You Think YOU Like Beer?

For some reason or another, I’ve been doing a lot of research on beer lately. Perhaps I’m developing a problem. It feels oh so good, though. Actually, I’ve done a lot more reading than I have drinking. And most of my reading has focused on how our ancestors viewed beer, so I don’t think my liver has much to worry about. For now.

To tell the truth, what I’ve found is that no matter how much drinking you or I take up, no matter what lengths we go to to acquire beer, no matter how much money we spend or how many barrels we start brewing in our basements, beer won’t mean nearly as much to us as it did to our great-great- great-great-great grandfathers.

Now you might be saying to yourself, “Hmmm… I don’t know. I saw last year’s fourth quarter earnings for the world’s largest brewer – AB InBev – and they sell a crapload of beer.” I saw those too. And you’re right, that is a lot of money, especially just for one quarter. Don’t forget too that they’re not the only brewer by any stretch, and lots of beer companies, despite all their profits, still feel compelled to spend huge sums on advertising. Apparently all that profit still makes the corporate suits ask themselves, “Do you think people will remember that they like beer next year?” So they dole out $2.5 million for a 30 second ad during the Super Bowl, just to remind us that beer is pretty cool.

But nevertheless, all that spending doesn’t necessarily equate to people feeling passionately about beer. For passion, you might look to all the Oktoberfests (original and knock off versions) held around the world. Or the fact that so many young people try to secure it illegally. You might even say that the fact that people pour it into bags and tape those bags to dark places of their body in attempts to smuggle it into sporting events speaks volumes about our passion for beer. But all those asses full of beer are nothing compared to how people felt about beer thousands of years ago.

Consider the following…

In the game of love, Modern Man tries to use beer to achieve any number of goals. The ultimate one being to get a woman to agree to come back to his house or apartment and… “organize his music collection,” if you catch my drift. He hopes the “organizing” takes place over a single night or maybe even up to a week if it’s Spring Break. But anything more than that and he begins to not appreciate her criticism of his Scorpions phase.

On many other occasions, however, Modern Man is happy to exchange a beer for a phone number, even if it turns out to be fake, just so he can show his friends that he can in fact ply a number from a member of the opposite sex. Then there are times when Modern Man is happy to buy bottles and bottles of beer for a lady even if it only means she’ll talk to him for five more minutes.

But not Ancient Egyptian Man. His standards were much higher. If Ancient Egyptian Man gave even a sip of beer to a woman, it meant she’d have to do a whole lot more than just “organize his…” ok, you know what? Sex. I’m obviously talking about having sex. And offering beer to a woman meant that he hoped for a lot more than just getting her into bed. It meant she would become Mrs. Ancient Egyptian Man. And you know what came next: in-laws, kids, Pictionary parties, weekends antiquing. Of course back then there weren’t any antiques. All of the quilts and tea sets were the latest, state-of-the art productions, so people went… now-ing, presumably. At any rate, an offering of beer was not made lightly.

The Babylonians didn’t have this same practice, but beer did play a role in marriage for them as well. Babylonian fathers of Babylonian brides sent beer to their new Babylonian sons-in-law for a month after the wedding. So beer may not have been viewed quite as highly by the Babylonians as it was by the Egyptians, given how much of it they were willing to part with, or maybe it was and fathers were just ecstatic to get their daughters married off to whomever would take them. Either way, husbands fared well no matter what their wives looked like (at least for as long as the beer lasted).

I didn’t find much on the changing alcohol content of beer through the ages, but I think it can be presumed that beer has always been fairly potent because the ingredients, for the most part, haven’t changed, and the taste isn’t really the selling point. So given that alcohol has certainly always been a reason to enjoy beer, it was interesting to read that George Washington gave daily rations of it to his troops during the Revolutionary War. Seems counterintuitive to winning a war in which you’re outmanned and outgunned (which I guess goes without saying if you’re outmanned). Then again, keeping morale high is an important factor in fighting a war, and what better way to do that than with some suds?

Going back to the Egyptians, they didn’t let diminished capacities interfere with their love of brewski either. Earlier, I only scratched the surface of the passion the Egyptians had for beer, given that they also used to brew batches of it to bury with their dead so it would travel with them to the afterlife. The only problem is that this passion for brew may have impacted their passion for rewards in the afterlife, since part of their beliefs about receiving rewards in the afterlife (other than beer, of course) involved “the ability to recite spells, passwords and formulae of the Book of the Dead.” So there’s a good chance that your buddy in college who always thought he did better on tests after he had a few beers in him is at least ¼ Egyptian.

But the Egyptians weren’t the only early civilization that tied beer into its religious beliefs. The Sumerians are believed to be the first to brew beer (even though it was most likely by accident) and, appreciating what a glorious thing they discovered, they had a goddess of brewing. When is the last time you heard of anyone praying to a god of beer? The “shrine” of empty beer cans your drunk test-taking friend built in his dorm room? Please. It may have been shaped like a pyramid (I told you that guy had Egyptian in him), but beer-can pyramid building was only the first step toward admittance into preschool back in the days of his ancestors.

