Keg o'my Heart

Beer is the original and authentic booze. The name boozah was given to the merry malt beverage by the ancient Egyptians over 5000 years ago, when a superior brand of suds was brewed in the delta city of Busiris. Tomb paintings, papyri and hieroglyphs all attest to the fact that beer was the Egyptian national drink. Two gallons was the minimum daily quota quaffed by even the lowliest sons and daughters of the Nile, and temple priests made light work of religiously chugalugging the daily beer offerings made to Egyptian deities by Pharaoh and his followers. On a typical feast day in old Memphis, over 900 jugs of beer were offered to the god Ptah alone, and Ramses III is credited with picking up the tab for 466,303 jugs used to slake the eternal thirst of the holy guzzlers.

Brewed of barley, wheat or millet (a kind of seed now sold as a treat for parakeets), Egyptian beer was often spiced or perfumed, and always consumed in quantity. In one tomb painting a lightly clad tavern maid is seen exhorting the customer to drain his crock for a foamy refill. "Drink unto rapture," she coaxes in come-hither hieroglyphs. "Let it be a good day. Listen to the conversation of they companions and enjoy thyself." When after-dinner beer was served in the palaces of the wealthy, servants would exhibit a wooden "skeleton at the feast" to all the guests, urging them to "Drink and be merry; for when you die, such will you be."

Since the demand was great, and the beer highly perishable, brewing was an everyday task, and was considered a kitchen art, like baking. "Beer is liquid bread," the chemist Liebig observed in the 19th Century, and the Egyptian housewife whipped up a batch of home-brew along with her loaves and spice cakes. In the brewing kitchens of the nobility, professional brewers made beer for households numbering in the hundreds, and a list of such brewers' names in the Petrie Papyri has left scholars puzzling over a mystery greater than the riddle of the Sphinx. According to an Egyptologist named Mahaffy, who made a study of the scrolls, one strangely un-Egyptian name keeps reappearing: "It is the name SMITH, undeniably written this way in Greek letters."

Who Smith was, or where he came from, no one knows. Despite the Greek lettering of his name, it is not considered likely that this brewer to the third Ptolemy was of Hellenic origin, since the Greeks were a winebibbing people and had even less understanding of cereal beverages than the grape-oriented Romans and Hebrews. It should be noted, though, that a former Cairo brewery official, named James Death, once wrote a book that attempted to prove that the "leavened bread" of the Bible was, in reality, Jewish beer, which the Israelites learned to make during their captivity in Egypt.

Actually, the primitive brewing process was so simple that anyone could have learned it at a glance. In the case of the Egyptians, grain was moistened with water and allowed to stand until it began to germinate, at which time it was dried and ground into a coarse malt. The malt was then steeped in a vat of hot water and yeasted with sour bread dough. When fermentation had taken place, and the yeast had converted the grain sugars into alcohol, the foaming beer was then strained off into jugs.

By this same basic process, beer had been brewed since the dawn of thirst by peoples from the southern tip of Africa to the Arctic Circle. Yeasts and cereals varied according to climate, however. In Africa the fermentation of native millet beers is still induced by means of milkweed and fermented roots. In the Kalevala, the ancient folk epic of the Finns, the saga of the search for yeast is told in the same iambic pentameter as Longfellow's Hiawatha:

What will bring the effervescence,Who will add the needed factor,That the beer may foam andsparkle,May ferment and be delightful?

With a mythological assist from Kapo, "snowy virgin of the Northland," the old brewess tries adding ripe pine cones and foam from the mouths of angry bears, with no success. Finally, honey is tried, and the beer begins to ferment, "Foaming higher, higher, higher ... /Overflowing all the caldrons." The news travels fast:

Scarce a moment had passed over,Ere the heroes came in numbers,To the foaming beer of Northland,Rushed to drink the sparklingliquor ...Said to make the feeble hardy,Famed to dry the tears of women,Famed to cheer the broken-hearted,Make the aged young and supple,Make the timid brave and mighty,Make the brave men even braver,Fill the heart with joy and gladness,Fill the mind with wisdom sayings,Fill the tongue with ancientlegends ...

