"No Beer, No Civilization":
George Will thinks some folks underestimate the importance of beer.
UPDATE: Professor Bainbridge thinks it's really "No Wine, No Civilization." Redheadlaw7 likes that story better.
Features
Stuff from us
Academic Legal Writing: personalized bookplates
Sources on the Second Amendment
I actually have the same questions about bread too. Who on earth would know that you could make something easily edible by chopping down these weeds, grinding up the seeds, etc. etc.
Come to think of it, whoever thought they would try crushing weeds, wrapping them on paper, lighting them on fire, and sticking one end of them in their mouth and inhaling?
I suspect the evolutionary process at work was developing immunity to lots of the contaminants in drinking water.
Will believes in that benefit. He dresses himself while drunk every morning. And he's drunk everytime he lovingly debates with Cokie Roberts.
That's why I mentioned the possibility that the beer being discussed had lower alcoholic content than modern beer.
jgepps,
Yes, diets can be balanced, but the way to balance dehydration is to take in fluids. I'm not one of your"silly moderns." I fully understand that people have been drinking alcohol for many thousands of years. I even drink it myself. My doubts were about the use of beer as the main, or only source of fluids. I suppose there's some level of alcohol content that leads to a net increase, rather than decrease, in fluids from beer. I don't know what is.
'Habituative', yes; 'addictive', no.
Beer is a social lubricant that permits for institutional evolution. But because of its affect on inhibitions, I would guess that it has been used more often for institutional changes organized around "us-them" distinctions rather than "true-false" ones.
Furthermore fermentation turns the incomplete protein of grains into complete protein, with a healthy dose of B vitamins as well.
You could live forever on beer with just a source of vitamin C, relatively easy to find in nature.
If you only had bread, however, you would die of malnutrition in short order.
My guess is that for a long periods of human history there have been at least some human beings (the ones who could afford to do so) who have survived with beer or wine as their only beverages per se. That's not to say that they didn't also take in water in relatively safer forms such as wet, cooked foods (e.g., soups), raw fruits and vegetables, etc.
I'd also be curious to hear from one of the MDs here whether there's some lower threshold of hydration at which your kidneys will simply begin to ignore the diuretic effects of any further alcohol you consume.
I've been reading "The Pillars of the Earth" and the sequel this summer and it has taken some getting used to the constant reference to everyone drinking beer all the time, including kids and including for breakfast.
In wines and higher alcohol / bottle conditioned beers, the higher alcohol is sufficient to kill most bugs.
It's not exactly certain what the first beer was made from. It might have been dates; it might very well have been barley. There's an interesting seal from the Dilmun civilization (approx. 2000 BCE, in what is now the country of Bahrain) that shows two men sharing a jug of beer, drinking it through straws. This image accurately relays the design, though it is a modern interpretation in textiles.
In the 'too good to be true' department, the original seal was discovered during excavations funded in part by a Scandinavian brewery, as recounted in Looking for Dilmun.
It appears to be that certain breads were baked intentionally to brew beer from them. Evidence of such is found both in Sumeria and ancient Egypt.
Out of curiosity, how do we know it was beer in that Dilmun jug?
I don't know about you, but when I drink beer I tend to urinate a lot, part of the dehydration effect, so taking in water in and of itself does not mean it does not cause dehydration.
In any case, wine is mostly water. Whiskey of less than about 100 proof is mostly water. Do they not cause dehydration?
My very simple point is not that beer causes dehydration but that alcohol does. (If you can find any study that shows otherwise please cite it.)
Therefore, when we drink a mixture of water and alcohol, like beer or wine, the water content and the dehydration effect will offset one another. what I am curious about is where the breakeven point is in terms of alcohol percentage in the mixture. Without knowing that we don't know whether beer causes dehydration.
That seems like a straightforward enough question. Note that I made no claims, just expressed some doubts.
I can personally attest to the fact that you can stay hydrated on beer. We forgot the water but remembered the beer on a all day fishing trip in the hot sun and felt no more tired or dehydrated than on a usual trip.
The hops in beer are also a preservative but its wide use is relatively recent compared to the history of beer.
Also, as old as beer is, mead is probably older. True it doesn't have the same relationship to farming. Alot of mead is not boiled.
Do not drink alcohol, including beer and wine. They increase dehydration and make it difficult to make good decisions.
WebMD also says to avoid caffeine which is a proven myth. So, I would like to see a better source. I haven't seen a study either way on alcohol, but my own experience says beer is net source of hydration like coffee. I wish someone would do a study on alcohol in the same way as the caffeine study.
Here are the caffeine studies:
http://www.ific.org/foodinsight/2002/ja/caffdehydnbfi402.cfm
http://www.snopes.com/medical/myths/8glasses.asp
(Check here. It's about drugs, but he contrasts with alcohol.)
I don't know about you, but I tend to urinate a lot when I drink *water*. I guess water must be dehydrating, too.
From the Snopes article you yourself linked to:
It's not clear what they're basing that statement on, but it seems noteworthy that it's included in an article that seems generally very skeptical about claims that drinking things other than water will leave you chronically dehydrated.
Believe what you like. You have the right to be utterly stubborn in your ignorance. I'm not going to search the world for the quantity of information it would take to convince you.
