On the other hand, Cardinal Chigi's Roman anathema is more than neutralised by any number of benedictions, expressed or implied, from holy men of his Church. There are the regulations of St. Louis, of St. Hildegardis, the enlisted interest of the Bishops of Cologne, Utrecht, and Liége, the patron-saintship of St. Amandus, St. Leonard, St. Adrian, and the Irish St. Florentius, and, moreover, the very close connection which from time immemorial monks and religious houses have maintained with brewing. In olden days they were the brewers par excellence. In Lorraine our English Benedictines of Dieulouard, who maintained themselves in their monastery near Pont-à-Mousson down to the time of the Revolution, long possessed an absolute monopoly of brewing, and were famed for their produce. And M. Reiber will have it that there are still in Germany, at the present day, des congrégations de moines brasseurs. Then there is St. Chrodegang, a near relative of Charlemagne, the great reformer of monastic orders, who particularly directed—and the rule is still observed—that monks should be allowed the option of either beer or wine. And sensible monks, a communicative Carthusian confided to me the other day, prefer good beer any day to bad wine.
If, in face of all this, neither Romanists nor Protestants can say anything against beer, much less are Mussulmans in a position to do so. For Mahomet actually, though he expressly forbids wine, never says a word in prohibition of beer—thus leaving a convenient loophole to thirsty Mahommedans, of which French writers tell us that bibulous Algerians eagerly avail themselves.
From all this it will be seen that, despite teetotal disparagement, beer comes before the world, so to speak, with very respectable credentials, entitling it to a fairly good reception. Brillat-Savarin, it is true, admits to its detriment that "l'eau est la seule boisson qui apaise véritablement la soif." But "l'eau," says another French writer, M. Reiber, "est la prose des liquides, l'alcool en est la poésie." Speaking more particularly of beer, among alcoholic drinks, M. Dubrunfaut writes: "La bière occupe incontestablement le premier rang parmi les boissons hygiéniques connues." And he goes on to say that among the beer-drinking nations one finds, as a rule, manly qualities most developed—as among the English, the Germans, the Dutch, the Belgians, and the Northern French. Brillat-Savarin only objects that beer makes people stout.
Of course there is beer and beer. The wise doctors of Salerno very rightly gave particular attention to this subject—as well they might, for beer was adulterated in their days with no more scruple than it is in ours. The Minnesinger Marner, in the thirteenth century, bitterly complains that brewers make beer even without malt. There was no minnesinging to be done on such drink. Then there was the manufacture of the aroma. Before there were hops—and even after—people had a violent fancy for spices, the indulgence in which was carried to such a point that the Church, meeting in Council at Worms in 868, and at Trèves in 895, felt bound to take notice of the matter, and in a special canon laid down the rule that beer spiced after the manner then prevalent should be allowed, as a luxury, only on Sundays and saints' days. What those spices were may be gathered from the following recipe for making beer, which appears to have been first published at Strassburg (from early days a cerevisian city) in 1512, and which was twice re-issued, under special approbation—namely, in 1552 and 1679. "To one pound of coloured 'sweet-root' (probably liquorice) add seven ounces of good cinnamon, four ounces of the best ginger, one ounce each of cloves, 'long' pepper, galanga, and nutmeg, half an ounce each of mace and of cardamom, and two ounces of genuine Italian saffron." Whatever might be added in the shape of malt, who would recognise in this decoction anything remotely worthy of the name of beer? It is of such stuff that Cardinal Chigi must have been thinking when he pronounced beer "infernal drink." For brewing beer the school of Salerno give the following good advice:
Non acidum sapiat cerevisia, sit bene clara.
Ex granis sit cocta bonis satis, ac veterata.
It must not, above all things, be sour. For acidity "ventriculo inimica est. Acetus nervosas offendit partes." As the Germans have it—and they ought to know—
Ein böses Weib und sauer Bier
Behüt' der Himmel dich dafür!
It should be clear, because "turbida impinguat, flatus gignit, atque brevem spiritum efficit." "Bene cocta" it should be, for "male cocta ventris inflationes, tormina et colicos cruciatos generat"—which Latin speaks for itself. As for good grain, the doctors appear to prefer a mixture of barley and oats. They allow either wheat, barley, or oats. Wheat, they say, makes the most nourishing beer, but heating and astringent. Barley alone makes the beer cold and dry. A mixture of barley and oats renders it less nourishing, but also lighter on the stomach, and less confining and distending. The Germans nowadays brew beer of every conceivable grain and no-grain, even potatoes. But according to the material so is the product. Lastly, say the doctors, beer, like wine, should be old, or you will feel the effects in your stomach.
We cannot at the present period dissociate from beer the idea of hops. But it was comparatively late in history before hops were regarded as an indispensable ingredient. The Sclav nations are reported to have had them early; also the Mahommedans of the East. Haroun-al-Rashid's physician states that in his day they were given as medicine. In France, the first record of their cultivation is of the year 768, when Pepin le Bref gave some directions as to the hop-grounds belonging to the monastery of St. Denis. In Germany they are known to have been successfully cultivated about Magdeburg in 1070. We are supposed to have received them over here in 1525. In Alsace, beer-drinking country as it is, they were not cultivated till 1802. The soil being very suitable, they then made way with such rapidity that they soon crowded out completely madder and woad, which had previously been considered the most profitable crops—so profitable, that from the coques de pastel (woad), which were looked upon as the emblem of prosperity and well-being, the Lauraguais, and indeed the whole country round Toulouse, came to be christened le pays de Cocagne. Hence our own word of "Cockaigne," about the derivation of which so many contradictory guesses have been made. It may be interesting to note that in Strassburg the bakers at one time used to put hops into their yeast, and that in some foreign countries the young shoots of the hop-bine furnish a favourite vegetable, dressed like asparagus.
Drinking habits are of course by far the most developed in Germany, where beer has really become the object of a cult. Blessed with a healthy thirst, which made our own poet Owen exclaim—