Ninety-nine Beer Quotes On The Wall

"Alright brain, I don't like you and you don't like me, so just get me through this exam so I can go back to killing you slowly with beer."
-- Homer Simpson

"I wish to see this beverage become common instead of the whiskey which kills one-third of our citizens and ruins their families."
-- Thomas Jefferson on beer, January 6, 1816

"Chicba, corn beer, was the vehicle that linked man to his gods through the fecundity of the earth."
-- Gustravo Otero, 1951

"American Beer is a lot like making love in a row boat. It's f**king close to water!"
-- Eric Idle (Monty Python)

"Beer is the center of everything. Everything revolves around Beer. When you drink beer, everything revolves. Therefore, Beer is the center of everything."
-- University of Waterloo Engineers

"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

"What two ideas are more inseparable than beer and Britannia?"
-- Sydney Smith, English clergyman and writer

"On the chest of a barmaid in Sale, were tattooed the prices of ale. And on her behind, for the sake of the blind, was the same information in Braille!"
-- Anonymous

"It was then that the Greeks, nurtured on brews they had learned about from the Egyptians, showed a handful of indomitable beer drinkers could overcome the greates of empires when it had forsaken the contents of brewing vats for exotic and befuddling liquors. In their beer drinking heyday the Persians were invincible, but they succumbed to the inebriate habits of the nations they conquered."
-- David L. MacIntosh (A Beer View of History)

"I never met a free beer I didn't like."
-- Brent Runyon

"Your thirst fought every day."
-- Pilgrim Brewery

"Would you really call yourself a Christian if charity cost half as much as beer?"
-- Jimmy Buffett

"In some countries, when a boy reaches a certain age it is customary for his father to take him to a bordello so as to ensure his proper initiation into one of life's greatest pleasures. In England, the equivalent custom is for the father to take his son on his first visit to a pub and to supervise his initiation into the ritual of beer-drinking in a proper social environment."
-- Terry Foster (Pale Ale)

"They didn't trademark everything back then. Now someone farts and they put a TM after it. Even Miller Lite says 'A Fine Pilsener Beer' on the label. It is a crime."
-- Michael Jackson

"God bless the Woman who gives birth to a brewer."
-- Anonymous

"Lite beer is an invention of the Prince of Darkness."
-- Inspector Morse (Mystery)

"The brewery is the best drugstore."
-- Old German Folk Wisdom

"A glass of bitter or pale ale, taken with the principal meal of the day, does more good and less harm than any medicine the physician can prescibe."
-- Dr. S. Carpenter, England, 1750

"Blessings of your heart, you brew good ale."
-- William Shakespeare (Two Gentlemen of Verona)

"Old men and young, while gathered around the social beer table, relate their experience and quantity of beer they have swallowed at one sitting, or in one day, or in one evening with as much pride as an old hunter would rehearse his achievements in the forest or jungle. They seem to be as proud of the capacity of their stomachs as a prize fighter is of his muscle."
-- Henry Ruggles, 1883

"Good beer needs no passport."
-- Anonymous

"Of my merit, On thet pint you yourself may jedge; All is, I never drink no sperit, Nor I haint never signed no pledge. "
-- James Russell Lowell (The Biglow Papers)

"Our lager, which art in barrels, hallowed be thy drink. Thy will be drunk, (I will be drunk), at home as it is in the pub. Give us this day our foamy head, and forgive us our spillages, as we forgive those who spill against us. And lead us not to incarceration, but deliver us from hangovers. For thine is the beer, the bitter, the lager. Forever and ever, barmen."
-- Anonymous

"The Puritanical nonsense of excluding children-and therefore to some extent women-from pubs has turned these places into mere boozing shops instead of the family gathering places they ought to be."
-- George Orwell

"Here's to a long life and a merry one. A quick death and an easy one. A pretty girl and an honest one. A cold beer-and another one!"
-- Old Irish toast

"I pray thee let me and my fellow have a haire of the dog that bit us last night."
-- John Heywood (Be Merry Friends)

"It's very hard to get pretentious about beer. You can become knowledgeable and start to talk with a highfalutin' vocabulary. But you can only go so far with beer, and I've always liked that. "
-- Fritz Maytag, Anchor Brewing, San Francisco

"Life alas, is very drear. Up with the glass, down with the beer!"
-- Louis Untermeyer

"Every man who casts a vote for the saloons deserves that his son shall die a drunkard, or that his daughter should be consigned to the tender mercies of a drunken husband. If you deliberately favor this detestable, crime breeding, filthy blot upon society, you are worse than the saloon keeper. You are so low down that I wouldn't spit on you."
-- Evangelist Billy Sunday, 1910

"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)

"Portland and Seattle are America's beer capitols. It is a private competition between them... No one else comes close, though Denver and the rest of Colorado are trying hard."
-- Michael Jackson

