I have received delegations of working men who, apparently speaking with the utmost sincerity, have declared that they would regard it as a genuine hardship if they were deprived of their beer, for example.
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
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.
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.
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.
After tea, we discussed a variety of topics before the fire; and Mrs. Micawber was good enough to sing us (in a small, thin, flat voice, which I remembered to have considered, when I first knew her, the very table-beer of acoustics) the favourite ballads of "The Dashing White Sergeant", and "Little Tafflin".
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.
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