Among the most ancient of Norse legends was the story of Valhalla, where Odin's armored maidens, the Valkyries, greeted slain heroes with brimming ale horns, and heaven consisted of an eternity of booze on the house. Since distinct differences between ale and beer had yet to evolve, malt brew was called both öl and biorr. Common to all Northern languages was some form of biorr, which etymologists have traced to beo, a word which the Old Germans used for "barley" and Anglo-Saxons applied to the yeast-yielding honeybee. From this double-barreled source we got beor, biorr, bere and, eventually, beer.

Differences in nomenclature aside, the heroes of the North were never at a loss for an excuse to pass around horns of the wet and foamy. Ale was drunk in thanksgiving for the harvest and in penance for one's sins, to celebrate birth and marriages, and to make the mourners merry at wakes. Long before the beery reigns of Harald Bluetooth and Gorm the Old, ancient Danes gave "ales" in the same way that 19th Century English ladies gave "teas." Every sort of meeting, secular or religious, was called an "ale," for the same refreshment was served at all, whether held in a sacred grove, a family hall or the council room of a king. Saxon chiefs would never sit to decide an important matter without first whetting their wisdom with large humpen of brew, and Norwegians held that business transacted at an ale drinking was as legal and binding as any performed in a court of law.

From the beginning of the Christianera, beer became as closely associated with the northern Church as it had previously been with pagan religion. Saint Brigit, the Fifth Century abbess of Kildare, is still remembered for having miraculously transformed a tub of bath water into most excellent beer to assuage the thirst of lepers. The good saint held Irish brew in such high esteem that she was moved to declare, "I would like to have a great lake of beer for Christ the King. I would like to be watching the Heavenly Family drinking it down through all eternity."

Throughout the Middle Ages, beer was served at breakfast, dinner and supper, and the per-capita consumption is estimated to have been in the vicinity of eight quarts a day. Brewing for a large feudal estate was, therefore, a major operation. In Wales, where beer was called cwrw by drunk and sober alike, the royal brewer ranked above the court physician, and it was the king's privilege to sample privately every new cask of ale. It was further ordained that the high-ranking steward should receive "as much of every cask of plain ale as he can reach with his middle finger dipped into it, and as much of every cask of ale with spiceries as he can reach with the second joint of his middle finger."

The steward's finger was by no means the first to be put into the beer. The age-old custom of dipping a digit into a vat to determine the temperature of a malt mixture was already known as "the rule of thumb," for brewing remained an instinctive art practiced mainly by women in their kitchens. A girl learned to make ale at her mother's knee, and counted the ability among her beau-catching accomplishments. When she married, the bride and her mother brewed a big batch, and gave a "bride ale" feast to which friends and neighbors brought gifts to start the young couple in housekeeping—and in this we have the beery beginnings of all bridal parties.

Among the feasts and ceremonies retained from pagan days were the old religious "ales," which were adapted to the celebration of Christian festivals in the Middle Ages. There were Whitsun ales, Easter ales, tithe ales, and ales in memory of saints and the dear departed. On the eve of a saint's day, people would gather in the churchyard, as they had formerly gathered in sacred groves, with beer and food to see them through the long night's vigil. As a Tenth Century manuscript describes it, they came "with candelys burnyng, and would wake, and come toward night to the church of their devocian." And "afterwards the pepul fell to letcherie, and songs, and daunses, with harping and piping, and also to glotony and sinne."

Against all such unbuttoned "ales" and dubious devotions, the higher clergy of Britain, Germany, Scandinavia and Flanders issued repeated warnings. But nowhere was better beer brewed than in the convents and monasteries, where brotherly brewers and cloistered brewesses worked to perfect their beers with a precision of method unknown to any other branch of medieval science. At a time when the taste and quality of home-brewed beers varied from house to house, and from one batch to the next, monastic brewers were striving to standardize their product by means of grain selection, temperature control, and the exact measurement of malt and "spiceries." The familiar XXX symbol for strong booze began with the monastic grading of beers into one-, two- and three-X qualities, and the first significant step toward the development of modern beer is believed to have been made in a convent kitchen with the experimental use of hops.

