Text Box: Text Box: Ten amazing beer facts in Travels with Barley!
Text Box: Text Box: Text Box: Did you know that: The beer-drinkingest day in America isn’t Super Bowl Sunday but...the Fourth of July. The Brits in 1996 brewed a beer made from a recipe gleaned from the walls of the tomb of Egyptian boy king Tutankhamen and sold the first bottle at auction for $7,200—the highest price ever paid for a bottle of beer. You yourself can drink an ale made from a 2,700-year-old beer recipe reverse-engineered from dregs found in a royal tomb in Turkey believed to hold the burial place of the legendary King Midas. It’s called Midas Touch Golden Elixir and is made and widely distributed by Dogfish Head Craft Brewery in Milton, De. George Washington loved London porter, a forerunner to stout, and led one of the first-ever “buy-American” campaigns in an effort to get citizens of the new nation to start drinking America-made porter instead of the British variety. Beer is the best-selling adult beverage in the world. In America it continues to outsell its rivals wine and liquor 7 to 1. The oldest recorded beer recipe is about 4,000 years old and was recorded in the form of a poem to a Sumerian beer goddess. Fritz Maytag at Anchor Brewing actually replicated the recipe several years ago and said it tasted more like apple cider than beer. Brewers, until Louis Pasteur definitively settled the question in 1876, made beer for thousands of years without a concrete knowledge of yeast and its role in fermentation. Until then the phenomenon that produced alcohol was known as “God is good.” Anheuser-Busch uses rice in its Budweiser formula; with Bud Light the No. 1 selling beer in America and Bud No. 2, Anheuser-Busch consumes about 15% of the entire U.S. rice crop. You think you’ve been in rough beer joints? In ancient Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), tavern owners found guilty of overcharging patrons for beer were put to death by drowning. The first cousin of the hops plant is...the marijuana plant. Fans of really hoppy beer also might want to know that one risk of ingesting lots of hoppy beer is a syndrome known as...Brewer’s Droop. Hops contain an herbal form of estrogen that can make men...chesty...or even lead to that debilitating ailment known in these modern times as...erectile dysfunction. HOME