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.
We live thetime that a match flickers; we pop the corkof a ginger-beer bottle, and the earthquake swallows us on the instant. Is it not odd, is it not incongruous, is it not, in the highest sense of human speech, incredible, that we should think so highly of the ginger-beer, and regard so little the devouring earthquake?
This is all thousands of years old. It's the same the world over. Anyone who has ever walked upright has loved beer, celebrated over it, told talks over it, hatched plots over it, courted over it. It's what we do as a species. It's what makes us human. We brew.
It was darkly rumoured that the butler, regarding him with favour such as that stern man had never shown before to mortal boy, had sometimes mingled porter with his table beer to make him strong.
My rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them.
Is there a parson much bemused in beer, a maudlin poetess, a rhyming peer, a clerk foredoom'd his father's soul to cross, who pens a stanza when he should engross?
If in 1989 I said, 'I have an idea: Bottle water and sell it. And charge more than a beer,' they would have chased me around with a giant butterfly net. The same with paying to watch a television station.