10 Weird Facts about Beer

10 Weird Facts About Beer

 

1. The Earliest Beer recipe – Beer brewing dates to almost 6000 BC. However, it was the Sumerians around 2000 BC who really loved the stuff. Their plaques and carvings often centre on people or gods drinking from large jars of beer.

 2. Beer is Dangerous – For your liver, obviously. But beer brewing is also a dangerous process due to the chances of bottles exploding, as today’s home brewers know. Sometimes, however, you get beer destruction on an even larger scale. At a London brewery in 1814, a vat containing more than 100,000 gallons of ale exploded, sending the beer rushing down the street through poor residential areas. It destroyed two houses and one pub, killing nine people in the process.

 3. People will do anything for Beer – Seriously, they will. During Prohibition in America people took to drinking hair tonic and posing as members of the clergy to get alcohol. Sometimes people come together on a large scale in the never ending quest for free beer.

 4. Brewing is Woman’s Work – In ancient and medieval times the job of making beer fell to women. In some cultures it was considered such an honour that only beautiful or noble women could do it.

 5. Religious Beer – The few beer producers who weren’t women tended to be monks. Monasteries have a rich history of brewing beer in order to refresh tired travellers and to sell to make money to run the monastery. Today some still have active breweries, especially the Trappist Monks in Belgium and the Netherlands.

 6. Beer is Medicine – Beer was often used as medicine in medieval times. But those people used just about anything as medicine whether it worked or not, right? Modern people wouldn’t be so silly. Or would they? Shortly after the start of Prohibition the government ruled that doctors could give out beer for medicinal purposes.

 7. The World’s Oldest Brewery – It’s a terrible stereotype that Germans are all huge beer drinkers. However, their country of 80 million did until just a few years ago have more breweries than the 300 million strong USA. They also lay claim to the oldest brewery. Located in Bavaria, Weihenstephan Abbey has been making beer since 1040.

 8. Beer in Mythology – Virtually every polytheistic religion has a god or goddess of beer. The epic Finnish poem Kalevala spends more time on beer than on the creation of man. The Egyptian lion-goddess Sekhmet gave up killing forever once she got drunk enough. And the Greeks and Romans had Dionysus and Bacchus, respectively, the god of pleasure and wine and freeing ones inner self from care and worry.

  9. Drinking Ages – The age at which you are allowed to buy alcohol varies surprisingly little from country to country, usually falling between 16 and 21. However, parts of India have a drinking age of 25, the latest in the world.

 10.  Beer and Spit – The Incas and some Pacific Island cultures used spit to ferment their beer. Beer or Chicha was very important for Incan festivals. They had large breweries devoted to making enough of the stuff. The recipe went something like this: take a large vat of water and let it warm up in the sun. Get a bunch of women to chew corn until it is a pulp in their mouths. The women then spit the pulp into the vat of warm water and let it sit for a few weeks.