I Serve Beer

The First Beer and The Knowledge of Good and Evil

It was in Dallas, Texas in 1990. My buddy and I each stole a can of Miller Lite from my mom's refrigerator and we drank them fast, in the alley behind my house.

The beer can, with its flowing script word - "Lite" - hovering over a barley shield, seemed special, magical even.

The beer felt sharp and cold in my mouth with a taste that was somehow both sweet and bitter.

I had stolen sips from cans of beer before, so I had encountered that taste before, and I had smelled it all my life, at my parent's get togethers at the house and at restaurants.

Somehow I didn't realize that by drinking the whole can I was entering a new world.

A few minutes afterward, I felt lightheaded and dizzy, and I knew something was happening.  

Going back in the house on that Sunday evening, I tried hard not to show the knowledge of good and evil I had acquired in the last hour. 

Over the last twenty years, since entering this ancient brotherhood and sisterhood of beer, I have served beer and been served beer, in the same way humans have for thousands of years, since the first recipe for beer was written down, in the first written recipe ever recorded 5000 years ago, when a couple of guys in Sumeria said, "whoa, hold on, tell me one more time EXACTLY how you made this."

I have served beer in my work as a singer songwriter, making and performing songs for people to hear while they drink beer. I fought this idea for a long time, preferring to view my job in more literary terms, but only recently, around my 35th birthday, I realized fully, with some acceptance, comfort and satisfaction, that I sell beer.

Whatever interest my songs produce makes money through the process of selling beer to audience members who gather to listen to music and stories while they drink beer.

Beer Helps People Pay Attention

Humans are a storytelling species.  Our ability to learn from others via language use sets us apart from all other animals on earth.

Humans pay attention to stories, and they particularly pay attention to stories or lyrics set to music. A study by Matthias Mehl and James Pennebaker of people’s daily activity found that individuals listened to music during approximately 14% of their lives and they have conversations 28% of their lives.

People pay even more attention to music and conversation when beer is involved. When blood alcohol levels are low and ascending after beginning drinking, the stimulant properties of alcohol are evident, with people reporting feelings of elation, energy, and vigor.

A second effect of alcohol generally accepted by psychologists who study alcohol’s effect on the brain - summarized as the attention allocation model - predicts that a rising blood alcohol level reduces attentional capacity to only the most salient stimuli impinging on the drinker.  In other words, alcohol causes a “spotlight effect” where only the most prominent features of the environment are monitored, allowing a drinker to become distracted from less present concerns. 

In the case of listening to music and drinking in a public place like a venue or a bar, the most salient features of the nearby environment might be whatever a friend or companion is saying or whatever the musicians and performers are doing and saying. 

In the first case, the live or recorded performance of music is possibly creating a sonic backdrop, a shared experience to comment on, and an environment without “awkward silences” that is comfortable for having a conversation.  The conversation is the most salient stimuli, and drinking beer distracts drinkers from other stressors.

In the second case, the performance is capturing a listener’s attention and drinking beer helps keep other concerns out of the way, so that a listener can align her mind with the music or lyrics.

In either case, the music performance is creating a context where beer drinking helps a drinker focus on the most salient stimuli, whether that is conversing or listening to music or both.

 

People Buy Beer to Help Them Pay Attention to Conversation or to Music... 

And Performers Create Contexts Where People Want to Pay Attention

Beer helps humans focus on one stimulus at a time, and push aside outside thoughts.

Beer helps people pay attention, and attention is engagement with information.  The feeling of focused attention, often called the state of “flow,” is reported in research by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to be one the most enjoyable states of being in daily life. 

A music listener who drinks beer finds a state of flow that is pleasurable, and as long as the blood alcohol level slowly rises through the course of listening, it will be a very pleasant couple of hours, until the conversation or music stops, the blood alcohol level gets too high to focus attention even on the most salient stimuli, or until blood alcohol level starts falling causing sleepiness.

So as a songwriter and performing musician, my job is to make music or tell stories that make people want to pay more attention in that environment, either to their companions or to the content of the performance, and thus makes them want to buy and drink beer.

If the music I perform or the stories I tell are not conducive to pleasant conversation, the customers will leave and will not buy beer.

If the music I perform or the stories I tell are boring or unpleasant, the customers will not pay attention to the show, and will either not enter the venue or they will leave, and will not buy beer.

If the customers in the venue or bar, come, stay and buy beer, the club is happy and I get booked to perform again.

I am paid from either the cover charges collected from the audience that wanted to attend the show or from the establishment who pays from alcoholic beverage sales at the venue.

So I perform stories and music that create a desire in an audience to pay attention to what's going on in the room. When people are paying attention, they can feel more focused on what's going on in the room by buying and drinking beer.

So ultimately... I sell beer. That’s my job.

To summarize:

• Performers attract attention from customers and attract customers to a venue
• Customers buy beer to make paying attention easier
• Venues use proceeds from beer sales or ticket sales to pay performer
• The more attention performer attracts = more customers for beer and tickets = the more money for the venue and performer

How Music and Beer Domesticated Humans

Beer and music, music and beer. If you see a guitar, you’re likely to see a beer bottle.  If you see a beer, you’re likely to hear a song. All over the world, people drink beer and sing songs and sing songs and drink beer like it’s what we were born to do. 