Though hops are mentioned in the Finnish Kalevala, and Belgians credit the invention of hopped beer to a 13th Century Flemish king, Gambrinus, the first reliable reference to the use of hops in beer occurs in the Physica Sacra of Saint Hildegard. Speaking De Hoppho, the 12th Century German saint wrote that while its bitterness gave beer "a longer durability," the hop "creates in man a sad mood" and "affects his bowels unpleasantly by reason of its heating properties." In the third volume of the same work, she therefore advises, "If thou desirest to make a beer from oats and hops, boil it also with the addition of Gruz and several ash leaves, as such a beer purges the stomach of the drinker and eases his chest."

To this day, the exact nature of Gruz is unknown, though brewers and scholars generally agree that it doesn't sound like anything the modern drinker would like to have in his beer. The theory is that Gruz was a seasoning compounded of plants and herbs, such as sweet gale, wild rosemary, yarrow, juniper, bog myrtle, broom tops, alehoof and moth-kraut. Whatever its ingredients, it is known that the Archbishop of Cologne had a monopoly on its manufacture in 1381, and that German Gruz, or Grut, beers were brewed and sold for export in Hamburg, Bremen, Lubeck, Münster and Einbeck during the 11th Century.

The fame of Einbeck's wheat-and-barley beer was such that brewers in other towns began to imitate the summer brew, which was called Ainpock, or Einbock. In time, the name was shortened to Bock—the German word for "goat"— and all reference to Einbeck was lost when the head of a bucking goat was adopted as its universal trademark.

Among the most popular beers of the Middle Ages were the light, hoppy wheat beers of Bohemia, which were often favored over the native product by drinkers in the leading beer towns of Germany. The importation and enormous (continued on page 154) Keg O'm heart (continued from page 144) sale of Bohemian beer by the cathedral chapter of Breslau created such economic havoc with the town's brewing industry that brewers and councilmen joined forces to make the trade illegal, thus touching off the Pfaffenkrieg, or "Parsons' War," of 1380. Denied their traditional right to sell beer of any origin, the clergy closed the churches and refused to perform all sacraments.

In the equally memorable year 1492, when Columbus set sail to discover the West Indies and a hitherto unknown malady called syphilis, a sensible stay-at-home German brewer of Braunschweig, named Christian Mumme, is said to have concocted a thickish, hopped barley beer, which later became a favorite in London. Most Englishmen found the hopped German beers too bitter for their taste, however, and preferred the more saccharine English ales.

Because of the spicy sweetness of their ale, the English traditionally drank it with festive cakes and fruit, in consequence of which custom King John was reported to have died, not of his enemies' poison, but of a "surfeit of new ale and peaches"—a combination that impresses one present-day American beer drinker as being pretty much the same thing. In an effort to explain the early English distinction between ale and beer, a 19th Century authority theorized that ale was "brewed from malt to be drunk fresh," while beer was "brewed from malt and hops, intended to keep." But the same writer found that distinctions were "different in different parts of the country," even in his own day, and failed to take into account that the word "bere," or "beer," had been in use long before the English fancied the flavor of hops. The most likely explanation is that the terms were used almost interchangeably, since British brews differed widely in taste and strength, and were known by a variety of local names as well.

One reason for the profusion of names and types is that most English house-holders did their own brewing, or patronized a breed of boozy brewesses, called "alewives," whose recipes were highly individualistic. Recalling the broom-top flavoring used in German Gruz, it is significant that the original English alehouse sign was a broom hung outside an alewife's door to inform the thirsty traveler that home-brewed ale was for sale within. This tradition of female "brewsters" carried over into the 15th and 16th Centuries, when women not only brewed for London taverns, but frequently ran them.

Insofar as the modern student can as certain, the brew and services of some lady innkeepers left much to be desired, however. As early as 1464, the male members of the first professional Brewers' Company petitioned the Lord May or of London for more rigid regulations against unscrupulous brewesses who made "their bere of unseasonable malt, the which is of little price and unhol-some for mannes body." A statute of Henry VIII forbade brewers to use hops and "brimstone." A more liberal attitude toward hops was displayed by Henry's son, Edward VI, however, and the controversial vine grew in English esteem over the following century, eventually winning the scientific approval of herbalist Nicholas Culpepper. Hops, Culpepper held, "easeth the headache that comes of heat" and "killeth the worms in the body."

If Culpepper was correct, the Eliza-bethans must have been remarkably free from all possible obstructions. The Queen and her maids of honor began each day with pieces of toast floating in quarts of warm ale. Mary, Queen of Scots, who was weaned on beer as a tot, expressed anxiety over the supply as soon as she was imprisoned in Tutbury Castle, and sent her secretary to inquire, "At what place near Tutbury may beer be provided for Her Majesty?"

