Hmmm. You want to learn about drinking kash [beer]? You certainly came to the right place. This is where it was invented [about 10,000 years ago] with the goddess Ninkasi’s help (she’s the goddess of brewing). I can fill you in on all the choices and techniques, as long as you’re willing to foot the bill for my demonstrations. Most people choose from among those varieties made from “hull”-less barley, but my personal favorite is from the hulled varieties. This of course, results in pieces of hulls floating amongst the brew. But we, in all our modern wisdom, have devised two sophisticated ways to avoid their ingestion. In Palestine, they have developed this strainer-thing, which fits over the vessel and down into the brew, to keep the hulls from being sucked in. I myself prefer this Assyrian invention called the “straw” [sometimes made of gold and lapis-lazuli]. With it, I can drink from the hull-free depths of the vessel.

Ahh, here are some fresh bowls of kash. Please pay the good lady, while I continue. As you can see, they know my drink here. You can see some of the delightful hulls, floating at the top. Do you also see that other lady, carrying a platter of fresh-cut bread out for all to enjoy? The invention of bread goes no further back in time than the invention of Kash. In fact, there is still considerable conflict among the experts as to whether barley, which is possibly the first domesticated plant, was first domesticated to produce bread or beer. People of all walks of life drank it, and it figures strongly in our medicine, our rituals, and our mythology. Back in the days of Ur, people drank their kash from globular bottles [pottery, I assume]. It isn’t as though kash is without nutritional benefits [the yeast neutralizes the tannins in the barley which tend to irritate the stomach, and they also provide b-vitamins and essential amino acids]. My bar tab here has been helped tremendously by the simple fact that tavern-owners convicted of overcharging for their kash were sentenced to death by drowning.

Look up at the menu-board and you will see several varieties flavored with figs, dates or date-juice. But you will notice many other varieties, some flavored with skirret-weed [a licorice-flavored plant], and others flavored with Assyrian-root [radish]. Fermentation was often started from the yeasts on grapes and raisins, which were added for this purpose, but they would also have added more variety to the flavors of kash. [Anchor Brewing Company makes a beer based on one of the ancient recipes from Sumer. It tastes much like a hard apple cider, retaining the fragrance of dates, and the smoothness and effervescence of champagne].

You will probably notice that, after a bit of drinking, there will be a gaseous eruption from your lungs. Have no fear of it, it is harmless and will even give you some relief. Beer will greatly improve a man’s belching prowess. Few people grant enough historical significance to belching. Men would be unable to hold their territories without a good loud belch. If a man strayed into another’s territory, it is the volume and bass of his belch, which repels the invader. If you want to know who has the largest territory in Babylon, you would need look no further than our deity, jojo. His lungs have to really exercise to expand and contract with that huge gold medallion on his chest. But then…..deities SHOULD have a larger territory.

The belch has often been used in battles, and is capable of disheartening skillful warriors, especially when soldiers unite in a good belch. If you put a big rock cliff behind them, the sound would be so loud that 4 or 5 of them could have chased Alexander away. Of course, it has been relied on too heavily at times. You may remember when we Babylonians laid siege to the Assyrian capitol of Nineveh, an oracle said that the river would help the attackers conquer the city. Many experts* say that the Tigris River flooded and knocked down a distance of 20 stades of Nineveh’s walls. I was there. I can tell you that the Assyrians had over-prepared for the battle. They produced a combined belch that was so loud, that their burp was what actually knocked the wall down. I was there, I heard it…..believe me.

I’m told that among certain families here at AW, a good belch can be a sexual attractant, much like a loud frog can get the best mate. I understand that in those families, the males tend to wait till a desired female has gone to bed, then they walk over to right beneath the ladies balcony and begin belching. One can always tell where the available women are for those men……especially if they are attractive enough to have several men interested in them. Fortunately for the parents of these ladies, from up on a balcony, one can reach quite a distance with a bucket of water.

Not everybody can put 2 and 2 together as well as I can. I’m sure you’ve all heard of Gilgamesh’s flood, when all mankind was wiped off the Earth except one man’s family, who were told to build a ship and stock it with animals to wait out the flood. They eventually released three different kinds of birds, and when the last one (a dove) returned with an olive branch, they knew there was land nearby. The complaint that the angry god had about people was that they had become too noisy. That much can be read in any account of the Gilgamesh flood, but where I tend to differ with some of the uninformed experts is that I know for a fact that this god didn’t approve of our belching – THAT was the noise which caused the flood.

You may have noticed way back in your youth that women tend not to belch in quite so demonstrative a fashion. Obviously, they leave territorial disputes and battles to the men-folk. In this fine establishment, you seldom hear a woman belch as though she was proud of it. That doesn’t mean that they can’t. I remember (about 2 years ago) approaching the door here, when a humongous belch shook the walls. The strung beads hanging in the doorway billowed out and I almost fell over. When I walked in the door, there were only women inside, and none would admit to performing the deed. Well, that’s about it for my presentation. Not that there isn’t more to discuss, or that I wouldn’t appreciate more to drink, it’s just that……wellll, another side of kash is that one must go outside and relieve oneself frequently, and I have no more room on my table because of the empty bowls.

* This site for one.