Well said.

And to answer the question about "why beer", it is about storage. Grain molds, dries out, rots, and so forth. You can only keep it for so long.

Beer, early beer that is, like essentially all fermented foods (Cheese, pickles, and so on) is about preservation of surplus stores. You harvested enough grain to last you til next harvest, but how do you hold on to it? Bread? Bread molds in days. Keep it dry and safe? Rodents will get it, and it will rot eventually.

So you throw grain seeds into water, they germinate, then you try to make some porridge or something out of it but you forget and you leave a bowl of cooked barley and water out behind your hovel. You find it a week or two later, bubbling, smelling kind of good but your starving because all your bread went bad so you drink it. WoW! Tasty, a bit bubbly, yeasty like bread, funky and sour (from lactobacillius bacteria, brettanomyces wild yeast, plus other microflora) like fruit. And you feel pretty good and nourished after. What is this I have stumbled upon?!?!

And before you know it, youre retracing your footsteps, throwing barley tea into clay pots/urns/vessels/etc and letting it ferment and it becomes a shelf-stable way to store your harvest. Slap some mud on top of the jar openings, bury them a few feet deep where the temperature stays 50 degrees year round, and you're set.

Over time, the things that make modern beer get added. Some medicinal herbs get tossed in until we finally stumble across humulus lupulus, the lovely hop. Known at the time as a natural preservative and medicine, people toss it into their beer and enjoy the bitter, citrusy, floral flavors. Barley, becoming the go-to crop for cold-weather climates, is standard for beers now, and even the process of malting (that is, germinating then halting the germination before it turns into a seedling) is documented in Egyption heiroglyphics (soaking grain, letting it germinate, drying it after a few days).

Beer is almost as old as agriculture and modern society, and possibly even older. To enjoy beer is to be human; to not is to deny yourself one of the things that makes life worth living for. Malty and thick stouts, crisp and clean pilsners, bitter and aromatic IPAs, and funky and tangy wild and sour ales. It is a beautiful world and while I won't pressure anyone into being a beer drinker, I will encourage them to drink beer.

Music is overrated. Shallow, easily-consumed entertainment for the masses.

@topgunmv: That's a dumb fucking law. Cyclists are safer on the sidewalk.

I keep mixing vegetarians and vegans together. To my understanding, the former don't eat meat and that is that, while the later don't eat anything relating to animals, whether it be eggs, milk, butter...etc. Does that sound about right?

Also is my use of "to my understanding" there ok?