And you’ve probably heard a thing or two about Catholics being particularly fond of beer. This is true, but much like their Egyptian counterparts, their fondness has waned. Used to be that Catholics would canonize people for beer. Nowadays you have to do things like “minister to the poor, sick, orphaned and dying.” And even that only gets you ¾’s of the way there.

But to be fair, passion for beer has waned among all religious groups and ethnicities. How could it not? Shortly after beer was discovered, people’s passion for it could only go down. Consider the fact that upon learning of the process for making beer, early man pretty much changed his entire way of life. He didn’t merely spend his nights and weekends drinking it, he didn’t suddenly have something cool to give his friends for their birthdays and hut-warming parties, and he didn’t just have something besides his own urine to drink. Well, he did. But he had so much more than that. As this quote from anthropologist Alan Eames points out, courtesy of Beer100.com, "beer was the driving force that led nomadic mankind into village life...It was this appetite for beer-making material that led to crop cultivation, permanent settlement and agriculture."

The Discovery Channel even devoted a documentary to that very topic. And not only did beer farming prompt man to stop gathering berries and hunting more advanced species, but the documentary goes into how his passion for beer pretty much led to reading, writing and arithmetic. No joke. (You’ll have to watch for a few minutes, but it’s worth it.) Today, when people change their way of life for beer, they usually end up flunking out of school or losing their job, their relationships and everything in their savings account. Yay alcoholism!

But the most telling evidence that we’re not so gung ho over beer anymore is that we don’t do morally abhorrent things in the name of it. Not like we used to, anyway. Oh sure, people may steal it from time to time, and they may do terrible things after drinking beer, but we rarely see others killed over beer. If you long for the days when you could have seen people killed for stealing beer or even the crops used to make beer, you would have enjoyed living under King Wenceslaus (around 900 A.D.), who had people killed for stealing hops. Were theses maniacal orders of a king who became drunk (pun intended) with power and no longer cared for those he ruled for? Probably not. I imagine he was always a fan favorite, given that he would go on to be canonized.

Then there was the Code of Hammurabi. Hammurabi was the King of Babylon during the 18th century B.C. Remember how I wrote earlier that the Babylonians may not have valued beer as much as the Egyptians? Well if you wanted to disagree, you could certainly point to Hammurabi’s Code, part of which stated that owners of beer parlors would be drowned for overcharging. The SOB didn’t order death just to those who stole the shit, he ordered death to those who charged too much! I’m looking at you, every pro sports owner in America.

And I’m sure we’ve all had the misfortune of being around beer that’s gone bad. It’s usually due to negligent behavior of another person (or maybe yourself). Have you then felt obligated to give that person crap for leaving beer out for too long and thereby causing its skunkiness? That’s what you do, right? You give that person crap. Not literally, I hope. You tease them, you belittle them, you shame them for letting good beer go bad. You let them know they’ve ruined everybody’s evening, but all in good fun. You ultimately, unless it happens a second time, remain friends with that person.

Well, if that person lived in the 1500s, and was a woman, they would have been tied to a stake and used for kindling. Actually, if that woman had nothing to do with the beer going bad, but was simply close by when the bad beer was discovered, she would be sent up in flames. ACTUALLY, even when no one was at fault, which was most likely all the time, mob mentality would still find someone, nay, a woman, nay, a “beer witch” to blame.

You see, beer went bad constantly back then because all the processes we know today to keep beer fresh – dark storage, refrigeration, pasteurization – either weren’t as well known or as widely practiced. And when the skunky beer was discovered, the villagers hunted down the beer witch, yelled “Bonfire!” and got out their S’mores. You might be saying, “Yeah, but back then a woman was believed to be a witch if she produced an inaudible fart. They burned so-called ‘witches’ for everything.” True, but that’s still some serious hatin’ for a bad batch of brew.

Thankfully we don’t act so violently today when beer goes bad, but it’s possible we’ve gone too far in the other direction when it comes to impure beer. Everyone knows that criminals, or in this case heroes, bootlegged beer during Prohibition. Now that’s an example of some serious passion for beer during the last century. However, bootlegged beer was “often watered down to increase profits,” (did I say heroes? I meant assholes) and this watered down, tampered with, “light” version is what Americans came to prefer. That’s right. All that light beer we consume, that we choose over the real thing, started because of what we became accustomed to back when hoodlums were ripping us off. Not only did we tolerate it, but we enjoyed it and continue to enjoy it today. Granted, there weren’t many options during Prohibition, but there certainly are today.

So save your stories about the number of consecutive St. Patrick’s Days you’ve passed out in the gutter for your nieces and nephews. Kill a beer witch and then I’ll believe that you know how to enjoy a cold one.