Eames - The secret life of beer! : exposed : legends, lore and little-known facts

Beer is a gift from the goddesses, a soothing balm given our species to bring joy and comfort in compensation for the curse of self-awareness, the awful realization of our mortality. Beer nourisher and liquid bread, inspirer of song and story, tribal tale-teller, mother and father of democracy its domestication led to civilization itself. Beer is the stuff of our species and is in our very blood and bones.

Ten, twenty, perhaps fifty thousand years ago a woman hunter-gatherer with a gourd of grain was caught in a torrential downpour. Fleeing the lightning and thunder, the woman left the drenched seeds behind as she scurried for cover. The sun reappeared as ambient yeast infected the bowl of abandoned, fermenting gruel. Bubbling and sudsing, the worlds first brew waited for perhaps another woman to come along and spy the concoction. A curious sip followed by a grunt of pleasure at the tart taste followed by a deeper swig. Soon a strange sensation took hold of the woman. Dizzy, lightheaded feelings gave way to drunkenness and beer was born.

Whoever makes a poor beer is transferred to the dung-hill.

Edict, City of Danzig, 11th century

...Mans first civilization gave great place to intoxication. Long before there was decadence or world-weariness, men and women wanted to change their response to the planet on which they had evolved to self-consciousness.

Jacquetta Hawkes, The First Great Civilizations

In all ancient societies, in the religious mythologies of all ancient cultures, beer was a gift to women from a goddess, never a male god, and women remained bonded in complex religious relationships with feminine deities who blessed the brew vessels.

Beer and the Goddess

The ancient legends tell how the goddess took pity on the miserable plight of humanity and so loved her daughters that she bestowed the gift of beer to their sole keeping. Twenty thousand years ago, it was a goddess who gave life and abundance and it was the goddess who, out of a mothers love and pity for her fallen children, gave the gift of brew to the women of mankind. The cup of bliss, the gourd of temporary forgetfulness was filled with beer.

Beer Etiquette

I rinsed their own mugs in a trough before taking them to the bar to be refilled.

When the chill northeast wind blows,
And winter tells a heavy tale,
When pyes and dawes and doobes and crowes
Do sit and curse the frostes and snowes,
Then give me ale.

16th century English verse

The English hop plant is a species of morning glory, several varieties of which contain hallucinogenic properties.

Beer and Song

He that buys land buys many stones,
He that buys flesh buys many bones,
He that buys eggs buys many shells,
But he that buys good ale buys nothing else.

English Medieval song

The Philosophical Drinker

Kindly observe the tankard of beer I offer you. This bock was not made simply to drink. It was made to speak to you. And if you, with your tankard of beer, could learn the dialogue, you would discover that in your tankard lives a milky way of tiny bubbles. And inside each bubble, there exists an idea that is waiting to be discovered. Each one of these ideas can make you grand and large and fortunate if you so desire to learn to talk with beer.