Handling it: Angela Merkel raises a glass at a traditional folk festival in southern Germany in 2012. Credit:Reuters

Germany is well known for its liberal approach to the bottle. In Berlin you can buy and drink alcohol anywhere, at any time . Were you so inclined, you could walk into a convenience store at 4am on a Tuesday and buy 10 bottles of vodka. You could then take those 10 bottles onto the street, or into any public park, and proceed to drink yourself silly – without breaking a single law.

This is a land utterly bereft of lock-ins, lock-outs and last drinks. There are no legal limits on the trading hours for licensed venues. Pubs and bars stay open until the manager decides to close up, usually around 5 or 6am when the last punters stumble home to bed. And the big nightclubs don't close at all – they operate 24 hours a day from Friday evening until Monday morning.

Drinking in Germany is also incredibly cheap. A case of beer sells for around €12 ($17). Which might help to explain why the Germans are some of the most enthusiastic boozers on Earth. Among the OECD nations, Germany ranks fourth in the per-capita consumption of alcohol. Australia, it might be noted, languishes in 15th place, behind the likes of Slovenia and Portugal.

Some argue there is a direct link between the availability of alcohol and the prevalence of social mayhem. By this logic, a country such as Germanymust be some kind of barbaric hell-world where every night at the pub ends in a brutal orgy of violence.