"For drink, there was beer which was very strong when not mingled with water, but was agreeable to those who were used to it. They drank this with a reed, out of the vessel that held the beer, upon which they saw the barley swim. "
-- Xenophon, c.435-c.354 B.C., Greek historian

"Goethe was sick and couldn't eat anything, so he was kept alive by the Ko'stricher Schwartzbier."
-- Michael Jackson

"Over it all brooded thirst, thirst for a warmish bottle of Tiger Beer. Or Anchor. Or Carlsberg."
-- Anthony Burgess (Time for a Tiger)

"The perverted ingenuity of man has given to water the power of intoxicating where wine is not procured. Western nations intoxicate themselves by moistened grain."
-- Pliny the Elder, 23-79 A.D.

"Show me a nation whose national beverage is beer, and I'll show you an advanced toilet technology."
-- Mark Hawkins (New York Times, 1977)

"It was estimated that some five thousand people were trampled to death in the stampede for free beer at the coronation of Czar Nicholas II in Moscow in May 1896."
-- Guinness Book Of World Records

"And in my innocence, I thought that beer drinking in England was carrried to excess, but I was mistaken, English men are in the infant class - in the ABC's in acquiring a German's education in the practice of beer drinking."
-- Henry Ruggles

"Beauty is in the hand of the beerholder."
-- Anonymous

"You'll never see a hockey player on one of our beer mats. I can promise you that."
-- Peter McAuslan

"Englishmen are like their own beer: Frothy on top, dregs on the bottom, the middle excellent."
-- Voltaire

"A beer in the hand is worth two in the case."
-- Walter Breidenstein

"Most people hate the taste of beer to begin with. It is, however, a prejudice that many people have been able to overcome."
-- Winston Churchill

"Gimme a pigfoot and a bottle of beer."
-- Bessie Smith (Song written by Wesley "Sox" Wilson, 1933)

"Bad beer is like bad art - if you endure enough of it, eventually you forget the alternatives."
-- Stephen Greenleaf (BookCase)

"Men, Englishmen too, have been heard of, who do not know the taste of porter. This cannot be credited; though it may be readily believed that many are quite ignorant of the taste of water."
-- Westminster Review, 1846

"They, the Vikings, drink beer to insensibility day and night. It often happens that one of them dies with his cup in his hand."
-- Ian Fadhlan, 922 A.D.

"Why do I drink? So that I can write poetry."
-- Jim Morrison

"It's a fair wind that blew man to the ale."
-- Washington Irving

"That's right, lovers of 'music-you-can't-dance-to' have taken a shine to beer. As one particularly insensitive rooter remarked, 'There's nothing like laying your head back on the satin head rest, almost tapping your foot, and knocking down a couple of brews.'"
-- Lynne O'Connor (on the Austin, Texas Symphony's First Annual Beer Tasting and Benefit in Southwest Brewing News)

"All other nations are drinking Ray Charles beer and we are drinking Barry Manilow."
-- Dave Barry

"No microbrewer in his right mind should make wheat beer. Five years from now it will be dead (as a commercial product)."
-- Joe Owades, circa April '87

"May the day soon arrive when no fair Australian girl shall be allowed, or even be willing, to help gild the wine cup or beer glass with her attractive, and, alas! her most dangerous presence."
-- Archdeacon Francis Boyce, 1893 (The Drink Problem in Australia)

"Well I woke up this mornin' and got myself a beer."
-- Jim Morrison / The Doors (Roadhouse Blues)

"Matthew Vassar's gen'rous heart put a brain in every lass. He made his beer and college here for the good of the Freshman class."
-- Quote about the founder of Vassar College, who had beeen a brewer in Poughkeepsie, NY

"Three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops; and I will make it felony to drink small beer."
-- William Shakespeare (King Henry VI Part II)

"Of beer, an enthusiast said that it could never be bad, but that some brands might be better than others."
-- A. A. Milne

"Beer does not make itself properly by itself. It takes an element of mystery and of things that no one can understand. As a brewer you concern yourself with all the stuff you can understand, everywhere."
-- Fritz Maytag, President Anchor Brewing

"Every country must have its own devil. Welshland its own, and France its own. Our German devil will be a good wind-pipe, and must be called drinking, being so thirsty and hell-like that no guzzling of wine and beer, however large, will cool it off, and I fear that such will ever remain Germany's plague, until the day of judgment."
-- Martin Luther

"Doth it not show viley in me to desire small beer?"
-- William Shakespeare (Henry IV)

"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)

"'Did you ever taste beer?' 'I had a sip of it once,' said the small servant. 'Here's a state of things!' cried Mr. Swiveller. 'She never tasted it -- it can't be tasted in a sip!'"
-- Charles Dickens (Ye Olde Curiosity Shop)

