Beer is a popular subject, and has attracted an army of commentators down the centuries. But over time a mountain of misunderstanding, myth, fiction and fantasy has been put into print by writers on the drink’s history, all of which continues to be repeated today by the lazy.
Some of these errors, like the easily disproved claim that the Latin word for beer, cervesia, comes from the Roman goddess Ceres, have been around for millennia. Others, like the writer who asserted that porter got its name because it was popular with railway porters at Victoria Station in London (although railway porters arrived 120 years after porter-the-beer), have been minted only recently.
The Zythophile blog will periodically feature in the False Ale Quotes pages a series of the commonest myths about the history of beer, together with a matching rebuttal. Eventually it should be a resource that will act as a small bulwark against the great tide of inaccuracy the unwary can find themselves unknowingly helping to spread.
What about the claim that the name Alt doesn’t derive from the German word for old, but from the Latin word Altus meaning “high”? You can see this absurd claim repeated here:
http://www.duesseldorf-tourismus.de/article_en2.php?folderID=10273&sub1_folderID=10278&articleID=476&PHPSESSID=13cb59bd499ac59af
http://beeradvocate.com/beer/style/86
http://halfvalue.com/wiki.jsp?topic=Altbier
Why go for a simple explanation when a complicated one will do?
“But over time a mountain of misunderstanding, myth, fiction and fantasy has been put into print by writers on the drink’s history, all of which continues to be repeated today by the lazy.”
Like a breeze of fresh air when I saw this sentence.
I’m doing my part to battle beer fables at
Beer, Plymouth Rock & The Pilgrims—The Real Story
http://beerinfood.wordpress.com/2007/11/14/beer-plymouth-rock-the-pilgrims-the-real-story/
[…] awesome: Fraudulent Ale Questions, where the author debunks various myths about beer, including some myths that I’ve never […]
[…] A lot of it was so poorly documented, really. Especially in the early days. There are so many old stories that are accepted as fact even though they have since been disproven. There are always people […]