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
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?
And it occurs to me that if I were aboard a rowboat floating in the middle of all the beer I've drunk in a lifetime, I'd never be able to see the shore.
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.
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.
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."
I suspect states are going to realize there's money to be made, and they'll start to change laws so people can distil to sell. It happened with wine, it happened with beer.
Sometimes I wish I'd went through those good times stone cold sober so I could remember everything," he said, "but then again, if I had been sober the times probably wouldn't have been worth remembering.
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.
But if at church they would give some ale. And a pleasant fire our souls to regale. We'd sing and we'd pray all the live long day, Nor ever once from the church to stray.