Five Little Known Facts About Beer and Religion

Yesterday when I was at EBI, everybody was talking about what they were giving up for Lent, which starts today and goes until Thursday April 12th. One of the guys said he was giving up beer and it got me thinking. Here are five things you might not have known about beer and religion.

1. Beer brewing goes back at least to the ancient Sumerians, who recorded a recipe for beer on a clay tablet that's almost 4,000 years old. This would have been at least a few centuries before the time of Moses.

2. Back in the 1700s, the Paulaner monks of Germany brewed their own beer to help them get through a 40-day fast during Lent. They called it Doppelbock, and believe it or not, it's still around today. The beer was so heavy and malty that the monks could live on it for the whole fast.

3. People think Benjamin Franklin was a beer lover because he said: "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." But that's actually a misquote. The quote goes back to a saying of Franklin's that was originally about wine.

4. Arthur Guinness was a devout Christian, and he created Guinness because he wanted to stop people from getting drunk on hard liquor.

5. The Greenbelt Festival in London is a Christian music and arts festival, and they have a tent where people go to drink beer while they sing traditional hymns.