Our esteemed editor invited me to lunch a while ago. After three hours I had to leave because Qantas doesn’t even hold planes for me. Don’t they know who I am? The next day a somewhat shocked venerable editor asked whether I could remember how many beers I drank over lunch. I said 10 (but truthfully it was 12) and that the eminent QC lady next to me drank 5 (actually 3). The bar bill shocked him, he thought he’d been robbed because 15 beers were chalked up on the tab. My medico ordered me to reduce drinking and, at lunch, I obeyed. Our eminent editor didn’t understand that geologists have a huge thirst never abated by internal irrigation and have ways of stopping drunkenness by having amethyst on their person.
The Magi, the Three Wise Men, claimed that amethyst prevents drunkenness, keeps off hail, drives away locusts, and prevents insanity. In Book XXXVII, Pliny claimed that the Magi were talking nonsense. I’m on the side of the Magi because I can’t remember being drunk, had not been hit by hail, or seen a locust and have documents stating I’m not insane. Who are we mere mortals to disagree with the Three Wise Men?
Beer is very difficult to make compared to wine because grain needs to be steeped in water, laid out for partial germination, kilned, ground to grist, mashed with warm water, boiled in the presence of hops, cooled and fermented using brewer’s yeast. The Mesopotamians brewed beer and, in ancient Egypt, it was the drink of high priests and kings because it was so hard to make whereas airborne wild yeasts contaminated grape juice which fermented to wine, the drink of peasants. It still is. In ancient Egypt, water was so polluted that women and children drank low-alcohol beer rather than Nile water because fermentation killed bacteria. The Egyptians claimed beer was an essential part of the afterlife and the Vikings considered beer the drink of the gods. Some of us still do.
The Mesopotamians guaranteed beer purity. Those who did not use traditional recipes were executed. The Reinheitsgebot of 1516 AD in Bavaria was the first pure food act in the world. In the Middle Ages, beer was a safer drink than E.coli-contaminated river water because bacteria were killed during fermentation. The Bavarian law limits beer ingredients to water, barley, hops and yeast. Modern mass-produced beers with added chemicals can’t be certified under the Reinheitsgebot.
One tries to avoid pompous pretentious wine drinkers prattling on about terroir. Identical grapes obviously do not produce identical wines because of different soil types, microclimates and aspect. There is also terroir for beer. The water chemistry for brewing exerts a strong control on taste, aroma, alcohol content, colour, head retention and clarity. In previous centuries, because breweries used great volumes of water, they were located at rivers, springs and wells. Water chemically reacts with rocks and when used in beer making, its chemistry is controlled by the geology of the catchment area.
Wells along the Isar River flood plain have low pH waters depleted in calcium, magnesium, sulphate, chloride and carbonate are used to make light sweet München beers such as Paulaner, Augustiner, Weihenstephan, and Spaten. The Isar River sources from metamorphic rocks, granites and glacial sediments in the Alps with little rock dissolution hence the water has low total dissolved salts. For hundreds of years monasteries in Bavaria made beer. They still do and many beers are named after saints or Catholic orders. The Franciscans emphasise service to others, this they do by making Franziskaner beer. In Bavaria, beer is called Flübiges Brot (liquid bread).
The Guinness brewery on the River Liffey does not use river water but uses high pH calcium-, magnesium-, and carbonate-rich water sourced from the limestones in the Wicklow Mountains. Calcium stabilises enzymes used by the yeast to breakdown starch and precipitates phosphate, buffers the pH, and supports microbiological activity. Magnesium has a similar effect as calcium but too much magnesium makes beer bitter, as do sodium and potassium which also act as a laxative. The chemistry of Wicklow Mountain water makes it possible to make the famous Irish stouts.
Monks in the north of England were the early brewers and used well-water derived from marine sediments and salt deposits to make bitter beer. The higher sulphate and chloride content of the water made the beer bitter and allowed full extraction of bitter oils from hops. Further south, waters derived from chalk and produced darker beers such as Porter. Beer was the drink of working men, those from London’s East End once spent their summer family holidays in Kent picking hops. Pilseners and lagers, traditionally fermented and stored in caves in the Pils area of Bohemia, use low pH water containing low total dissolved salts from sandstones, igneous and metamorphic rocks.
Modern mass-produced beers which the RSPCA rightfully prevents us from giving to thirsty dogs use town water cleaned by reverse osmosis. In the US, Bud Light used an activist to promote its product to hairy-chested macho men and failed. God knows what chemicals are added to create different flavours for US and Chinese beers, the worst in the world.
I owe our majestic editor a generous return lunch to drink until we start talking braille, degust, and discuss the degradation and decline of our country. I’ll throw out the amethyst, ignore medical advice and shorten my life, cash in my super to avoid unrealised capital gains tax ALP-Green theft from my super, and cry into my super-funded beer about what Australia could have been. I was brought up in an expanding post-war economy when there was opportunity, acknowledgement of entrepreneurial risk, pride, dignity, tolerance, Christian values, a sense of community, sacrifice, service, patriotism, frugality, shame with receiving the dole, reward for hard work, robust education and strong manufacturing, mining and agricultural industries.
We now can’t even defend ourselves; we’re not self-sufficient; the country wastes its wealth; fewer people work to support themselves and the country; productivity, household income and volunteering continue to decrease; wealth, greed, welfare, public service employment, debt and the victim industry all have increased; and the values that made Australia great have been replaced with oppressive expensive Marxist symbolism.
We could build a defence industry and make submarine and aerial drones, manned submarines, naval ships, intelligent mines and ammunition, rockets, missiles, iron dome defences, and a nuclear industry. Instead, we fritter away taxpayer’s wealth on hare-brained ideology and entitled non-producers. A stroke of a bureaucratic pen could decrease red, green and black tape and attract investment. We need to de-stress infrastructure by greatly reducing immigration to a small few who add to productivity until there are more houses, better roads, cheaper electricity and food, fewer unproductive public servants and a welfare system for those truly in need.
The only difference currently between the two major parties is that the Liberal-National coalition is not the political arm of Marxist union thugs who finance the ultra-left Labor-Green coalition.
Where is the true conservative party and a leader to cut the Gordian knot and rebuild Australia before it’s too late?
