> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://thedailyeudemon.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Brews You Can Use II
- URL: https://thedailyeudemon.com/2079/
- Published: 2005-08-19T11:22:13.000Z
- Updated: 2005-08-19T11:22:13.000Z
- Author: Eric Scheske
- Tags: Books, Food and Drink, #wpChunk

Great passage from Steven Shapin's essay/review of Tom Standage's *A History of the World in 6 Glasses* in *The New Yorker*:

> The taking of certain drinks could itself be society-making. The Greek symposium was, literally, a “drinkingtogether,” and the watered wine was both such as loosened the tongue and allowed symposiasts to display self-control. Just as drinking opened up the possibility of intoxication, so it allowed for a show of moral discipline. Wine was the perfect drink for the Greeks: with proper management, you could position yourself at the golden mean between the Dionysian and the Apollonian. Plato's *Symposium* instructively ends with everyone except Socrates having gone home, fallen asleep, or gotten drunk: a true philosopher, it is implied, can hold his liquor. Drunkenness was traditionally not alcoholism–that's a fairly modern category–but was encompassed within the vice called gluttony, a moral rather than a medical problem. Social ties are, and always have been, signalled, sealed, and solemnized with a fermented or distilled drink. You don't just drink, you *drink to*: to life (*l'chaim*) and health (*santé*, *salud*, *prosit, na zdorovie*, *gezondheid*, *slainte*, *zum Wohl*), to the monarch (“Gentlemen, the Queen”), to absent friends (the Sunday toast in the Royal Navy), to general good humor, well-being, and luck (cheers, *noroc*), to the company here assembled (“Here's to us. And those like us. Damn few and they're all dead”). Bogart's “Here's looking at you, kid” to Ingrid Bergman is a vestige of the Scandinavian obligation to honor your drinking partner by catching his or her eyes over the rim of your glass–much nicer than *skøl*, a reference to the use of enemies' skulls as drinking vessels: “Heads up,” so to speak, rather than “Bottoms up.”

[Link](http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/050801crbo%5Fbooks1?ref=thedailyeudemon.com).