B is for Beer

B is for Beer by Tom Robbins states on the cover "A Children's Book for Grown-ups" on the left and "A Grown-up Book for Children" on the right. A quick summary of this book, which takes about an hour to read, is, "Six year old girl gets drunk on a beer, throws up, and has visions of The Beer Fairy who takes her on a tour of the history of beer, the production of beer, and the esoteric, new-agish magic that is beer drinking." It was thoroughly amusing, although it needed another 120 pages to get the full Robbins feel to it and pull in a bit more humor and a bit more fact. There's plenty of beer humor out there that could stand an interpretation under Robbin's pen (see 14 fun facts about beer which includes, 'It was the accepted practice in Babylon 4,000 years ago that for a month after the wedding, the bride's father would supply his son-in law with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer, and because their calendar was lunar based, this period was called the "honey month", or what we know today as the "honeymoon"').

An extra tidbit, B is for Beer did provide me some fodder for an interesting discussion in my row at work today about the origins of beer being in Egypt or Iran/Mesopotamia. Robbins states beer really started in Egypt and that anything that came prior to that was really just muck, not craftsmanship.

And I can't find any online references to Vinegar Eels living in the sides of beer steins, but there is a reference to nematodes that live only in the mats upon which Germans set their beer.