a) Meet with friends and enjoy the extraordinary elixir that is beer.
b) Celebrate those who prepare and serve beer.
c) Share and unite humanity by celebrating beers of all nations, styles and cultures.
This year we celebrate International Beer Day on Friday, August 6.
A Second Day of Friendship?
Well, if there is already a friendship day, why do we celebrate a second friendship day and also call it differently: beer day?
Answering this question, which makes perfect sense, I would like you to help me remember: At the last recent meeting with your friends, was there beer or alcohol?
Wait a second, before getting an answer, imagine that lovely get-together with friends without beer or alcohol. Perhaps we have not been aware that over time beer consumption has almost been eradicated from the face of the earth at least three times over.
The extinction of Beer.
The first time was around the 17th century when coffee, tea, chocolate and liqueurs appeared. Although these drinks did not provide nutrients like beer, which could be drunk during times of fasting due to its nutritional content and not be considered food by the Roman church. All of these new drinks offered something different from what was already known, making them exotic.
The second was at the end of the industrial revolution where new raw materials and instruments made other drinks a more economical option, so beer almost completely disappeared against rum and gin. In England before the industrial revolution there were almost 20,000 pubs at a ratio of 1 pub for every 187 inhabitants. Each pub regularly brewed its own beer. When cheap drinks arrived, they gradually stopped producing it until they reached almost a dozen beer manufacturers and at that time they all suffered from the low demand for the drink. One of them made an investment in modern copper equipment and developed a lower-priced beer using fewer inputs and managed to produce more than the conventional 200 liters.
Its success was so great that the rest of the breweries began to copy the formula, so a few breweries re-emerged and monopolized the pubs. It was now possible to centralize production and manufacture on a large scale thanks to the new materials to work with from the industrial revolution.
The third time that beer was endangered and in my opinion it is the greatest contribution to Beer Day comes from the prohibition of alcohol in the United States. Let us remember that from 1919 to 1932 the sale, import, export, manufacture and transportation of alcoholic beverages was prohibited in the United States and according to international treaties, Mexico also had a couple of consequences. By 1929, the first efforts were made to prohibit alcohol, however, the only thing left was that alcohol was not sold on the day of the presidential election and service hours were established in establishments where intoxicating beverages were served.
This last fact, the prohibition, gave us a broader overview of the social acceptance of alcohol and its participation in the daily life of the population. During Prohibition the general feeling was that "some fun is missing in our lives", due to this search, beer as well as other drinks was manufactured and sold clandestinely.
At the end of the so-called prohibition law signed by Roosevelt in 1933, the manufacture of beer with only 3.2% alcohol was authorized. Once again, beer underwent a change in order to survive; it now contained less alcohol, less flavor, and was more accessible to the population due to its lower price. Without a doubt, the best of all is that beer is back and it is once again legal to produce, distribute, serve, transport, import and export.
With all the above we can conclude and I hope we agree on the following "A party without friends is the same as a party without beer." Damn so many years to realize the importance of beer in our lives.
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