Beer

Favored drink of Penn Staters, beer has been around since before the dawn of civilization. Our caveman forefathers may have been sucking on wet barely and getting buzzed. Its purposeful production has too been around for many millennia. The ancient Mesopotamians were real jazzed about the drink. They eventually ditched names for beer that described its taste but instead called it either ordinary beer, good beer, or very good beer. Good being a synonym for strong. The Mesopotamians shared their beer by drinking from large vats with reed straws.

They even, like many other civilizations, had a goddess of the brew, Ninkasi. She has a whole hymn dedicated to her:

Ninkasi, you are the one who handles the dough [and] with a big shovel,
Mixing in a pit, the bappir with [date] – honey,

Ninkasi, you are the one who bakes the bappir in the big oven,
Puts in order the piles of hulled grains,

Ninkasi, you are the one who waters the malt set on the ground,
The noble dogs keep away even the potentates,

Ninkasi, you are the one who soaks the malt in a jar,
The waves rise, the waves fall.

Ninkasi, you are the one who spreads the cooked mash on large reed mats,
Coolness overcomes,

Ninkasi, you are the one who holds with both hands the great sweet wort,
Brewing [it] with honey [and] wine

Ninkasi, the filtering vat, which makes a pleasant sound,
You place appropriately on a large collector vat.

Ninkasi, you are the one who pours out the filtered beer of the collector vat,
It is [like] the onrush of Tigris and Euphrates.

“Like the onrush of the Tigris and Euphrates.” Indeed, alcohol has always been the drink of life. Bit dramatic though. There are whole historians and archaeologists dedicated to uncovering the secrets of the ale from days gone by. Having uncovered these hymns, they believe that beer was regarded as a sacred drink granted by the gods. Some believe the reason for this gift was to help humans deal with the crushing knowledge of their inevitable death. Ninkasi has some equivalents in Egypt, Africa, and India, one in particular being the Egyptian god Hathor/Sekhmet.

The goddess Hathor is the eye of Ra and generally a goddess of nice things like beauty and stuff. But in one myth, head god Ra was pissed that his worship was dwindling and that humans weren’t giving him respect, so he had Hathor transform into an enforcer to strike some fear and respect into those hearts. Hathor became Sekhmet and went on a bloody massacre. The number of dead bodies was a bit much for Ra so he asked her to stop. She didn’t. Well now Ra just felt bad. So he buddied up with the other gods and mixed thousands of vats of beer with pomegranate juice. Sekhmet drank all of it thinking the red drink was blood and passed out, at which point she transformed back into Hathor.