"Beer may be had at Burton," the secretary was told, and, according to all accounts, Burton brew was indeed fit for a queen. Its chief Elizabethan competitors were "March beer," which required an aging of two years, and the ale that was sold at the sign of the Dagger, in Holborn.

"We must have March bere, dooble, dooble beer, and Dagger ale," Thomas Dekker declared, and brew of all types and grades was joyously guzzled in Maytime, haytime, or on any old day of the week. "Cakes and ale" were synonymous with merrymaking. "Beer and skittles" (a kind of ninepins) came to mean any sort of fun and games.

He that drinks strong beer and goesto bed mellow,Lives as he ought to live, and dies ahearty fellow.

Such was the credo of John Fletcher, the Mermaid tavern with, who lived to drink the healths of Elizabeth, James and Charles I. Following the execution of Charles by Cromwell's Puritans, beer quickly lost status among the royalists—not because the Puritans were opposed to malt liquor, but because they approved of it. With the overthrow of the monarchy by Cromwell, royalists drank foreign wines and scorned to visit alehouses. Came the Restoration, and the monarchy was re-established, but English brew never quite recovered from the effects of royalist ridicule. Beer and ale had already disappeared from the tables of the fashionable, who now delighted in a new dinner beverage—hot tea, sipped from saucers. When the Great Turk Coffeehouse opened, in 1662, even breakfast ale was threatened by creeping coffee addiction, and malt brew of any sort became a lower-class drink.

But not for long. Twenty-seven years later, William of Orange arrived from the Netherlands with a retinue of Dutch courtiers and a regal supply of brandy and Holland gin. Though the Irish and Scots had been distilling whiskey for centuries, English fondness for strong liquor dates only from 1690, when William's government passed "An Act for the Encouraging of the Distillation of Brandy and Spirits." Stills sprang up everywhere, and within four years the annual production of English gin rose to a million gallons. Because of its potency and cheapness, gin became the favorite tipple of the common man.

Wealthier and more discriminating citizens savored brandy, and cultivated a connoisseurship of Continental wines. The classless simplicity of all-purpose table beer was lost in the ritualized consumption of correct vintages. Where toast, fruit, raw eggs and other foods were formerly added to ale, wine and brandy were now added to foods. English brewing degenerated.

In Germany, Scandinavia and the Low Countries, the story was much the same. With the advent of distilled schnapps, the bravura beer drinkers of Brueghel and Rubens became moody dram nippers, and brewing went into decline. By 1728, the quality of German beer sank so low that Frederick William I denounced the brewers of Potsdam, declaring that the King of Prussia had "had their watery, sour unwholesome slops going by the name of beer in his eye about long enough." Threatening to appoint a whole new set of brewers, he ordered that his son. Frederick, be instructed in the art of brewing in preparation for the day when he would succeed to the throne. By the time young Frederick became "the Great," however, the Prussian passion for imported coffee was draining the royal treasury. "It is disgusting to notice the increase in the quantity of coffee used by my subjects," he wrote in 1777. "If possible this must be prevented. My people must drink beer. His Majesty was brought up on beer and so were his ancestors, and his officers and soldiers."

Among Frederick's beer-fed army brass was a little-known drill instructor named Steuben, who assumed the title of Baron in order to hoax his way into the service of the American Continental Army, where his genius won the respect of another beer-drinking military man—General George Washington, who made his own home-brew, in keeping with a Colonial tradition which started with the Pilgrim Fathers. The Mayflower, as one shipboard journal noted, was actually on its way to Virginia, and landed passengers at Plymouth Rock only because "we (continued on page 166) Reg Q'my heart (continued from page 154) could not now take time for further search or consideration: our victuals being spent, especially our beere...." Once settled ashore, the parched Puritans wasted no time in putting their crocks and kettles to work. The first commercial brewery in Massachusetts opened in 1634, and was soon followed by others in Connecticut and Rhode Island. In New Amsterdam, the methodical Dutch started a full-scale beer works north of Wall Street.

