Beer v. Wine

anniefannie says:

March 17, 2011 at 3:44 pm

wine, for sure.
now could someone remind me why i gave it up for lent??

Scott says:

March 17, 2011 at 3:46 pm

Righteous Oakhurst Wine Crawl aside, that question borders on heresy in this town.

Mr. Bad Example says:

March 17, 2011 at 3:48 pm

Beer. Agricultural civilization largely exists because of the needs of the early beer industry. Long live the Brick Store.

Decatur Metro says:

March 17, 2011 at 4:20 pm

Interesting. Link please!
- nelliebelle1197 says:
  
  March 17, 2011 at 8:20 pm
  
  That’s actually trye.
  - nelliebelle1197 says:
    
    March 17, 2011 at 8:21 pm
    
    true…
- Mr. Bad Example says:
  
  March 18, 2011 at 2:29 pm
  
  Sure. I am more of an armchair scholar in this matter, but my wife is an professor of anthropology. Here is her response with citations:
  
  Broadly speaking, it’s thought that intensified agriculture developed out of broad-spectrum domestication as a coping mechanism for the worldwide cooling and drying of the Younger Dryas event around 11.5Ka (Anderson et al. 2007, Weninger et al. 2006). It’s thought that the very first forms of alcohol consumed would have been from rotting fruit by hunter-gatherers well before the shift to agriculture. While intoxicating, this could very easily go wrong depending on the microbial populations present in that fermented fruit. But the earliest archaeological evidence of alcohol brewing and consumption is in Iran with wine (Cordain et al. 2005: 344), while beer shows up in the archaeological record a few millenia later (ibid:344). Granted, beer could have been around much earlier, it’s just not archaeologically visible. But here is a key point: Both wine and beer provided a safe source of water, and in these more arid environments, this would have been a big-time advantage. This is especially the case given that early agriculturalists also had livestock, which likely would have contaminated local water supplies with their feces. In fact, there appears to be convergent evolution of lactase enzyme persistence in early agro-pastoralist populations (Itan et al. 2010), not necessarily because livestock milk was needed for calories, but because it was a safe source of water. So within this framework, beer, wine and milk would have been equally matched in their significance as safe water sources. BUT beer has multiple advantages over wine and milk. First, you cannot metabolize milk sugars without lactase persistence into adulthood, whereas all human populations can metabolize grain alcohols to a certain extent. Second, early beer likely resembled a porridge rather than what we recognize today as beer, and so it was not only safe source of water, but a calorie-laden and easily digested food source. Third, the alcohol present in beer provided a key opportunity for safely storing grains in the absence of sanitation and refrigeration, keeping grain stores from spoiling. Fourth, even if the grain did start to spoil before it was brewed into beer, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Basset et al. (1981) found skeletal evidence that ancient Nubians were unknowingly medicating themselves with a broad spectrum antibiotic (tetracycline) in their beer, secreted by Streptomycetes bacteria in the stored grains for brewing; if they’d baked the grain into bread, the tetracycline would have likely denatured, so beer is a likely candidate for antibiotic delivery. This helped spare them from a lot of zoonotic pathogens transmitted by their livestock, which could be serious and cause quite a bit of morbidity and mortality. SO. Beer might not have been the reason why agriculture originated, but it certainly was a major reason for its success.
  
  Anderson DE, Goudie AS, Parker AG (2007) Global Environments Through the Quaternary: Exploring Environmental Change, 4th Edition. Oxford University Press.
  
  Basset et al. (1980) Tetracycline-Labeled Human Bone from Sudanese Nubia. Science 209 (4464): 1532-1534.
  
  Cordain L, Eaton SB, Sebastian A, Mann N, Lindeberg S, Watkins BA, O’Keefe JH, Brand-Miller J (2005) Origins and evolution of the Western diet: health implications for the 21st century. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 81, No. 2, 341-354.
  
  Diamond J. (2005) The Lethal Gift of Livestock (Ch. 11). Guns, Germs & Steel. W.W. Norton Publishers.
  
  Itan Y et al. (2010) A worldwide correlation of lactase persistence phenotype and genotypes. BMC Evolutionary Biology 2010, 10:36. (11 pages) doi:10.1186/1471-2148-10-36
  
  Weninger B, Alram-Stern E, Bauer E, Clare L, Danzeglocke U, Jöris O, Kubatzki C, Rollefson G, Todorova H, van Andel T (2006) Climate Forcing due to the 8200 cal yr BP Event Observed at Early Neolithic Sites in the Eastern Mediterranean. Quaternary Research 66: 401-20.
  - karass says:
    
    March 18, 2011 at 2:42 pm
    
    I thought drinking alcoholic beverages was dehydrating. No? They can replace water if the available water is unsafe to drink?
    - Mr. Bad Example says:
      
      March 18, 2011 at 3:09 pm
      
      There is something of a threshold of dehydration that comes into play. It is probably more accurate to say that low strength alcoholic beverages are less hydrating rather than dehydrating.

Winnona Mom says:

March 17, 2011 at 3:49 pm

No contest – wine, but an occasional wheat beer is ok. But my all-time favorite is sake (nigori / unfiltered).

Ridgelandistan says:

March 17, 2011 at 4:11 pm

Beer me!

Parker Cross says:

March 17, 2011 at 5:06 pm

Wine, usually, but had a couple of good beers at The Marlay this afternoon for lunch. My sainted mother used to tell us, “It’s not a question of what is the right time to drink, merely a question of what’s the right drink at the time.” Today in the sun on the patio at noon, it was beer.

cubalibre says:

March 17, 2011 at 5:26 pm

Your mama sounds like smart, good people!
- Parker Cross says:
  
  March 17, 2011 at 5:54 pm
  
  She was, cubalibre, I miss her and Dad a lot.