*Originally written by Paul Baker who quit
Hey Everyone
I’m back from my self imposed exile from blog writing. Beer is a fickle and demanding mistress and she has been demanding a lot more time recently.
In any case. I’m back with some history that I thought you might enjoy.
So we know that beer was probably first “invented” as a drink in Ancient Sumeria and was probably the reason why we have agriculture, or towns, or civilization in the first place. Beer is mentioned in the first story ever written The Epic of Gilgamesh and so on. Beer is awesome, has always been awesome and will continue to be awesome. Fact.
Beer is also mentioned three times in the first set of laws ever written: The Code of Hammurabi in 1772 BCE. Lets think about that for a bit.
The FIRST time that someone (Hammurabi, a brutal autocrat) wrote down all the laws for a society where everyone could see them and said, “these are THE RULES and here is what happens when you don’t follow them.” Of course most of the punishments are harsh but its the first time anyone said, “look man, you broke rule #109. You knew the punishment when you decided to break the rules. So here is the punishment. ”
So in this first set of laws beer is mentioned three separate times. I think thats incredible.
Two of them which I think are amazing are rules 108 and 109.
Rule 108 deals with tavern keepers selling people “short pints.” If you sell a person a drink and give them less than they pay for? That’s a drowning.
How many times do you think people got shorted after the first few times?
Rule 109 concerns people getting together in taverns to conspire against the government. Not only do the conspirators get death, but so does the tavern keeper. People getting together to drink beer and bitch about the government is as old as civilization itself.
Pretty crazy stuff.
Tune in next time.
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