For the last couple of years, Ive taught my biotechnology students that beer may have played a major role in the dawn of civilization. People realized that fermenting grains were good to drink, planted plots of those grains. They had to settle down to tend those crops, so they invented villages. I just read an article in a scientific journal a few months ago about an archaeological find of an ancient brewery that lends credence to that theory. If it wasn't for beer, we wouldn't be sitting in our houses, typing messages on our computers to post messages on our striped-bass.com message boards. What's more important,
in the history of mankind, than that?