As a wee ripple wafts through the ether about the sweatiness of gose, it is good to be reminded that before a certain point not that long ago, beer was understood to be a product with functions, purposes. Having picked up the lad’s bug and sitting home today, I wonder what good might be done were I myself to take in a quart of a drink for a distressed horse as might have been on offer in the later 1600s. It is instructional to be reminded how in this case, the strong ale is a medicinal medium for getting the herbs into the well kept 1680s horse. A few decades later you can see the same thing being used off Newfoundland for the earlier adventurer business folk who needed a tonic. And beer as medicinal tonic was part of a continuum of uses. About the same time as the horse was receiving its treatment, in the Canadian Arctic there was both “ship beere” and “harbor beere” on board. In the next century, we see spruce beer identified as a common anti-scury drink.
Beer, of course, has always had other purposes. Not counting slug bait, the chiefest of purposes is simply the making of money. And as we need beer less and less due to ubiquitous safe water and other means to avoid getting scurvy, the making of money is more obviously one of its greatest powers. Yet, it is also still a means to make folk merry. Are there better things to make your riches at? I wonder. Think I will stick to the modern medicinals today but, still, one does wonder how the horse did after the treatment.