"There cannot be good living where there is not good drinking."

That statement was made by Ben Franklin, who wasn’t ever President of the United States, though many people seem to think he was. He did, however, become Postmaster General, so that’s something.

Anyway, Ben brings us to today’s post about Tom Standage’s A History of the World in Six Glasses. This book has been on my reading list for quite sometime and I was recently reminded of it. Standage explains how six beverages--beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and soda, have shaped human history—from the symbiotic relationship between the development of agriculture and beer in Mesopotamia to the creation of soda and the rise of globalization in America. You’ll read about wine in Greece and Rome (Bacchic revels and orgies); spirits in the colonial period (pirates and rum, sugar and slavery); coffee during the Age of Reason (the first hipsters in coffee houses); and tea and the British Empire (into the harbor it went, and so on).

Here is just taste, for those beer fans out there:

“Unlike food, beverages can be genuinely shared. When several people drink beer from the same vessel, they are consuming the same liquid; when cutting up a piece of meat, in contrast, some parts are usually deemed more desirable than others. As a result, sharing a drink with someone is a universal symbol of hospitality and friendship. It signals that the person offering the drink can be trusted, by demonstrating that it is not poisoned or otherwise unsuitable for consumption…today, tea or coffee may be offered from a shared pot, or a glass of wine or spirits from a shared bottle. And when drinking alcohol in a social setting, the clinking of glasses symbolically reunites the glasses into a single vessel of shared liquid.”

So next time you accidentally drunk text someone wildly inappropriate in the middle of the night, just explain that you are participating in the universal symbol of hospitality and friendship.