big one+1.80€ for a form+0.70€ for filling the form(?)+0.70 for sendind it attached to item(??)+tax. And the tax, that's called IVA here,(same as VAT?) it's 23%. Continental Spain's IVA is 18%, I believe... They too add everything and then apply 23%
But roughly it is the same.
They verify just a couple of items in each load, and not every load arriving at customs is checked. They usually check big packages and/or if they are insured. That means that the item is valuable and that they can get some money for the item checked.
I get a couple of items checked each year, and not always get taxed. I've been charged for items valued at 25€ and not been charged for items valued at 70€.(sent them PayPal receipts) Go figure...
Kind of lotery, in my opinion.
The thing I like the most, is when they check the items and write on the outside of the package the name of the item. I know that the guy that is doing that, can't be an expert in everything, but sometimes I just laugh myself silly.
For instance calling flashlights, canisters, monoculars, telescopes... 
Edit: forgot one thing. You have 30days (since the arriving of customs letter) to take care of all the papers demanded to receive your item. If not, item will go for the portuguese state and sold at an annual auction.
Here in Israel the limit is 50$ per package, and it doesn't seem that the customs aggregate packages for a person over any time period (although there have been some rumors of them doing so). For more than 50$ there's VAT (15%?) and customs fee (generally 30% but not applicable to computer parts or other electronics, to the best of my knowledge), plus some handling fees (can't remember how much but about 20$ maybe?).