Social groups form around music, and social groups form around beer, and when both ingredients are blended people have a good time.  Music and beer, alone or together, eases social transactions and bringing people together and serves as a glue for civilization. 

When people get together to drink beer or listen to music they often report a feeling of connection provided by the sharing a common beverage and to hearing and singing the same music and songs. It can be an inspiring thing to see these forces, music and beer, aligning individuals with competing interests  behind a common cause, to enjoy the moment and the community.

It makes you glad that humans make beer.  Or is it the other way around: Did beer make us into humans?

 

Humans Work for Beer

Humans cultivate barley, the cereal grain, and a member of the grass family,  and produce 136 million tons of it each year and devote 566,000 km² to its cultivation. It was one of the first domesticated grains (in the Fertile Crescent) and barley beer was probably the first drink developed by Neolithic humans.

10,000 years ago humans were nomadic hunter gatherers. The accidental making of beer by these nomads, by leaving wet grains in a container that fermented, and the enjoyable taste and effect of that first beer, are hypothesized to be reasons nomads might settle down, build heavy not very transportable pots, and make more of the grains that became beer.

The planting of barley was very likely the genesis of agriculture and the recipe for beer was the first written recipe in 3000 B.C.

Today beer is the most widely consumed alcoholic beverage in the world, and the third most consumed beverage of any kind, after water and tea. Last year, humans made 40 billion gallons of beer.

With humans love of beer, the continued reproduction of barley and hops and of beer, seems certain.

With so many people around the world working to further and perpetuate the spread of barley and hops DNA, you could reasonable ask, do humans serve beer (as in master and servant, not as in waiter and customer)?

Based on worldwide production and consumption of beer, it safe to say that humans work for beer and its constituent ingredients, and spend significant parts of their lives furthering the reproductive fitness of these plants and the alcoholic substance they turn into.

Working is always more fun while listening to music, and working for beer is made that much better by putting it together with music.

It makes you glad that humans invented music.  But once, again we can turn that question around: did music make us human?

Was Music the First Human Language?

Though the basic body of homo sapiens has been the same for millions of years, language development flowered in the last 100,000 years.

As expressed by Patrick McGovern in Uncorking the Past:

By combining and ordering individual sounds along an arbitrarily defined tonal scale, early humans might have created the first kind of universal language... although the significance of rhythmic tones is less precise than that of a language using words, it is in some ways more accessible: music made in one culture can be at least partly understood and appreciated by a person in another culture.

Music may have spurred on the development of language, arguably most human of all our attributes.  

So if agriculture was spurred on by desire for beer and the planting of barley, and if language was kickstarted by music, as modern humans is is fair to say we were made by beer and music. 

The Recipe for Civilization: The Symbiotic Coevolution of Beer and Music

Just as barley and hops are transformed by yeast to become beer, something qualitivatively very different from its ingredients, the process of people drinking beer is transformed by the addition of music.

All cultural ideas, or memes, coevolve to a certain extent, as long as both exist in the world of humans’ minds, but certain cultural memes or processes coevolve in an  interdependent way, in a symbiotic relationship. 

Symbiosis is the name for a close and often long-term interaction between different biological species, and we can extend the idea to long term interaction between cultural ideas, in this case, music and beer.

Music existed independently of beer, but once blended and consumed along with beer, became more prevalent and successful as a cultural meme.

 

Communion: Human Minds Sharing the Same Experience

Drinking a beverage reminds of our connection to the world and to others and reminds us that we are alive. Beverages allow human minds to experience the same thing in the same way as the performance of a song allows human minds to center on the same experience. It is empowering and reassuring for our species to have these shared experiences, and it is affirming to realize that one is a part of the group having one of those experiences. 

The symbolic raising of glasses and toasting the common refreshment is giving a nod to all that is noble about humanness.  Toasting the common beverage is an expression of appreciation for the preparation and knowledge that went into the brewing of the beer.  Drinking together is an acknowledgement of the agreed upon values that allows the assembled to be in person together, drinking at the same time.

I am discovering that I am a product of beer.

Would any of us be here without beer?  Would you have your friends, your husband, your wife without the temporary charms lent to you by beer?  Or more importantly, would mankind have survived without agriculture that was inspired by accidental fermentation of wheat and barley?

Humans serve beer by cultivating the plants that make beer and by developing the processes that help the consumption of those plants. The sun grows the plants, the animals eat the plants.

Music, and all technology, ultimately serves the DNA behind the plants that power life on earth.   

I work for beer. You work for beer. We serve beer.

If we take this for granted, how can we be better servants, getting the most for our masters and getting the most for ourselves out of the bargain? With the knowledge of this relationship, can we better align with beer’s needs to further our own goals, as billions of humans have done before us?

The rest of this story will be a journey to answer these questions and a quest to understand and align with the most powerful force on earth... beer.