How Beer Saved the World, Part 2: Now cometh the essayist.

Yesterday I sent Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna my post on the Discovery Network's hour-long documentary, "How Beer Saved the World." He replied that sometime back Fjordman had written about beer.

I thought, 'Now there's a combination: Fjordman and beer.'

I imagined an essay that tied a decline in beer drinking in Europe to a scheme involving Multiculturalists, the EU Parliament and immigrant Muslim clerics to keep white Europeans in a perpetually defeatist mood. So like a fool I asked Baron to send me what Fjordman had written about beer. Here was the reply:

History of Beer — Part 1

History of Beer — Part 2

History of Beer — Part 3

History of Beer — Part 4

History of Beer — Part 5

History of Beer — Part 6

It was then I remembered that in addition to his fame as a social critic Fjordman is also known for his very long essays.

But on dipping into the first installment, published in August 2009, I was hooked. Fjordman deployed his formidable skills as a writer and researcher and drew from an array of authoritative sources to create a discourse on beer's role in world history that is fully as engaging as the Discovery Network's offering.

Yet while the cinematic medium did a superlative job of quickly conveying that beer making, beer drinking, and the quests to improve and preserve beer were crucial to the survival and advance of civilization, the essayist's art allowed for forays into linguistics, anthropology, trade, inventions and advances in science that the documentary could only touch upon.

So while I still have no idea whether beer drinking is on the decline in Europe Fjordman's essay is an inspiring meditation on human ingenuity and ancient cultures as diverse as the Chinese, Incan and Bantu -- diverse excepting their love of the fermented beverage we call beer.

Fjordman recounts that in ancient times the Andeans were so fond of the stuff "that being forced to drink water was a form of punishment.” The sentiment was echoed by a tenth-century English abbot who averred that his choice in drink was "beer if I have it and otherwise water."

Bravo, Fjordman! Three cheers for the essayists! Bottoms up!

How Beer Saved the World

The Awesomer website cautiously announced ahead of the hour-long documentary's premiere on January 30, "We're not sure if the Discovery Network is playing an early April Fools Day prank or if there’s truth to the stories behind their special about beer’s world-transforming properties."

It was no prank: amazingly, astoundingly, laugh aloud in astonishment and delight, it turns out that beer had a key role in raising up civilization, sustaining it and pushing it forward. As one historian said during the film the most accurate marker for human history is actually beer. And the world has filmmakers at the Discovery Network cable channel to thank for bringing this stupendous news to the attention of the general public.

Beer. Who knew that beer played a key role in the building of the pyramids and the founding of America? Or that it played a life-saving role in many societies where much of the available water was unfit to drink? And that pivotal sciences, technologies, medicine, engineering marvels and mathematics of the ancient and modern world were driven by the beer-making process and the quest to improve beer, preserve and bottle it?

Even the demise of child labor in the United States was brought about by beer -- more specifically by the mass production of glass beer bottles, a process that predated Henry Ford's assembly line -- because the making of handmade glass was the biggest user of child labor.

"How Beer Saved the World" is an engineering marvel in itself. Probably the role that beer played in a particular field of endeavor is known within the field. But the documentary strings together all those roles so that beer's great importance to civilization emerges. The saga of beer is also beautifully told in the documentary with animation, reenactments, historical footage, riveting anecdotes, and all tied together with a big helping of wry humor.

The documentary will air again on February 14, at 8:00 PM (probably with a re-run later in the night) but I'm betting it will be so popular, once word gets around about the show, it'll air several times this year.

As to whether the saga will continue in the present era: the documentary ends with a look at efforts to make beer drinkable during commercial space travel -- a task easier said than done because burping at zero gravity in confined quarters is not a good idea.

But I was struck by the beer drunk by Egyptians in the ancient era; low in alcohol content (3 percent), chock full of vitamins and minerals and an antibiotic that was not formally discovered until the 1940s, it was the diet staple and as much food and medicine as drink. So one shouldn't wonder why the ancient Egyptians were known as a good-natured people.

Formulas for the Egyptian beer have been preserved; maybe it's time to resurrect some version of it and bottle it in medicinal quantities. Such a beer might wean moderns from substance abuse and pill popping for a host of minor ailments both mental and physical, and in general promote a more phlegmatic attitude about life's bumps and sprains.

Cheers!

February 1 Update
Here's the link to today's follow-up Pundita post on how beer saved the world, in which I examine Fjordman's wonderful 2009 essay, The History of Beer.