Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Puzzle Box!

Now, that is probably more of a welcome back for me, rather than you, as I’ll have to assume that you have been around these parts more than I have as of late. Last time I showed up here, I was winding up my life in Winnipeg, preparing for a really big adventure across the the ocean in Europe. The trip was fantastic and will actually be the topic of my article today. This will resemble a bit of a travel blog, but it all has its point rooted in building and personalizing your cube.

The Start of the Addiction 

I’m going to rewind for a moment and talk about the night that I bought my [card]Mother of Runes[/card]. I remember talking to the guy behind the counter and saying, “Mother of Runes is a cube card right?”

He laughed and said, “Of course it is!”

I replied, “I’ll take one.”

He asked me which one I wanted, and I responded by asking for the cheapest one possible. He laughed again and said, “You say that now, but later you’ll want the foil one, then the foreign foil one, then the altered foreign foil one and then… and then… and then…”  

“No, not me,” I said.

A few years and a foil [card]Liliana of the Veil[/card], [card]Flickerwisp[/card], [card]Falkenrath Aristocrat[/card], [card]Pack Rat[/card], [card]Lone Missionary[/card], [card]Vendillion Clique[/card], [card]Thirst for Knowledge[/card], [card]Snapcaster Mage[/card], [card]Cryptic Command[/card], and any other cube foil I have laid my eyes upon later, I am now looking for my foil [card]Mother of Runes[/card].

The Trip

I wanted to have a really cool article to write, either while on my trip or as soon as I got back, which was two and half months ago. I had to think of something I could do for my cube throughout the whole trip. My idea was this: in each city that I could buy Magic cards in, I would buy a foil that matched the theme of that city or country, or however I could justify buying a foil for my cube. Perfect! We were gone for 45 days in five different countries. I should have had my cube totally finished by the time we got back. Alas, this is not how it worked out.

My wife and I landed in Dublin. As soon as we got off the plane, we dropped our bags off at the hostel and headed to a pub for some dinner. (Here I had my first Guinness, but that is a whole other story. In short, in North America I am embarrassed when a friend orders a Guinness at my table. In Ireland, it is the nectar of the gods! From there, we headed to the Guinness factory, which was amazing, but again, a story for another time.)

It was the next day that my wife and I scouted out the local MTG shop. Forgive me, but I forget the name. It was a small, quaint place and the guy working there was wonderful. I told him I was from Canada and what my cube mission was and we dove into their singles binders straight away.

I asked him what he thought a themed cube card could be and he said, “Anything to do with drinking, vikings, or leprechauns.” We dug through Lorwyn looking for a foil [card]Glen Elendra Archmage[/card] to no avail. After a while, he gave up and left me on my own to scour the binders while we chatted.

Eventually, I came across an [card]Oath of Druids[/card], but it was non-foil. I asked him, “Druids are Irish right?” He went on to tell me all about the druids that had lived in Ireland thousands and thousands of years ago and I was sold! I left with a non-foil Oath of Druids that I cannot imagine ever replacing with even a free, altered, foreign foil, because I got it from the land of the druids with all of the stories attached to it. I now have one of the coolest conversation pieces I own in my cube and I get to use it and talk about when ever someone flips something crazy off of it. I can say, “You know that Grislebrand was summoned from Dublin, eh?” and let Magic do what it does best and create an awesome social atmosphere!

High-Power Personalization

It was after this visit with the guy in Dublin that I realized that this idea fit right into the Puzzle Box ethos: high-powered play without a high-powered budget. With this concept of personalizing your cube, you can have high-powered personalization without a high-powered budget!

I plan on finding little stickers of the flags for each country where I bought cube cards and putting them on the perfect fit over each card’s set symbol to try and further spark the conversation. If you are talented and buy a card like [card]Cogwork Librarian[/card] in Alexandria, you could paint an Egyptian or Minnesota flag on it and have your own Librarian of Alexandria.

Of course, you don’t need to travel to other countries to buy themed cards that you can attach a story to. If you come to Canada during winter, you can get an [card]Icy Manipulator[/card] from Ice Age and tell people how bloody cold it gets here. Or if you go to Florida, you can get a [card]Mother of Runes[/card] next door to your grandmother’s summer home. If you are in Paliano, which is actually a place just a little to the southeast of Rome, you could perhaps pick up a Paliano and find the mayor or any citizen to sign it for you.

Another Souvenir Another Reflection

One of my favorite parts of this whole exercise was that it really got me thinking about what I was seeing. When we were in Paris and went through the Louvre, we went on a tour through Napoleon’s apartment. It was a spectacle! Everything was dripping in gold and covered in the most plush of upholstery.