"My good friends drink is the curse of the world. All the crime, all the wars, all the heartaches of this world can be laid at the door of intoxication. Oh my friends what can cause more misery than beer, and alcohol? Can Anyone answer me that?"
-- Unknown Temperence Speaker, 1914

"There are those descended from an unawakened race of men who did not receive and do not revere the yeast. These sometimes attempt to brew-rather, merely manipulate ingredients-and swill the festered residues. But not to them is revealed the simplicity of art, either of beer or of poetry. Not for them is the beatitude of the true Malt; such people are cultural dropouts."
-- John F Adams

"To make strong ale: Thames-Water taken up about Greenwich at Low-water, when it is free from all brackishness of the sea, and has in it all the Fat and Sullage from this Great City of London, makes very Strong Drink. It will itself ferment wonderfully and after its due purgations and three times stink it will be so strong that several Sea Commanders have told me that it has often fuddled their Murriners."
-- Brewer's Guide, London, 1702

"Why we are here: To tremble at the terrible beauty of the stars, to shed a tear at the perfection of Beethoven's symphonies, and to crack a cold one now and then."
-- David Letterman

"As to the way of life of the English, they are somewhat impolite, for they belch at the table without shame. They consume great quantities of beer."
-- Father Etienne Perlin, 1558

"History flows forward in rivers of beer."
-- Anonymous

"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

"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

"What event is more awfully important to an English Colony than the erection of its first brewhouse?"
-- Rev. Sidney Smith, 1771-1844

"I am the first man south of the Mason-Dixon line to brew a drinkable home-brew."
-- H.L. Mencken (Heathen Days)

"And Tib my wife, that as her life, loveth well good ale to seek. Full oft she drinks, till ye may see, tears run down her check."
-- John Still, Bishop of Bath and Wells, 1543-1608

"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)

"The word pub can be found in bar names around the world, from America to Zambia, but only in England can the true pub atmosphere be found. Perhaps this has something to do with the English taking their progress slowly and making sure that they have kept the good from the past before throwing out the bad."
-- Terry Foster (Pale Ale)

"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

"Fermentation equals civilization."
-- John Ciardi (1916-1986)

"O Beer! O Hodgson, Guinness, Allsopp, Bass! Names that should be on every infant's tongue."
-- C.V. Calverley

"Mike Hammer drinks beer because he can't spell cognac."
-- Mickey Spillane

"Anyone can drink beer, but it takes intelligence to enjoy beer."
-- Stephen Beaumont (What I've Learned About Beer - January 2002)

"I set my beer down, but I can't remember where I put it. I think I must have (Ales)zheimer's."
-- Ken Rich

"Nothing ever tasted better than a cold beer on a beautiful afternoon with nothing to look forward to than more of the same."
-- Hugh Hood

"Beer is the only virtual reality I need."
-- Leroy Lockhorn

"This is all thousands of years old. It's the same the world over. Anyone who has ever walked upright has loved beer, celebrated over it, told talks over it, hatched plots over it, courted over it. It's what we do as a species. It's what makes us human. We brew."
-- Alan Eames, the Beer King

"I'm Allergic to grass. Hey, it could be worse. I could be allergic to beer."
-- Greg Norman

"Beer brewers shall sell no beer to citizens, unless it be three weeks old. To the foreigner they may knowingly sell younger beer."
-- German Beer Law, 1466

"When I die, I want to decompose in a barrel of porter and have it served in all the pubs in Dublin. I wonder would they know it was me?"
-- J.P. Donleavy (The Ginger Man)

"Got Beer?"
-- Walter Breidenstein

"Xs were used because there was no mass literacy - a state we are rapidly approaching once more."
-- Michael Jackson (on the use of X as a brand name for bitters)

"For a quart of Ale is a dish for a King."
-- William Shakespeare (A Winter's Tale)

"We're wanted men, we'll strike again, but first let's have a beer."
-- Jimmy Buffett

"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

"You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline - it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer."
-- Frank Zappa

"Let's all work to get people to drink more good beer, so if someone walks into your office and says he drinks Corona, don't immediately call him a dickhead."
-- Michael Jackson

"And thou shalt give to me health, life, long existence, and prolonged reign, endurance to my every member, sight to my eyes, hearing to my ears, pleasure to my heart daily. And thou shalt give me beer until I am drunk. And thou shalt establish my issue as kings forever and ever."
-- Ramses IV, Prayer to Osiris, 1200 BC

"And ale does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man."
-- A.E. Houseman, 1859-1936

"24 hours in a day, 24 beers in a case. Coincidence?"
-- Stephen Wright

"Adhere to Schweinheitsgebot. Don't put anything in your beer that a pig wouldn't eat."
-- David Geary

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