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"I should like a great lake of ale, for the King of Kings. I should like the family of heaven to be drinking it through time eternal."
-- St. Brigid |
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"And so, you see, 'twas beautiful ale, and I wished to value his kindness...and not to be so ill-mannered as to drink only a thimbleful, which would have been insulting the man's generosity. And so I used to eat a lot of salt fish afore going, and
then by the time I got there I was as dry as a lime-basket so thorough dry that ale would slip-ah, 'twould slip down sweet! Happy times! Heavenly times! Such lovely drunks as I used to have at that house!"
-- Thomas Hardy (Far From The Maddening Crowd) |
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"They who drink beer will think beer."
-- Washington Irving |
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"This beer is good for you. This is draft beer. Stick with the beer. Let's go and beat this guy up and come back and drink some more beer."
-- Ernest Hemingway (To Have and Have Not) |
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"I have never been into wine. I'm a beer man. What I like about beer is you basically just drink it and order more. You don't sniff at it, or hold it up to the light and slosh it around, or drone on and on about it, the way people do with wine.
Your beer drinker tends to be a straightforward, decent, friendly, down-to-earth person, whereas your serious wine fancier tends to be an insufferable snot."
-- Dave Barry |
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"Up to the age of forty, eating is benificial; after forty, drinking."
-- The Talmud |
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"For years the American workman would stagnate through his workday, but in the evening, he could get home, sit down and watch the TV, pop open a beer, and, then and there, get ahead."
-- Jerry Blaz |
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"The man who called it 'near beer' was a bad judge of distance."
-- Philander Johnson/Luke McLuke, Cincinnati Enquirer |
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"A beer in the hand is worth two in the case."
-- Walter Breidenstein |
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"Her ale, if new, looks like a misty morning, all thick; well if her ale be strong, her reckoning right, her house clean, her fire good, her face fair, and the town great or rich, she shall seldom or never sit without chirping birds to bear her
company."
-- Donald Lupton, 1632 |
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"There is more to life than beer alone, but beer makes those other things even better."
-- Stephen Morris (The Great Beer Trek) |
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"Real ale fans are just like train-spotters, only drunk."
-- Christopher Howse |
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"Ale it is called among men, and among gods, beer."
-- First recorded mention of the word 'ale', 950 A.D. (Old Norse Alvisimal) |
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"They told me this story while we were waiting for an up-train. I supplied the beer. The tale was cheap at a gallon and a half."
-- Kipling (The Three Musketeers) |
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"The brewery is the best drugstore."
-- Old German Folk Wisdom |
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"When the hour is nigh me, let me in a tavern die, with tankard by me."
-- Archpoet, Confesio, 2nd Century |
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"Show me a nation whose national beverage is beer, and I'll show you an advanced toilet technology."
-- Mark Hawkins (New York Times, 1977) |
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"Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer."
-- Dave Barry |
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"Well they worked their will on John Barleycorn, but he lived to tell the tale. For they pour him out of an old brown jug, and they call him home brewed ale!"
-- Anonymous |
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"Leinenkugels makes better beer now that Miller bought them. It will license insecure people to like craft beers."
-- Michael Jackson (on megabreweries involvement in craft beers) |
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"Do not cease to drink beer, to eat, to intoxicate thyself, to make love, and celebrate the good days."
-- Ancient Egypt |
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"Saint George he was for England, And before he killed the dragon he drank a pint of English ale out of an English flagon."
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton |
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"I have never found that Bass's India draught pale ale, taken in small quantities at meals disagrees... The drink is laxative, while the contrary is to be said of other ales and porters."
-- Roger Protz (The Great British Beer Book) |
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"I make my beers the way I like them and it happens that a lot of other people like them that way too."
-- Bert Grant |
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"This is grain, which any fool can eat, but for which the Lord has intended a more divine form of consumption. Let us give praise to our maker and glory to His bounty be learning about beer."
-- Friar Tuck |
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"The selling of bad beer is a crime against Christian love."
-- 13th Century Law from the City of Augsburg |
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"The heart which grief hath cankered, hath one unfailing remedy - the tankard."
-- C.S. Calverly |
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"Beer is the only virtual reality I need."
-- Leroy Lockhorn |
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"When I was in that city, I asked a policeman where I could get a glass of beer. 'You see the second street on your right?' the officer said. 'Well, go down there and the fourth door on your right is a movie theatre. That's the only place in town
you can buy it.'"
-- American Prohibition Joke |
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"The best place to drink beer is at home. Or on a river bank, if the fish don't bother you."
-- American folk saying |
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"They don't mind it; it's a regular holiday to them - all porter and skittles."
-- Charles Dickens (The Pickwick Papers) |
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"Beer that is not drunk has missed its vocation."
-- Meyer Breslau |
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"Well I woke up this mornin' and got myself a beer."
-- Jim Morrison / The Doors (Roadhouse Blues) |
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"Give a man a beer, waste an hour. Teach a man to brew, and waste a lifetime!"