One thing that my wife noticed was that most of the many, many paintings were of hunting scenes. Not just scenes of men riding with guns and dogs, but the actual moment when the prey that was being stalked was being killed, either by gunshot or dog bite. It was quite violent. As we walked around and heard bits of the tours describing how the monarchy taxed and taxed and taxed and gave nothing back but misery, it occurred to me that that felt very Orhsovish. It was rich and took on the official appearance of religion and benefit for its people, but their actions resembled more the themes of the paintings: death.

After the Louvre, we had planned on going to find the Magic shop to find the card for my cube. There was a perfect choice: [card]Mortify[/card]. It was black and white, it killed creatures and enchantments.  It’s no [card]Vindicate[/card], but that’s okay. To be fair to France, in a small town called Altkirch, where my wife’s family is from and there are no opportunities to buy cards, I would have bought an [card]Eternal Witness[/card]: it was beautiful!

That’s what I have for this installation of the Puzzle Box. There are lots of other souvenir cards to talk about and really, really cool stories and lessons to attach to them. Next time: London, the Graffiti Tunnel, Lambeth, and Thalia.

Thanks for lettin’ me come and hang!

Andrew

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Serum Visions!

First things first, I must apologize for my absence these last two weeks. My wife and I are moving to Toronto and just did the big packing blitz. It left absolutely no room for writing. But here we are, back and ready to bottle! 

This week we’re going to be following up on Brew Day in 15 Steps. If you by chance actually brewed your first beer on that day, it’s time to bottle. I know this because I started a brew not long after that article was published, and it’s time to bottle that one. 

There are a few things that you need to do before you bottle your beer to ensure that you aren’t creating little exploding brew bombs. You are going to need to check your final gravity (FG) at least twice with your hydrometer, to make sure it has finished fermenting. If you remember from the brew day, we check the Starting Gravity (SG) to find out how much sugar is in the wort. This lets us know approximately what the final alcohol percentage will be. We check the gravity again, once the air lock has mostly stopped bubbling (probably seven to fourteen days after the brew), to find out how much sugar is left. Then we check again a few days later to make sure that the amount of sugar has not gone any lower: say from 1.013 down to 1.011. If you find this has happened, this means that the beer has not finished fermenting. Once you have checked your gravity twice a couple of days apart and it has not changed, you are ready to bottle.

To understand why this is so important—because it is very important—I’ll need to explain what happens during the actual fermentation. Yeast is a living organism that feeds on sugar. Like all living organisms, it produces waste from what it eats. In the case of yeast, that waste is alcohol and carbon dioxide. Yeast will continue to consume the sugar until all of the digestible stuff is gone. So, if you bottle your beer before all of the initial sugar has been digested, and then, add more during the bottling process, there will be too much carbon dioxide inside of the bottle and it will explode. 

Steps to Bottling 

Step One: Clean and sanitize everything that will come in contact with your beer! Everything that touches, or even could touch, the beer at this point must be sanitized—no exceptions!

Step Two: Place your fermentor of beer on a raised surface, like a table or countertop. Then place your six-gallon bottling bucket right underneath a carboy on the floor (this is best done in the kitchen where you can get things wet with out being worried about it).

Step Three: Place your sanitized racking cane (which will be connected to about four to five feet clear vinyl tubing) into the brew. Try to keep the bottom of the cane about three to four inches away from the surface of the beer.

Step Four: Syphon the beer from the fermentor into your bottling bucket. Try to leave as much of the sediment, or trub, on the bottom of the fermentor as possible. You will have to tilt your fermentor to keep your racking cane as far away from the trub for as long as possible. Don’t worry to much about getting every drop of beer.

A couple notes on this step:

    a. Many people (including myself) start the syphon with their mouths. If you are going to do this, you must sanitize you mouth and lips. I personally use some bad tequila as a mouth wash just before starting the syphon. 

     b. You must syphon “quietly.” This means you minimize the amount of splashing that happens during the transfer. If you mix in too much air/oxygen into your beer at this point, it will taste like green apples and you will be more inclined to dump your beer rather than drink it.

Step Five: Add priming sugar to your beer (the sugar that will make your beer carbonate). There are a couple different options for this step:

     Option 5A: Carbonation Drops – These are drops of sugar that are pre-made to be the correct amount of sugar to carbonate a single bottle of beer. To use these, you simply put one drop into each bottle and then fill each bottle. This is by far the easiest and safest way of carbonating beer for a beginner.

     Option 5B: Malt Extract or Dextrose Priming Sugar

Step 5B.1: Measure out 3/4 cup dextrose priming sugar or 1-1/4 cup of dry malt extract.

Step 5B.2: Boil chosen priming sugar with a cup or so of water for five minutes to sterilize.

