I'm getting rather hoarse, I fear,
After so much reciting:
So, if you don't object, my dear,
We'll try a glass of bitter beer -
I think it looks inviting.
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.
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.
I am sure of this, that if everybody was to drink their bottle a day, there would be not half the disorders in the world there are now. It would be a famous good thing for us all.
Give an Irishman lager for a month and he's a dead man. An Irishman's stomach is lined with copper, and the beer corrodes it. But whiskey polishes the copper and is the saving of him.
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
I asked these Indians: "Do men ever make Chicha?" My question was met with gales of laughter. The women howled. Bent over in hilarity, one replied, "Men can't brew. Chicha made by men would only make gas in the belly. You are a funny man! Beer is women's work."
For all we know that English people are/ Fed upon beef - I won't say much of beer/ Because 'tis liquor only, and being far/ From this my subject, has no business here;/ We know too, they are very fond of war,/ A pleasure - like all pleasures - rather dear;/ So were the Cretans - from which I infer/ That beef and battle both were owing her