A brief history of beer

A mind on beer is a mind held dear
Bohemian proverb

In the beer of our lord 1832 an Austrian peasant by the name of Gunther von Trapp (directly related on his mother’s side to the makers of the film, The Sound of Music) made a startling discovery.

He discovered there was something missing, an inexplicable crushing void in the man-made universe. Some good stuff had already been invented: wheels, gunpowder, chess, sheep anuses. But there was a certain je ne sais quoi (Austrian for sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll) that was lacking and all the king’s chambermaids couldn’t get a rise out of him.

So he thought and he thought and after some thought he gave it some more thought as an afterthought. In this fiery bout of sudden brain-cell activity, his entire body was an electrical field in which ions grazed and roamed and suddenly trajected into outer space, never to return. His cerebral cortex spat and hummed and expanded, and his medulla oblongated. Hairline cracks and tributaries of lightning issued from his bulging thrusting cranium and soon he began to look like some twentieth century German geek called Einstein with electric hair and a doped look, a geek afflicted with such grandiose delusions of grandeur that he’d go and put his initial into his theorem of relativity.

True, if our Gunther had so wished he could have preceded and therefore made redundant this mad German genius, but true to his pacifist sheep-tending ways von Trapp wished to make the world a better place and not a hoard for atomic weapons. Soon he was wandering the Alps in a dazed unseeing daze, his sheep scattered and lost, much like his own thoughts. His poker buddies deserted him, shaking their heads sadly. Poor old von Trapp, finally succumbed to Edelweiss poisoning (an Austrian expression for chewing the cud once too often). 

In those days, thinking was considered a foolish aristocratic pursuit. Not much has changed. But von Trapp was determined to make the most of his nerdy appearance, and since computers hadn’t been invented there was little he could do except listen to Sting on a CD specially compiled for him by his one remaining friend, Malt.

And it was on a dark, peculiarly stormy night when his hair crackled more than ever and his spine had turned into a lightning rod, a night when he was flush with Stolichnaya vodka sneaked past Austrian Customs in the stomach linings of sheep, that it hit him. At the time he was also fiddling with the stomach lining of his favourite cotton-dweller through a rear portal. Austrian-Bohemian lightning fizzed and forked sheepishly and upon sighting him, dutifully alighted on its favourite son, the pride of the alps, the little prince of conductivity who received his Eureka thunderbolt all Christlike - arms outstretched and pinioned to the chill night air - a sucker for melodrama long before the audience for The Sound of Music was conceived. 

In this epiphanic moment of booming thunder and shoddy Industrial Light and Magic effects, the equation came to him; he felt knighted and awestruck all at once. He’d done it! He’d steadfastly worked beyond his station, beyond even those humbug dumbfuck aristocrats, beyond the loftiest peak and thinnest atmosphere. Moon landings were to be scoffed at.       

He immediately threw a party to celebrate his invention, which he termed King of Good Times in the hope that royalty would endorse his product. He sent RSVP inscriptions to Foster family from far and wide, cousins, uncles, nephews – to Carlsberg, Heineken, Amstel, and even a couple of American toads called Budweiser. He invited discerning sheep, his friend Malt and his favourite musician all the way from England for a private concert. He made sure to burn the purple asses of his fickle friends who’d abandoned him so swimmingly.       

Unfortunately fame and fortune and patents continued to elude him since he’d have to wait at least a hundred and fifty years before Warner Brothers was launched and a three-movie deal was struck. 

What’s more, poor von Trapp, that unsung beerer of good tidings, that angel in sheep’s clothing, OD’d happily on his discovery: he literally drowned in too much of a good thing, swimming in a specially constructed pool. Months later a clumsy friend scraped out a fitting, if solecistic, inscription on his gravestone: Beer there, done that. Thence the terminology was modified and the world splash-dove into a new era of voluptuousness.

Today washed-up Hollywood actors peddle his product to the Dalai Lama, as evidenced in the case of Richard Beer.

von Trapp’s world-transforming equation

v = malt + hops + barley + alpine spring water (Evian will do)

(where v stands for wow!, hops is another term for erections (sheep-enhanced or otherwise), barley originates from you’ll remember me when the west wind moves among the fields of barley)