Beers & Bards

thisisgrowling
Apr 8, 2015
2 min read

At Edinburgh I was involved with an academic society centering around literature where I weekly battered my liver and chatted about something vaguely bookish. Mostly I learned about single malts, the wee heavy, and how to drop names of continental philosophers just nonchalantly enough to stay afloat. We were all bougie humanities students and it was more of a nitro pour situation than a keg stand one.

Edinburgh, where I left my heart, is arguably among the best places in the world to drink literature. It was the first named among only eleven UNESCO Cities of Literature and its literary history is imprinted in the names of its pubs: Jekyll & Hyde, The Blind Poet, The Conan Doyle, Finnegan's Wake.

During those four years, good beer and literature were inexorably tied togeher for me, but I'd never read any literature specifically pertaining to drink.

If you spend any time at all with beer weirdos you'll have been told that an ancient Sumerian (South Mesopotamian) goddess of beer and other alcohol, Ninkasi, namesake of Oregon's Ninkasi Brewing Co., appears in "A Hymn to Ninkasi" - one of th earliest pieces of poetry the earliest poetry we know of.

Likewise in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh the character Enkidu, foil and companion to Gilgamesh, begins as a "wild man" outside of human society. Among other rites of passage, drinking beer for the first time ushers Ekindu into his full humanity:

Enkidu ate the food until he was sated, he drank the beer-seven jugs!

and became expansive and sang with joy! He was elated and his face glowed. He splashed his shaggy body with water, and rubbed himself with oil, and turned into a human.

Here's your boy Edgar Allan Poe telling it like it is:

Fill with mingled cream and amber, I will drain that glass again. Such hilarious visions clamber Through the chambers of my brain. Quaintest thoughts Queerest fancies, Come to life and fade away: What care I how time advances? I am drinking ale today.

Yeah you are, Edgar. Here's my favorite of them all - William Blake's 'The Little Vagabond':

Dear Mother, dear Mother, the Church is cold,

But the Ale-house is healthy & pleasant & warm;

Besides I can tell where I am use'd well,

Such usage in heaven will never do well.

But if at the Church they would give us some Ale.

And a pleasant fire, our souls to regale;

We'd sing and we'd pray, all the live-long day;

Nor ever once wish from the Church to stray,

That's a really lovely way of telling mum that of course you'd go to church if only there was beer there. No discussion of booze and poetry would be complete without Charles Baudelaire so I'll leave you all with this snippet form 'Be Always Drunken':

Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.