The Mesopotamian recipe for beer started the reverie. Recipes for beer wandered about, through good luck and bad through the ages. Beer was codified as immutable law by Wilhelm of Bavaria's Jahrzeit des Reinheitsgebot of April 1516, specifying barley malt, water, hops, and yeast. Anything extra, anything different, anything not pure and natural was tantamount to a crime against nature. It was brewers' art to each and all create their distinctive beers within the law. How far we have come! Budweiser boasts of brewing its all but flavorless and colorless sap using real rice instead of surplus corn and barn sweepings like its competitors. Budweiser makes money; beer from fungally degraded rice and whatnot is a regrettable but obligatory adjunct to that end.
The People's Republic of Canada is famous for its hearty beers that fuel hockey passions and cool brains heated to boiling by cabin fever wrought of interminable, brutal winters. Canuckistan is famous for its paper mills that discharge surreptitious loathsome massive dribbles born of internally reprocessed untold megatons of black liquor - the odious aqueous sulfurous effluent end to lignin chemically dissociated from cellulose wood fiber - into its waterways, at least in the good old days. In the good new days black liquor is dehydrated and burned as fuel solids, causing processing problems, pollution problems, and profitability problems. How lucky the bottom line was that a senior Vancouver Pulp and Paper executive upon popping the first can of a spoiled Labat six pack was struck by an idea! Lucien Poswilly took a swig of the slime, wondered whether yeast could ferment black liquor, and proceeded to finish the can. It may have been pig swill, but it was alcoholic pig swill.
A few thousand gallons of black liquor later researchers carried a most curious quaff into the VP&P, Ltd. boardroom. It sported a foamy head, a luxuriant aroma, an aspect black as midnight and - courtesy of some mighty tough fungi - no molecule capable of eliciting proximate human demise. Lignin is wrought of hydroxylated and methoxylated aromatic nuclei bearing three-carbon chain alkylation. Some very naughty yeast harboring a creative biochemical fondness for diet pills, nasal decongestant, XTC, and crystal meth had found a way around the toxicities of coniferyl, coumaryl and sinapyl alcohols by modifying their molecular structures into something more familiar.
Each chilled mug grasped in senior executive hands rose to senior executive lips. A thick black swallow wormed down senior executive throats. It had a intense smell, a vile taste and a recreational pharmaceutical punch like a hydraulic ram. Cries of "Good, eh?" and "You betcha!" arose from abruptly bent minds. The waste sumps and laboratories of Vancouver Pulp and Paper, Ltd. were proud parent to Maximum Black, diluted ten-fold for general consumption. (Water is even cheaper than effluent.)
Maximum Black went public riding a tsunami of ecological bafflegab. All natural! Naturally grain-free! Naturally brewed for you to save our rivers! The natural drink of the forests of British Columbia! Wipe your carbon fotbprint with Maximum Black! Anyone who could keep a pint of Maximum Black under his short ribs for 20 minutes spent the rest of the hour raving drunk, utterly blissed, and freed of embarrassing nasal discharge. Local breweries shifted production from gurgles of pale ale to rivers of black, Maximum Black!
Faced with a loaded, plastered, looped, and juiced citizenry Ottawa did what it had to do. It trebled the sin tax on Maximum Black and laughed all the way to the Exchequer. Maybe the bastards would be rendered numb enough to re-elect incumbents next election. Canada recorded the first trade surplus in its history, proceeded to balance its books, and decided that clearcutting forests was not so bad after all. They could always build condominiums to hide the bare dirt.
Targets of Enviro-whiner vituperation and bile for three decades, Canukistani paper mills were suddenly caught short by demand for their chemical waste outstripping their ability to process the main product. Recycling of paper fell to nothing as the world drowned in an avalanche of beautiful, white, crisp, strong pre-consumer paper. Keep that black liquor coming!
Thus it was that the entirety of First World civilization dove into its own bellybutton and perished. Pigmented rabble from hot and humid lands overran the once mighty. The wealth of planet Earth and its mankind were finally secured by the avatars of Gaia seeking just and deserved redress for untold millennia of oppression. One generation later a formidable infrastructure of asphalt, concrete and steel; electric power, communication, public sanitation, consumer production and recreation lay in shambles as worldwide population stabilized at 600,000,000 people. The future was secure and unchanging, with mankind returned to harmony with the environment. Diseased and malnourished children forever faced a future maximum black.
Moral: Life is too dear to drink bad beer.