-- Bill Owen |
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"And so they've defeated us year after year, but sure there was plenty of whiskey and beer."
-- Song satirizing the oft-defeated Democratic Party in the 1880s |
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"Good ale, the true and proper drink of Englishmen. He is not deserving of the name of Englishman who speaketh against ale, that is good ale."
-- George Borrow, 1851 (Lavengro) |
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"I set my beer down, but I can't remember where I put it. I think I must have (Ales)zheimer's."
-- Ken Rich |
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"My house is about equidistant from the Young's brewery and the Fuller's brewery. This is no accident."
-- Michael Jackson |
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"So laugh, lads, and quaff, lads, twill make you stout and hale; through all my days, I'll sing the praise of brown October ale."
-- Reginald De Koven (song from Robin Hood) |
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"Beer should be enjoyed with the right mixture of abandon and restraint."
-- M.F.K. Fisher (famous American food writer) |
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"Never wear button-fly jeans to a beer dinner."
-- The Malt Advocate - Spring 1994 |
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"Wisselton, wasselton, who lives here? We've come to taste your Christmas beer."
-- English Christmas verse |
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"It is not "just beer", it is a noble and ancient beverage which, like wine, food and television advertising, can be extraordinarily good or unmercifully bad."
-- Stephen Beaumont (World of Beer) |
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"And many a skeleton shook his head. 'Instead of preaching forty year!' My neighbor Parson Thirdly said, 'I wish I'd stuck to pipes and beer.'"
-- Thomas Hardy, 1914 (Channel Firing) |
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"Beer isn't just beer -- beer needs a home."
-- Die Welt, German newspaper, 1976 |
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"Fermentation equals civilization."
-- John Ciardi (1916-1986) |
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"24 hours in a day, 24 beers in a case. Coincidence?"
-- Stephen Wright |
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"Two of the more dubious achievements of American culture are white bread and light beer."
-- Bruce Aidells and Denis Kelly (Real Beer and Good Eats) |
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"Then here's to the heartening wassail, wherever good fellows are found, be its master instead of its vassal, and order the glasses around."
-- Ogden Nash & Sue King (A Drink With Something In It) |
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"I drank only water; the other workmen, near 50 in number, were great guzzlers of beer. We had an alehouse boy who attended always in the house to supply the workmen. My companion at the press, drank every day a pint before breakfast, a pint at
breakfast with his bread and cheese; a pint in the afternoon about six o'clock, and another when he'd done his day's work...but it was necessary, he suppos'd, to drink strong beer that he might be strong to labor. Those who continu'd sotting with beer all
day, were often, by not paying out of credit at the alehouse, and us'd to make interest with me to get beer, their light, as they phras'd it, being out."
-- Benjamin Franklin (The Autobiography) |
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"Heaven! that's another tale. Mightn't let me chew there. Gotta have me a pot of ale; would I like the brew there?"
-- Robert Service, Grandad |
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"My favorite black-and-tan is a "mother-in-law": a mixture of stout and bitter."
-- Anonymous |
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"Keep your libraries, your penal institutions, your insane asylums -- give me beer. You think man needs rule, he needs beer. The world does not need morals, it needs beer. The souls of men have been fed with indigestibles, but the soul could make
use of beer."
-- Henry Miller |
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"What event is more awfully important to an English Colony than the erection of its first brewhouse?"
-- Rev. Sidney Smith, 1771-1844 |
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"Back and side go bare, go bare. Both foot and hand go cold. But, belly, God send thee good ale enough, whether it be new or old."
-- Bishop John Still |
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"Come tarry here and welcome be and guaff the foaming brew; a friendly smile a word a song will cheer the heart of you."
-- Altes beer sign (1939) |
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"Why diet if you can have a beer?"
-- S. Engal |
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"Beefsteaks and porter are good belly mortar."
-- Scottish Proverb, 1760 |
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"Real women don't drink light beer."
-- New Glarus Brewing Co. bumper sticker |
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"Beer was not made to be moralized about, but to be drunk."
-- Theodore Maynard |
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"While you merely see the disease bearing viruses, I see the benign microorganisms which by making, among other things, strong beers...and enable you to spend your evenings in alcoholic bliss."
-- Patrick McGinley, 1978 (Bogmail) |
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"It's a fair wind that blew man to the ale."
-- Washington Irving |
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"He that drinks strong beer, and goes to bed mellow, lives as he ought to live, and dies a hearty fellow."
-- 17th century English drinking song |
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"The hardest part about making beer is siphoning it into bottles. This is tricky, because what can happen is the phone rings and you get involved in a lengthy conversation during which your 4 year-old son gets hold of the hose and spews premature
beer, called "wort", all over the kitchen and himself, and you become the target of an investigation by child welfare authorities because yours is the only child who comes to preschool smelling like a fraternity carpet."
-- Dave Barry |
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"Yes, we (Americans) have a beer culture, but it is a lot like a teenage boy: at the core, there is such tremendous potential, skill, and creativity, but unfortunately, there are a lot of distractions out there: girls, sports, and peer pressure.