According to William Penn, the quaffing Quaker, who made and sold beer at Pennsbury, Pennsylvania, early settlers in the state improvised homebrew "of Molasses, which well-boyld, with Sassafras or Pine infused into it, makes a very tolerable drink." In the Southern colonies, less tolerable beer was brewed of dried cornstalks, persimmons, potatoes and Jerusalem artichokes.

By 1710, the cheapness of West Indian rum, and the quick Yankee grasp of the principles of distilling, had made beer brewing a marginal occupation. Since stills were tax-free and easy to build, farmers converted their grain into easily shipped kegs of whiskey for sale to taverns and grocery stores.

Back in England, meanwhile, a 20-shilling-per-gallon tax on spirits had raised prices to a level where the workingman was forced to drink malt brew in defense of his pocketbook. Some drank beer and some drank ale, while some favored a combination of the two known as "half-and-half." Others inclined to a three-way mixture of strong beer, light beer and ale, which kept publicans hopping from one keg to another filling mugs, until a brewer named Harwood hit upon the idea of packaging the three brews in one keg. Harwood called the mixture "entire," but it quickly became known as "porter"—presumably because of its popularity among thirsty London porters. In less plebeian taprooms, gentlemen often requested a stronger, higher-priced ale called "stout," and kept count of their pints and quarts by chalking the score on the table—thus "minding their Ps and Qs."

When America's score with the British was settled, and Hessian mercenaries had gone home to Germany to seek solace in steins of Frederick the Great's patriotically improved beers, the victorious Yankees went back to hitting the jug in jubilation. Rum sotting and whiskey snorting threatened to become the American way of life, and the Massachusetts legislature sat in 1789 to find a way of limiting drunkenness without curtailing independence. The result was "An Act to Encourage the Manufacture of Strong Beer, Ale and Other Malt Liquors," in which commercial brewers were exempted from all taxes for a period of five years. But tax-free breweries still couldn't compete with tax-free stills—of which there were 5000 in Pennsylvania alone.

Much of the American aversion to malt brew may be attributed to the fact that early 19th Century beers were flat and dull. They tasted moral, and bore little resemblance to our lively latter-day product. Modern beer, or "lager," was the inspired creation of some unknown German brewer or brewers, and involved the use of a yeast that sank into the brewing mixture, instead of floating on top, thereby causing fermentation to work up from the bottom. Additional liveliness was induced by krausening, or carbonation.

Lager was first brewed in the United States by a German brewer named Wagner, who made the first batch in a shanty on the outskirts of Philadelphia in 1842. Its success among the German-Americans of Philadelphia was instantaneous, and with the growing influx of German immigrants, other brewers began making lager to supply the ever-increasing number of beer saloons in the German neighborhoods of Eastern cities.

Among native Americans, however, drunkenness remained a national problem in the years preceding the Civil War. Seventeen states had experimented with prohibition by 1855, but Yankees and Rebels continued to enjoy the strong comfort of whiskey and moonshine all during the Great Conflict. The stillness at Appomattox was followed by renewed keg thumping on behalf of beer, whose temperance virtues were now underscored by the solid citizenship of the industrious German-Americans of the North.

An 1866 report of the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that "a moderate use of beer will aid digestion, quicken the powers of life, and give elasticity to the body and mind." More appealing to the average American was the lively taste of lager, and a growing appreciation of the brew made beer the basic beverage in New York's new "concert saloons" and German-type beer gardens. A fastidious French tourist, named Longchamp, tells of an 1867 visit to one of these pretzel palaces, which he found "handsomely fitted up, and crowded with visitors—a number of what they call 'pretty waiter girls' flitting about among the customers, and laughing and loudly talking with them. A piano player, wildly thumping and banging on a cracked and hideously wired instrument, the rattling of glasses, and moving of chairs and tables—all contributed to bewilder and madden me ..."

The sight and sound of so much happy guzzling bewildered and maddened many former advocates of beer temperance, too. The dutiful sipping of warm, flat prelager brews as a substitute for "ardent spirits" was to be admired, but the genuine enjoyment of cool, refreshing lager in saloons where "pretty waiter girls" served whiskey, brandy and rum, as well—that, of course, was something to be deplored. By 1880, annual lager production was up to 13,500,000 barrels, and in the next decade it doubled. Beer had become the American fun drink, and if the Nineties were gay, lager could justly claim a good part of the credit. The large foaming mug and the small five-cent price still symbolize "the good old days," and the corner saloon with its sleek mahogany bar, brass rail, swinging doors, free lunch and genuine handpainted study of a romantic nude, epitomizes the happy past for all who take their nostalgia in gulps.

