IN THE QUIRKS
Beloved Beer! | By Glen Mikkelsen, CVE
Are you a cenosillicaphobiac? Are you a venue manager who fears an empty beer glass? the allure of this beverage. Venue managers spend hours thinking about beer. We order it, serve it, clean it up, ban it, and deal with its managers around the world. So, let’s look at beer, and its remarkable hold on the human condition. Undeniably, beer is a supreme social lubricant. It likely gets its name
from bibere, the Ancient Latin word that means “to drink” – so beer is synonymous with the act of drinking itself. Its popularity is only sur- It is assumed that the
discovery of beer was a fortunate accident. About 10,000 years ago, some believe a loaf of bread may have become damp, or perhaps moist grain – grain that already had be- gun to ferment – was per- haps cooked to save it from going to waste. No matter how it transpired, water, yeast, and grain were unit- ed to create the most mar- velous of concoctions. How much power did this discovery have on humanity? Well, some anthropologists believe this mystical, mood-altering beverage converted hunter-gathering people to grow the needed grain and stay in one place. This led to communities, civilization, and ultimately the need to build stadiums and ballparks!
In ancient civilizations, particularly Egyptian and Sumerian, beer
Egypt. It was a currency, a medicine, an integral part to religious cere- In 1200 BCE, it would not be a stretch for a beer-slinger at Egypt’s
chariot races, to say, “Thanks for the tip, and here’s your straw.” That is because early beer resembled porridge as much as liquid. Drawings from Ancient Egypt depict people sipping their beer from large straws alcoholic porridge resting at the bottom of the urn. A story also relates an early drunk driving accident in Egypt. The
story says that an inebriated charioteer was arrested after running over a priestess of the goddess Hathor. The perpetrator was taken to the his corpse hung, until animal scavengers had reduced it to bones. Apparently though, Hathor’s priestesses were no strangers to beer.
They would “drank in her honour of the beer of Iunu coloured with the red ochre of Abu when they celebrated her festival each New Year.”
Besides priestesses, for centuries it was women who brewed beer. 40 Facility Manager Magazine
Even in Ancient Inca, girls aged 8 to 10 would chew corn into a pulp- like consistency in their mouths, and then spit the pulp out into huge would become thick, cloudy, and clumpy, and was strained into an Incan brew. In England, prior to the Middle Ages, women brewers were known as ale wives, and they ran the alehouses. These women would make This unhopped brew was called ale. In the 12th century, it was a German Benedictine nun who helped
revolutionize the beer brewing world. St. Hildegard of Bingen laud- - tolling the virtues of hops preservation properties. Hops stopped beer from turning into vinegar. St. Hildegard wrote, “As a re- sult of its own bitterness, when put in [beer], and it may be added so that it lasts so much longer.” Hops was initially in- tensely resisted. It was thought to be decidedly unhealthy as a primary ingredient in brewing. Hops introduction was
fought through legislatures, royal proclamations, and writings of the day’s medical practitioners. The Catholic Church protested – as they quantities. - age with added hops. Beer spelled the end of women’s domination of brewing, as men possessed the capital to fund large breweries and storage houses. The job that had belonged to women was slowly taken over by males. Ironically, however, science has shown that hops contain large quan-
tities of estrogenic and tranquilizing compounds. In fact, hops were used in traditional medical practice as a natural estrogen replacement and to help insomniacs sleep. The greater level of plant estrogens in Consumption by men of large levels of estrogenic compounds can lead to unwelcome performance problems later in life. In fact, the En- glish termed the condition “Brewer’s Droop,” which was contracted -
and it helped nourish monks during episodes of fasting.
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