1st Liquid Bread in History
The earliest mentions of beer date back to thousands of years BC in what is now western Iran. Beer then appears in records from perhaps every part of the world...
In Mesopotamia, beer was associated with magical rituals and was believed to have magical powers. There may be something to this, for example in Egypt beer was used as a healing agent for various rinses. In ancient Egypt, even under the pharaohs, beer was even used as a national currency.
Vikings who died in battle were in turn given various gifts, including beer. Because what would the afterlife be without a proper drinking regime, right.
In medieval Europe, Christian monks sometimes kept the traditional forty-day fast in a slight variation, keeping what was called a drinking fast. They ate nothing and took their energy and calories only from beer.
It is clear, therefore, that we have developed a natural instinct to keep our glasses full at all times. And fear...
2. Cenosi... Cenosilica... phobia
The fear of the empty beer glass has a name - Cenosillicaphobia. I would say that in the Czech Republic we are quite successful in avoiding this fear. Everyone has always told us that prevention is the most important thing... that's why
3. We go out for one every now and then
Beer is the third most popular drink in the world, after water and tea, so it's often on our tables. Well, sometimes... Every Czech drinks an average of 282 pints of beer a year. Yes, everyone, including newborns and teetotalers... Czech breweries produced a record 21.3 million hectolitres of beer for us last year.
4. The word "beer"
The word "beer" is originally Old Slavic and is a word that denoted "the most common and widespread drink", the latter being true at least in the Czech Republic to this day.
5. Beer as a prize
The Wife Carrying World Cup is underway in Finland. And do you know what the top prize is? A beer the weight of a wife.
photo: radseason.com
6. Beer bottles as building materials
In 1963, Albert Heineken created a beer bottle that could be used as a brick to build cheap housing in poor countries. In Thailand, they liked the idea, so in 1984, when a group of monks were fed up with the amount of rubbish in their neighbourhood, they asked locals to help them collect all the beer bottles. Since then, they've had a temple there, built from 1.5 million bottles of Heineken and local Chang beer. The whole temple is made of beer, including the interior. The temple is called Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew (or Temple of a Million Bottles) and you'll find it just over the border from Cambodia. And if you think it must be tacky, you're as wrong as the fir tree, it's beautiful. Look
photo: traveltriangle.com
7. Beer for everyone
In Japan and some other countries, they have Braille on cans so that blind people can distinguish between alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages. If you think about it, how do blind people shop here?
8. (Un)legal drinking
In Iceland, beer was illegal until 1989, since then they celebrate every March 1 as Beer Day. Just imagine what we would have done if beer hadn't been around until 1989...
9th The World's Strongest Beer
On purpose, guess what the alcohol content of the strongest beer might be? .... actually has an alcohol content of a whopping 67.5% and is called Snake Venom (or snake venom), incidentally absinthe is also around 70%.
10. Home delivery
After Niels Bohr won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922, a local brewery brought its own supply of beer directly to his house and supplied him with beer until his death. He therefore had unlimited beer consumption in his house for 40 years.
And one extra bonus - at any given time, 0.7% of the world's people are drunk, meaning there are 50 million drunk people in the world right now. And right now, too.