The Gemütlichkeit that beer promoted on the working-class level was counterbalanced by the urban elegance described by O. Henry in his purple-tinted snapshot of A Cosmopolite in a Café: "I invoke your consideration of the scene—the marble-topped tables, the range of leather-upholstered wall seats, the gay company, the ladies dressed in demistate toilets, speaking in an exquisite visible chorus of taste ..."

From the melting-pot neighborhoods to the haunts of the upper strata, the revolution that lager had worked upon American social life was all but complete, and tastes were beginning to reflect a new sophistication. Pasteurization, which Pasteur developed from his studies in beer fermentation, now made it possible to enjoy bottled beers that were free of deterioration caused by active microorganisms. German beers were imported to New York, Milwaukee beers were available in Alabama.

But lager was doomed by its very success. Militant prohibitionists no longer discriminated between beer and ardent spirits. They were antisaloon, and since beer had built the American saloon, they were out to ban beer. Through the agitation of feminist reformers, Prohibition was emotionally linked with the fight for woman suffrage. The clergy and large corporations joined the crusade to stamp out "the curse of drink," and when the Kaiser's army overran "little Belgium," in 1914, American indignation was directed against beer as a German beverage. No one thought to point out that the Belgian victims were themselves the world's leading beer drinkers, with a percapita capacity almost twice that of the German invaders, and by the time America entered the War, beer had few public defenders. The Volstead Prohibition Act of 1919 gave only token approval to the former temperance drink by allowing the manufacture and sale of a beer that would contain no more than one half of one percent alcohol.

The new low-key lager was dubbed "near-beer," and Luke McLuke of The Cincinnati Enquirer sadly commented that the man who first called it that was a mighty poor judge of distance. Many brewers went out of business rather than produce such wishy-washy suds. Some kept their plants intact and sat back to await the failure of the Noble Experiment, while others brewed near-beer as an adjunct to making the soda and ginger ale Americans now needed to dilute raw bootleg hooch. Of all outlawed liquids, lager was the most difficult to bootleg. Since beer could not be brewed profitably in bathtubs, bootleggers would purchase breweries through dummy corporations and produce enough dealcoholized beer to satisfy appearances, while vats of full-strength lager were piped off into a nearby garage for delivery to speak-easies. Others supplied their near-beer customers with a supplement of alcohol, which could be added or "needled" into a glass or keg of legal brew to bring it up to full strength.

As an alternative to drinking questionable fluids at high prices, economy-minded quaffers made their own home-brew from ingredients sold in malt-and-hops shops, but, for all its purity, homebrew was usually inferior in foam and flavor to the worst in the bootlegger's stable. Small wonder, then, at the rejoicing on April 7, 1933, when a New Deal law legalized the sale of 3.2 lager, which was only .5 short of pre-Prohibition strength. In cities and towns from coast to coast, crowds gathered in a New Year's Eve mood to celebrate the end of the 14-year dry spell. In Times Square, a mock funeral for near-beer was held amidst shouted choruses of Happy Days Are Here Again. A Milwaukee brewery threw open its doors to cheering celebrants and doled out free beer to all who brought a container. In the 20 states where the law was immediately effective, lager was sold in restaurants, lunchrooms, hastily equipped taverns and drugstore soda fountains. A million barrels were joyously guzzled in the first 24 hours, and breweries ran dry.

The first canned beers hit the market in the mid-Thirties and, by 1939, beercan punchers shared the homey clutter of kitchen drawers. In neighborhood beer stubes a brassy-voiced girl trio, called the Andrews Sisters, was rattling glasses with the Beer Barrel Polka, a raucous recording that became the American beer drinker's national anthem. Sentimental customers fed a few nickels into the slot and sipped their brew to the strains of Our Love and I Didn't Know What Time It Was. Actually, it was later than most Americans imagined. In the previous September, England's Prime Minister Chamberlain had flown to Munich, beer capital of Bavaria, to play a losing hand for peace with Nazi Chancellor Adolf Hitler.