Step 5B.3: Add to beer in bottling bucket and stir gently for ten to fifteen seconds. Do not mix in any air!

Step Six: Wash and sanitize all bottles! This means getting all debris and dirt out of the bottles and thoroughly coating the inside of the bottle with no-rinse sanitizer. Try to get as much of the sanitizer out as you can, but do not rinse.

Step Seven: Syphon beer into the bottles quietly: do not mix in air! Fill the bottles until the beer reaches the very top of the bottle—when you remove the bottling wand you’ll be left with the perfect amount of empty space.

For this step, you’ll be attaching your bottling wand to the other end of your tube that is connected to you racking cane. The bottling wand makes it so you have a controlled flow of beer into your bottles.

Again, if you are starting the syphon with your mouth (a great opportunity to have a couple of mouthfuls!), you need to sanitize your mouth and lips. 

Step Eight: Cap bottles using sanitized caps. There are many types of cappers for glass bottles. If you get a floor capper, where you use a lever to push the caps on to the bottle, you can use any pop top beer bottle. If you are going to use a butterfly capper, you need to use bottles with short ridges underneath the top lip of the bottle. The easiest bottles like this to find are MGD, Heineken, Stella, and Corona. 

Please do not go out and buy a fresh case of these. You can go to vendors or local watering holes and ask to buy cases of empties. Not everyone will do this, but there’s a good chance that someone in your area will help you out.

Do not use twist-off style bottles! These may or may not seal. If they don’t, it will result in flat and oxidized beer!

Step Nine: Put your beer in a warm place to let it carbonate for two weeks. I do encourage you to try your beer after it has been in the bottle for only a week. It probably will not be very good, but you will start to learn what beer tastes like during different stages of its life. 

Step Ten: Your beer will be drinkable after two weeks in the bottle, pretty good after three to four weeks, and at its peak (most likely) from five to seven, depending on what kind you have made. One thing is always for certain: the longer you wait, the better it will be. And the last bottle is always the best!

[deck title= Bottling Apparatus List]
1 Bottling Bucket
1 Racking Cane
1 Bottling Wand
1 No Rinse Sanitizer
1 Priming Sugar or Carbonation Drops
1 Beer Bottle Capper
6 feet of vinyl tubing
56 Caps
56 Pop Top Bottles
[/deck]

This is the bare minimum set up one needs for bottling. If you would like to cut the bottle cleaning time by 75 percent, I recommend a bottle washer that you screw on to your tap in your kitchen, as well as a wonderful contraption called a Vinator bottle washer. If you are planning on getting into this hobby with any vigor, these two pieces are a must!

Now Drink

So there you have it! In Twenty-five steps and a little waiting is all it takes to have 56 beers that you crafted yourself! I love this hobby, and if you get into it, I know you’ll love it too!

If you noticed that I have missed anything, please let me know. If you have any questions or need any help, you can hit me up on Twitter at @awcolman.

Thanks for hangin’, everyone.

Andrew

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Puzzle Box!

Here we are. This is it! This is the mutli-colored section of the cube, and it’s the last section to be posted. After today, anyone can come to this website and find a powerful and balanced cube for under $200. This is exciting! I’m just going to dig right in because there’s lot’s to be said this week.

General Notes on the Gold Section of the Puzzle Box

In this cube, the largest and most detrimental omission due to the financial constraints is the mana base. That being said, just because you don’t have all of the very expensive lands does not mean you won’t have a lot of fun playing this list. When I started building my own cube, I had only a few of the M10 check lands and ten [Card]Terramorphic Expanse[/Card]s as fixing—and it was an absolute blast to play. Why is that? Because you are going to build the best decks you can, they will be at balanced power levels, blowouts won’t happen, and games will just be fun. I would, however, recommend that the mana base is the first place you put any real money into this list. If you don’t already have the ten shocks, you can start by getting the M10 check lands as they are quite inexpensive. However you feel like acquiring the lands for cube is up to you. One thing I would suggest, though, is that you add them in cycles to keep things balanced.

Regarding the dual lands, and mana rocks for that matter, in our list I chose the best lands and mana artifacts within our price restrictions. Each archetype got one dual land and one mana rock—which one depended on the focus of the archetype.

Control and midrange decks such as Dimir, Azorius, Selesnya, Orzhov, Golgari, Simic, and Izzet got the Ravnica bounce land and its signet. Rakdos was the only guild to get its pain land and Mirrodin talisman. Gruul and Boros each got its corresponding pain land and signet. These two guilds are good for aggro but also for [card]Wildfire[/card] deck. The pain land gives each deck the option for a turn-one [Card]Goblin Guide[/Card] and a mana rock aids in breaking the symmetry of [Card]Wildfire[/Card] and [Card]Armageddon[/Card].

