Here's to good old beer

My father wasn't much of a drinker, but mostly he drank beer. Ruppert Knickerbocker beer. He may have averaged one a night, after supper, in the summer. A beer after mowing the lawn, a beer while listening to a ball game on the radio, a beer while playing poker with his buddies (which included, at one point, a parish priest). When friends came over to play cards on weekends, everyone drank "highballs," but for my father, his regular brew was a brew.  Did he go through a case of beer a month? Probably not even that. But he liked to have a beer, and one of the treats of my childhood was taking a sip of Dad's beer. That and looking for the Knickerbocker Man in the bottom of the can. 

Another fun remembrance of my childhood is joining hands with the other kids and doing the Knickerbocker Beer chant and stomp. (Knickerbocker Beer! Knickerbocker Beer! We've got the rhythm in our feet! Boom, boom, boom!) I actually could find no reference online to the Knickerbocker Beer chant, but there are plenty to a wholesome nursery school game called Dr. Knickerbocker. Has Dr. Knickerbocker replaced Knickerbocker Beer, beer being considered too unseemly for small children to be chanting and stomping about? Or was Knickerbocker Beer a regional variation on the more kid-friendly Dr. Knickerbocker theme? 

My final childhood attachment to beer came in the fourth grade. On Halloween that year, we were asked to come someone "from early American history." Most of the girls, for lack of anything else, came as Betsy Ross, Sacagawea, or a generic Pilgrim lady. But I decided to go bold, choosing Peter Stuyvesant, mostly because he had a peg leg. I fixed up a swell costume - some cast-off football pants from my cousin Robert, a white shirt, a bandoleer made of a wide red belt of my mother's, and, for the crowning touch, a peg leg made out of a beer bottle.

Alas, the peg leg splintered when I limped around on it, and I had to make something out of a paper towel roll, which kept collapsing. So the effect wasn't all that great. Still, it beat Betsy Ross.

Despite these early encounters with beer, I never became a beer drinker. I didn't drink in either high school or college, when beer would have been the bev of choice. When I started drinking in my twenties, I mostly drank mixed drinks or wine, with an occasional beer.

Today, my beer consumption is pretty much limited to a Guinness or two when I'm in Ireland. 

Still, I was intrigued by a piece I saw a few weeks ago that talked about a beer that was available at a recent climate summit, where the delegation from Signapore gave out "free beer made from recycled toilet water."

A hoppy pilsner called NEWBrew that comes in pastel cans decorated with solar panels, rain clouds and cityscapes, the beer is part of a collaboration between a Singaporean company called Brewerkz and the country’s national water agency. The project is designed to draw attention to, and normalize, Singapore’s water reclamation efforts.

An island country at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, Singapore has no major natural freshwater sources of its own. It collects rainfall, imports water from its northern neighbor, Malaysia, removes salt from seawater, and uses filtration systems and ultraviolet light to make wastewater drinkable again. (Source: NY Times)

Wastewater? Gulp! Or, rather, not gulp. Not me, anyway.  And yes, I know, a lot of folks, when criticizing a beer, say that 'it tastes like piss.' Now they may really have a point. 

But water scarcity is a serious problem, getting worse as the world warms up. And if wastewater can be put to good use - as beer, as soda, as water-water (for imbibing or for crop-watering) - then so be it. 

Personally, I'd rather see it go to the crops, but if it's going to make it into a beer can, I'd be happy to hoist a can to my father's memory. 

Here's to good old beer...Drink it down, drink it down, drink it down!