Once again the beer-drinking Belgians were overrun, but Americans knew better than to hold beer responsible for German aggression. British pub patrons were braving out the blitz with the help of an occasional pint, and Yanks in uniform drank their beer to the tune of Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition, When the Lights Go On Again and the Victory Polka. GIs stationed in England grew familiar with aromatic British ale, beer and stout served at the warmish temperatures natural to a nation reluctant to accept central heating. In occupied Germany and Austria they met with a wide variety of lagers, ranging from light, dry Pilsner types that resembled the better American brews, to the darker, sweeter beers characteristic of Bavaria. Color, they soon found, had little to do with a beer's strength or body. A bottle of pale Danish beer purchased in post-War Paris might have a fuller body and higher alcoholic content than a dark table beer which Belgians drank in place of water.

For the most part, however, the GI preference was for the familiar American beers, which varied somewhat in flavor from brand to brand, but were similarly light, dry, medium-strong and refreshingly effervescent. From repeal to the present day, beers of this type have been favored by the majority of Americans in all sections of the country. Minority drinkers, who appreciate differences, are more than likely to hit upon a brew to their liking among such relatively offbeat American types as Prior's Double Dark, Pittsburgh's Iron City Beer, the robust Rainier Old Stock Ale and Danish-yeasted Olympia Beer of the Pacific Northwest, and such premium draught beers as Michelob or Pabst Andeker.

Fortunately, beer has no sacrosanct vintages. In selecting a brew, there's nothing to do but quaff and compare, and the urban beer buff is by no means confined to domestic brands. Over the past ten years or so, American travel abroad has created an increasing demand for foreign beers, and a bewitching bevy of bottled imports share supermarket shelves with canned Geschlürf from Milwaukee and "merry-go-down" from Detroit. Pushing a cart through the beer section of a well-stocked metropolitan market, the serious sudsman can fill his basket with a library of famous brews: Amstel and Heineken's from Holland; Carlsberg and Tuborg from Denmark; Löwenbräu and Würzburger from Germany; Carta Blanca from Mexico; Kirin from Japan; Guinness Stout and Harp Lager from Ireland; Bass and Whitbread English Ales; and an occasional sampling of Czechoslovakian Pilsner Urquell. The list is far from complete, and new labels keep turning up to pique the palate.

The greatest single influence on American beer-drinking habits in the past 15 years has been television, which has sharply reduced over-the-bar sales of draught beer, and sent home consumption of packaged beers soaring. In bottles, cans and on draught, American beer consumption has doubled since repeal, with an estimated 15.8 per-capita gallons guzzled in 1964. This was still only about half the amount consumed in Belgium in 1963, when the world's champion beer drinkers burped in at 30.6 gallons to beat West Germany's 30.0 by a foam fleck.

If America was lagging behind in the chugalug league, its scientists were making major brew break-throughs. A few years ago the New York Herald Tribune heralded the discovery of "A New Drug Found in Beer Said to Clear Mental Illness." The drug, called glutathione, is "made up of three amino acids, the basic chemicals of all protein-life substances," and is therefore essential to man's very existence. In a paper delivered before the Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine, Dr. Mark Altschule of Harvard reported that experimental doses of glutathione were given to disturbed patients, "and removed their excessive mental aberrations for a month." The only drawback to its widespread use is the difficulty of extracting glutathione from whole beer, which puts the cost of a single treatment at "about $1000."

The human digestive tract can do the same extracting job for free, of course. With a $1000 beer budget, it would seem that the normally distressed drinker could enjoy the benefits of therapy for a considerable period of time, while absorbing additional protection against an embolism in old age, by virtue of another element in beer which British researchers find "decreases the rapidity of blood clotting." But science in the Age of Anxiety only confirms the folk wisdom of the Age of Heroes, when rugged warriors of the Northland "Rushed to drink the sparkling liquor... / Said to make the feeble hardy ... / Famed to cheer the broken-hearted... / Fill the heart with joy and gladness...." Hops, as old Culpepper discovered, "easeth the headache that comes of heat" and should be used to "cleanse the reins of gravel." As the poet A. E. Housman has pointed out, "...malt does more than Milton can/To justify God's ways to man." There's peace of mind in Pilsner, and lager is the liquid staff of life.

Let's drink to that, shall we? Here's to your very good health!