Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need – a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.
Jerome K. Jerome, from Three Men in a Boat

I want someone to look at me the way I look at beer.
Anonymous

The mention of the history of beer always brings a laugh or at the very least a snicker. The history of beer for most people is not a serious topic of study. It seems to them frivolous and hardly worth more than a few diverting minutes of anyone’s time. Beer, after all, is a drink for leisure, for young people, generally men, and associated with sports and student life. That perception of beer is a case of historical myopia, of an inability of many people at the beginning of the twenty-first century to conceive of a world different from their own. The prevailing presentism makes it difficult for many to comprehend a world where beer was a necessity, a part of everyday life, a drink for everyon of any age or status, and a beverage for all times of the day from breakfast to dinner and into the evening.
Richard W. Unger from Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Men who have been intoxicated with wine fall down face foremost, whereas they who have drunk barley beer lie outstretched on their backs; for wine makes on top-heavy, but beer stupifies.
Aristotle, quoted in A History of Beer and Brewing, by Ian S. Hornsbey

The man that isn’t jolly after drinking
Is just a driveling idiot to my thinking
Euripides

God made yeast, as well as dough, and loves fermentation as dearly as he loves vegetation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Essays

The supermarket shelves are loaded with diverse choices and all manner of foodstuffs—fortified with this or that, low calorie variants, ‘organic,’ etc. Beer is no different—except that there is no overt fortification going on, rather the inherent components such as vitamins and minerals that can be in quite useful quantities.
Charles W. Bamforth, from Beer: Health and Nutrition

Thy wanton grapes we do detest
Here’s richer juice from barley press’d.
from A Panegyric Upon Excellent Strong Beer … Drank In Wich, Worcester  by Thomas Nabbes

The sway of alcohol over mankind in unquestionable due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it . . . it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something we immediately recognize as excellent.
William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience

“Only a pint at breakfast-time, and a pint and a half at eleven o’clock, and a quart or so at dinner. And then no more till the afternoon; and half a gallon at supper-time. No one can object to that.”
Richard Doddridge Blackmore in Lorna Doone

“There is an ancient Celtic axiom that says ‘Good people drink good beer.’ Which is true, then as now. Just look around you in any public barroom and you will quickly see: Bad people drink bad beer. Think about it.”
Hunter S. Thompson,  in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

But if at church they would give some ale. And a pleasant fire our souls to regale. We’d sing and we’d pray all the live long day, nor ever once from the church to stray.
William Blake

In my opinion, most of the great men of the past were only there for the beer.
A.J.P. Taylor

Beer makes you feel the way you ought to feel without beer.
Henry Lawson

Beer does not make itself properly by itself. It takes an element of mystery and of things that no one can understand.
Fritz Maytag

The best audience is intelligent, well-educated and a little drunk.
Alben W. Barkley

In vino veritas, in cervesio felicitas (In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is joy).
Anonymous

Light beer is an invention of the Prince of Darkness.
From Inspector Morse (BBC)

We brewers don’t make beer, we just get all the ingredients together and the beer makes itself.”
Fritz Maytag

If God had wanted us to filter our beer, he wouldn’t have given us livers.
Larry Bell

Regarding big breweries: We’re in different businesses. We both make something called beer, but they don’t really taste much alike. The big brewers are of a completely different mindset. A-B has more in common with Coca-Cola than they do with us. That’s not to say their beer is bad. It’s just different from what we make. If you look at their advertising you see they are trying to sell lifestyle.
Brock Wagner, founder of St. Arnold Brewing

Drinking really cold beer is like slapping yourself in the face with an ice pick.
Michael Jackson