Elixir of the Gods

by LJ

"What did you say this was?" he asked.

"I don’t know what it is," said Dabin. "Something my wife Ninkasi was trying. It’s sat in those jugs for a while now."

With a prayer to the gods that it was not poisonous, he took a sip. And another. And turned towards Dabin with wide eyes. "Marvelous!"

Dabin tried it, concurring with his young friend. He looked at the jugs, all full of this elixir. "What shall we call it?"

He contemplated the issue carefully. Calling upon all his many years (twenty-three in all), Methos proclaimed, "We will call it ‘beer’."

[finis]

A/N: Ninkasi was the Sumerian goddess of beer. The first pictoral evidence of beer dates from about 4,000 BCE, about 1,000 years before Methos’s time (unless the time before his first quickening 5,000 years ago is *really* foggy). For the sake of the Really Old Guy, the timeline has been skewed just a wee bit here.... In any case, if it were new at any point in Methos’s lifetime, it would have been very, very early on.

There is a hymn to Ninkasi about beer-making, which can be found in an article here: http://www.funet.fi/pub/culture/beer/homebrew/docs/ninkasi_article This article describes a modern attempt to recreate Sumerian beer based on the hymn to Ninkasi.

Another article on the origins of beer here: http://www.funet.fi/pub/culture/beer/homebrew/docs/ninkasi_article