Seamus,
Alcohol stimulates urination over and above that induced by just drinking water.
Look here for one explanation. There are many sources that say the same thing.
I have empirical evidence that alcohol stimulates urination over and above the lower bunks of Freshman dorms as well.
The moral: there's nothing bad about drinking beer. Ever.
Personally, I think it's fascinating to read about how much booze people consumed in pre-industrial times. They weren't drinking watered-down beer, they were just slightly stewed all the time. I've read somehwere that the modern economy only works because people are wired on caffine all the time instead of half-drunk.
I believe it's pretty common knowledge that wine is typically a higher alcohol content than beer. It seems that alcohol is a diuretic and whether or not that overcomes the water content to dehydrate depends on the % of alcohol. It's perfectly possible that wine is typically too high of an alcohol content to hydrate a person.
Also, you don't have to boil the water to make wine, do you? That could be an additional reason why beer was more effective at hydrating city masses safely.
Barley, of course, wasn't the only grain used. Rice beer--early San Miguel?--shows up from the Indus Valley civilization to Sumeria as well. And, as noted above, mead has a pretty long run. The antiquity of African beers, based on millet and sorghum is, to my knowledge, yet to be established.
Well, you don't use water to make wine. It's grape juice. However, they would sometimes add water to wine to dilute it, and that would be unboiled water.
It goes into great detail on the origin of wine, why it's pretty clear that wine preceded beer and how alcohol contributed to the rise of civilization. It's one of the more interesting books I've read.
One batch of barley malt can be used up to three times. The first run is high alcohol, the last "small beer."
Tokyo Tom, Orin's link works fine for me.
General Disarray, Yes I wish that statement was referenced and quantified.
Steve in CA, Exactly! It has to be so.
Also, I was with Will until he made the snarly comment about liberals. It isn't the liberals who are trying to stop people from drinking beer (we have, afterall, FDR to thank for repealing that odious Prohibition Amendment). It is the religious wingnuts and fundamentalists, who believe that the Bible is inerrent, with the sole exception that Jesus actually drank grape juice, not wine.
"Will, unfortuately, missed the greatest evolutionary advantage of beer and wine to propagation of the species -- changing the perception of members of the opposite gender."
Or, ahem, members of the same gender....
Well, that effect would seem to be sort of a nullity from an evolutionary point of view.
I'm sorry, but I didn't find anything in that article about liberals. I *did* see a funny jab at health food store clerks, and some uncharacteristic understanding of the feelings of secularists, but definitely no "snarly" comments about "liberals".
That said, the only thing liberals are likely to do in relationship to beer is get you to drink *better* beer, like microbrews (you know those elitist beers).
I stand corrected. However, even this is bizarre, to assume that health food store people don't drink beer. It's still a snide aside.
"Well, that effect would seem to be sort of a nullity from an evolutionary point of view." Who's talking about that? As the old joke goes, what's the difference between a straight boy and a gay boy? A six pack!
[Important Note to Helpful Readers: If we have confusing typos and especially ugly formatting errors, such as an unclosed underline or bold tag, we'd love to hear from you about them -- but please e-mail the author about this, rather than leaving a comment. We often won't read the comments for a while after the post, and if there's a glaring formatting error, we'd see it quickly when we revisit the post, even without the comment; and in any event the comment likely isn't going to be that helpful to your fellow comment readers. So please e-mail us directly about glitches like this. Thanks!]
Comment Policy: We'd like the posts to be civil, of course (no profanity, personal insults, and the like), but we're also hoping that people try to be as calm, reasoned, and substantive as possible. So please, also avoid rants, invective, substantial and repeated exaggeration, and radical departures from the topic of the thread. Sticking with substance -- and staying on-topic -- will make the comments more helpful to other readers, and more pleasant.
As editors, we reserve the right to delete posts, and even to kick out posters, though we hope that both of these will be exceptional events. (We also reserve the right to be busy with other things, and therefore (1) not remove all the posts that might merit removal, and (2) ignore demands such as "You should remove A's posts, because they're just as bad as B's!")
Here's a tip: Reread your post, and think of what people would think if you said this over dinner. If you think people would view you as a crank, a blowhard, or as someone who vastly overdoes it on the hyperbole, rewrite your post before hitting enter.
And if you think this is the other people's fault -- you're one of the few who sees the world clearly, but fools wrongly view you as a crank, a blowhard, or as someone who overdoes it on the hyperbole -- then you should still rewrite your post before hitting enter. After all, if you're one of the few who sees the world clearly, then surely it's especially important that you frame your arguments in a way that is persuasive and as unalienating as possible, even to fools.
Our goal is to provide an interesting and pleasant environment that can help inform readers. To do that, we'll occasionally have to exercise our editorial discretion. Think of this as an in-person discussion group, where having different voices is critical to a great conversation -- but where sometimes the leader has to deal with cranks who sour the conversation more than they enliven it.
Naturally, there's always a risk that this discretion will be used erroneously, no matter how well-intentioned the editor. But discussion groups (especially on the Internet, but also off it) generally need an editor who'll occasionally make such judgments.
And, remember, it's a big Internet. If you think we were mistaken in removing your post (or, in extreme cases, in removing you) -- or if you prefer a more free-for-all approach -- there are surely plenty of ways you can still get your views out.