Selenium WebDriver and DropDown Boxes

If I want to select an option of a dropdown box, there are several ways to do that. I always used:

driver.findElement(By.id("selection")).sendKeys("Germany");

But that didn't work every time. Sometimes another option was selected. So I googled a little bit and found this piece of code which works every time:

WebElement select = driver.findElement(By.id("selection"));
    List<WebElement> options = select.findElements(By.tagName("option"));
    for (WebElement option : options) {
        if("Germany".equals(option.getText()))
            option.click();
    }

But that works really really slow. If I have a long list with many items in it, it really takes too much time. So my question is, is there a solution which works every time and is fast?