These things are fine in themselves, but they keep us from focusing on our true nature."
-- Scott A. Smith, Lynchburg, Va |
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"If barley be wanted to make into malt, we must be content and think it no fault, for we can make liquor to sweeten our lips, of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut tree chips."
-- Popular song from the 17th century, Colonial America |
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"Lynne was 'underwhelmed: it's soapy and looks like frog spawn.'"
-- Lynne Pearce, discussing Erdinger Weiss beer (What's Brewing, June, 1994) |
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"And what dost thou drink? I drink beer if I have it or water if I have not."
-- Archbishop Alfric's Vocabulary, 995 A.D |
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"Beer glorious beer. Sing the praises of the first man to take barley and ferment the results now known as beer. Tip a cold pilsner to that unknown brewer. Give thanks to the beer god. I know not what course others may take but as for me... give
me another beer!"
-- John Walentik |
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"I pray thee let me and my fellow have a haire of the dog that bit us last night."
-- John Heywood (Be Merry Friends) |
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"In de hemel is gee daarom drinken wij hee (In heaven there is no beer so we drink it here)."
-- Trappist Monk Proverb |
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"Some people love it so much it's like a cult, but it still has to be considered a specialty beer because Orval's limited production. It's not Miller Lite -- thank God."
-- Charles Finkel, of Merchant Du Vin (importers of Orval) |
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"Prohibition has made our president a dictator, executing an unpopular law by force of arms. It has made our congressmen cowards and hypocrites, passing more, and more oppressive laws, while themselves carrying whisky flasks in their hip pockets.
Prohibition has divided our people into factions almost as bitterly hostile to each other as the factions that existed before the Civil War."
-- William Randolph Hearst, 1932 |
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"In Belgium, the magistrate has the dignity of a prince, but by Bacchus, it is true that the brewer is king."
-- Emile Verhaeren, Flemish writer, 1855-1916 |
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"Beer. If you can't taste it, why bother!"
-- Anonymous |
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"Good beer needs no passport."
-- Anonymous |
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"Why do I drink? So that I can write poetry."
-- Jim Morrison |
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"Contrary to revisionist history and public relations, Sam Adams was not a brewer."
-- Gregg Smith |
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"When that guy turned water into wine, he obviously wasn't thinking of us Duff drinkers."
-- Homer Simpson |
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"Drink not the third glass, which thou cannot tame, when it is within thee."
-- George Herbert (The Church Porch) |
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"In my opinion, most of the great men of the past were only there for the beer."
-- A.J.P. Taylor, British historian |
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"Why, we'll smoke and drink our beer. For I like a drop of good beer, I does. I'ze fond of good beer, I is. Let gentlemen fine sit down to their wine. But we'll all of us here stick to our beer."
-- Old Somersetshire English song |
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"God made yeast, as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he loves vegetation."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882 |
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"In the Bowling Alley of Tomorrow, there will even be machines that wear rental shoes and throw the ball for you. Your sole function will be to drink beer."
-- Dave Barry |
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""An honest brew makes its own friends.""
-- John Molson, Molson's Brewery Ltd. (1930) |
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"I like lager beer, but the beer does not like me. Fifteen years ago I could drink fifty glasses of beer in one day and never get intoxicated and have no headache the next morning. But it seems the beer is changed. If I drink eight glasses of beer
of an evening my head is ready to burst the next day....A friend of mine told me he drank beer freely at a picnic, and he was paralyzed for three days....There is no other drink I like better than lager beer, but the way they make it is a humbug. In
former times they had a brewer to make beer, but now they have a chemist."
-- Letter to the Editor, New York Sun, 1882 |
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"Fermentation may have been a greater discovery than fire."
-- David Rains Wallace |
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"A little bit of beer is divine medicine."
-- Paracelsus, Greek physician |
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"All other nations are drinking Ray Charles beer and we are drinking Barry Manilow."
-- Dave Barry |
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"Anyone can drink beer, but it takes intelligence to enjoy beer."
-- Stephen Beaumont (What I've Learned About Beer - January 2002) |
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"Give me a woman who loves beer and I will conquer the world."
-- Kaiser Wilhelm |
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"For when the lepers she nursed implored her for beer, and there was none to be had, she changed the water which was ready for a bath into an excellent beer, by the sheer strength of her blessing, and dealt it out to the thirsty in plenty."
-- Vita Sanctae Brigidae (Life of St. Bridget 439-521 A.D.) |
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"Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day."
-- Anonymous |
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"Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink."
-- A.E. Housman (Terence This is Stupid Stuff) |
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"The Heineken Uncertainty Principle: You can never be sure how many beers you had last night."
-- Anonymous |
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"Drinking wine before beer is a no-no, dear. Topping beer off with wine - that's fine!"
-- German proverb |
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"The government will fall that raises the price of beer."
-- Czech saying |
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"Chicba, corn beer, was the vehicle that linked man to his gods through the fecundity of the earth."
-- Gustravo Otero, 1951 |
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"Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?"
-- William Shakespheare (Twelfth Night) |
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