Today is National Beer Day! If you're out with friends and run out of things to talk about, here are some beer facts from the @mental_floss Twitter account.
1. After he won the Nobel Prize, Niels Bohr was given a perpetual supply of beer piped into his house.
2. The Code of Hammurabi decreed that bartenders who watered down beer would be executed.
3. At the Wife Carrying World Championships, first prize is the wife's weight in beer.
4. A cloud near the constellation Aquila contains enough ethyl alcohol to fill 400 trillion trillion pints of beer.
5. Coined in the early 1900s, the word "alcoholiday" means leisure time spent drinking.
6. The builders of the Great Pyramid of Giza were paid with a daily ration of beer.
7. During WWII, a bear named Wojtek joined the Polish army. He transported ammunition and sometimes drank beer.
8. Fried beer won Most Creative Fried Food at the 2010 Texas State Fair.
9. The top five states for beer consumption per capita: 1. North Dakota, 2. New Hampshire, 3. Montana, 4. South Dakota 5. Wisconsin.
10. Germany is home to a beer pipeline. Taps in Veltsin-Arena are connected by a 5km tube of beer.
11. Thomas Jefferson wrote parts of the Declaration of Independence in a Philadelphia tavern.
12. Cenosillicaphobia is the fear of an empty glass.
13. At the end of Prohibition, FDR said, "What America needs now is a drink."
14. Winston Churchill called the concept of Prohibition "an affront to the whole history of mankind."
15. George Washington insisted his continental army be permitted a quart of beer as part of their daily rations.
16. Oktoberfest originally started as a festival celebrating the 1810 marriage of Crown Prince Ludwig.
17. At spas in Europe, you can literally bathe in beer as a physical and mental therapeutic treatment.
18. In the 1990s, the Beer Lovers Party ran candidates in Belarus and Russia.
19. J.K. Rowling invented Quidditch in a pub.
20. Beer helped Joseph Priestly discover oxygen. He noticed gases rising from the big vats of beer at a brewery and asked to do some experiments.
21. A Buddhist temple in the Thai countryside was built with over a million recycled beer bottles.
22. The moon has a crater named Beer.
23. Beer soup was a common breakfast in medieval Europe.
24. At the start of Bavarian Beer Week in Germany, an open-air beer fountain dispenses free beer to the public.
25. In the 1980s, a beer-drinking goat was elected mayor of Lajitas, TX.
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This story originally ran in 2013 on Drink Beer Day (September 28).
acEightyThrees on November 11st, 2017 at 16:12 UTC »
Also in the Code: a judge who reached an incorrect ruling would be fined and removed from the bench permanently.
JimmySinner on November 11st, 2017 at 15:52 UTC »
Here's a translation of the Code
I can't find anything in it to corroborate the idea that watering down beer would be punishable by death. The two closest things are
EDIT: Before you ask, corn just means any cereal grain here. It used to be a generic term and it began to morph in the 1800s, and now it tends to only refer to but still doesn't exclusively refer to maize. The translation is accurate, just a little archaic.
TheLowClassics on November 11st, 2017 at 15:49 UTC »
Hammurabi was tough but fair