Dispatches from Beer History

Here in the Dirty South, we are all about some learning. As for me, I passed my dissertation proposal yesterday (sounds like passing a kidney-stone or something - not a bad analogy) and am now in the land of ABD (all-but-dissertation). I'm taking some of this day off to do...well, more research. Just on beer. It's like I am writing a third-grade paper on beer, you know, the kind of paper where you would just look at the Encyclopedia Brittanica and re-word that crap. Here's what I've come up with:

THE ANCIENT WORLD

Check out this cylinder seal impression from Mesopotamia (a.k.a. Iraq); it dates from around 1800BCE. Cylinder seals like this were used as signatures; you would roll out your unique picture on clay tablets to show you agreed to what was in them. This dude here picked a sweet, sweet image: namely, he is on the left, drinking beer out of a straw with an enthroned goddess while a servant refills the beer jar. He's all like, "You want to know who I am? I'm the dude that gets to drink with the gods while you all just ask them for rain and lame stuff like that." By the way, everyone used straws back then to filter out all the nasty crap that would float around with the beer. And: no hops were used in beer yet. Basically, they would bake a loaf of bread with some honey and fruit, and then let it sit in a jar with some water. Mmm, sounds delicious. If you want to try some Anchor Steam Brewery created a recipe gathered from ancient poetry: namely, a four-millennia-old hymn to the goddess of beer, Ninkasi, and brewed it. So, besides being liquid bread and preserving well, beer served several social functions: it was used in religious rites, and, as in the modern world, it seems like beer got people totally in the mood (those links might be in the "too much information" category for some). 

THE MEDIEVAL WORLD

Monks are famous for making beer; but did you know that, from ancient times until well into the middle ages, all beer-brewers were women? It was only when it got to be big business that the monks stepped in. And then things got really weird: enter the beer witches.

So maybe the women-beer connection explains one of the most interesting figures of the medieval world (with her own Great Divide beer to boot). Check out her legends (from beer history):

Probably the best known Irish saint after Patrick is Saint Brigid (b. 457, d. 525). Known as "the Mary of the Gael," Brigid founded the monastery of Kildare and was known for spirituality, charity, and compassion. St. Brigid also was a generous, beer-loving woman. She worked in a leper colony which found itself without beer, "For when the lepers she nursed implored her for beer, and there was none to be had, she changed the water, which was used for the bath, into an excellent beer, by the sheer strength of her blessing and dealt it out to the thirsty in plenty." Brigid is said to have changed her dirty bathwater into beer so that visiting clerics would have something to drink. Obviously this trait would endear her to many a beer lover. 

Wow, she was way ahead of the curve on grey-water recycling (into beer, no less). But my favorite thing about Brigid? A sample of her poetry (I sure like her style):

I'd like to give a lake of beer to God. 
I'd love the Heavenly 
Host to be tippling there 
For all eternity...
I'd sit with the men, the women of God
There by the lake of beer
We'd be drinking good health forever
And every drop would be a prayer.

Now praying about getting tipsy in heaven? My kind of saint. By the way, maybe these people are her intellectual descendants. 

THE EARLY MODERN WORLD

Controversy Brews: IPA, as we all have heard, was made with lots of preservative-like hops in order to survive the long trek from Britain to India; but is this story actually just a myth? 

LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY

If there were a Guiness Book of Records entry for "Most prolific beer consumption in the history of the world," this dude would win hands-down. Check out the stories from Hulkster.

Alright, so I kind of slowed down there at the end. But I got to the point where I would have quit in third grade anyhow. Let's hope that programs for PhDs in Beer History will flourish everywhere.