I think it’s interesting how things ended up balancing out. You’ll find that the signets will be very high picks in this cube because of the general lack of fixing. What this might mean is that aggro decks will be happy to main deck a [Card]Pillage[/Card] or [Card]Disenchant[/Card],  because it could very well blow out an opponent that is relying on signets for fixing. I walked in late at my LGS one night and there was a six-man team cube draft going on. Two team members were looking at a decks and a comment was made that the deck just died to a [Card]Stone Rain[/Card] because the mana base was so greedy. In our case, we don’t run [Card]Stone Rain[/card], as there aren’t that many targets for it (compared to a normal cube). For this list, where the concentration of mana-fixing artifacts is very high, that comment translates rather well to [Card]Disenchant[/Card].

Lets look at the lists.

Azorius

These colors are firmly rooted in control. There won’t be much opportunity for a U/W tempo deck because we’re missing cards like [Card]Geist of Saint Traft[/Card], [Card]Delver of Secrets[/Card], [Card]True-Name Nemesis[/Card], and [Card]Master of Waves[/Card]. If you have these and would like to push blue tempo rather than control, that’s a good place to start.

[deck title=Azorius]
[Cards]
Azorius Chancery
Judge’s Familiar
Azorius Signet
Azorius Charm
Plumeveil
[/Cards]
[/deck]

Dimir

Dimir’s cards are a little more flexible. [Card]Psychatog[/Card] and [Card]Shadowmage Infiltrator[/Card] are good cards to have in both U/B tempo or U/B control decks. This is a better color combination for tempo than U/W, mainly because there is so much instant-speed removal and more removal attached to creatures.

[deck title=Dimir]
[Cards]
Dimir Aqueduct
Dimir Signet
Far // Away
Psychatog
Shadowmage Infiltrator
[/Cards]
[/deck]

Rakdos

Rakdos in this list is pure aggro, mainly made up of above-curve one- and two-drops and unconditional removal. Fixing that is immediate and causes yourself damage: what more could you want? An obvious exclusion is [Card]Murderous Redcap[/Card]. Add it if you’d like, but I wanted to keep this section as focused on aggro as possible due to the fixing that we have available to us.

[deck title=Rakdos]
[Cards]
Sulfurous Springs
Rakdos Cackler
Spike Jester
Talisman of Indulgence
Terminate
[/Cards]
[/deck]

Gruul

Gruul is a bit of a mashup in this list. It has two one-drops and a [card]Bloodbraid Elf[/card]. I included the two one-drops to help out aggro decks and [Card]Bloodbraid Elf[/Card] because it’s a card I am extremely happy to have in my deck all the time! If you don’t like this section, there is certainly room for innovation here. Have at it!

[deck title=Gruul]
[Cards]
Kird Ape
Tattermunge Maniac
Bloodbraid Elf
Gruul Signet
Karplusan Forest
[/Cards]
[/deck]

Selesnya

Selesnya is by far the deepest guild as far as the quantity of quality cards. Luckily for us, [Card]Kitchen Finks[/Card] was just reprinted and can be found fairly inexpensively. However, when Modern season hits, this may need to be adjusted as it could break our budget depending on if Reddit decides to buy it out.

[deck title=Selesnya]
[Cards]
Selesnya Sanctuary
Dryad Militant
Qasali Pridemage
Selesnya Signet
Kitchen Finks
[/Cards]
[/deck]

Orzhov

I really like this selection of cards. [Card]Lingering Souls[/Card] is very powerful and has thankfully been reprinted enough times to allow for its inclusion. I find [Card]Tidehollow Sculler[/Card] to be a very fun and powerful card to play.  [Card]Mortify[/Card] is awesome removal with a sometimes-relevant second option. If I know that my opponent has a [Card]Curse of the Shallow Graves[/Card], I’m going to be happy this kills it!

[deck title=Orzhov]
[Cards]
Orzhov Basilica
Tidehollow Sculler
Orzhov Signet
Mortify
Lingering Souls
[/Cards]
[/deck]

Golgari

This is an interesting section. In most lists, it includes removal spells and more removal spells, such as [Card]Abrupt Decay[/Card], [Card]Pernicious Deed[/Card], [Card]Putrefy[/Card], [Card]Maelstrom Pulse[/Card], and [Card]Vraska the Unseen[/Card]. We can afford none of these, so we get to include all the fun creatures that other cubes don’t get to include! As Mark Rosewater always says, “Restriction breeds creativity,” and being creative is always more fun.

[deck title=Golgari]
[Cards]
Golgari Rot Farm
Lotleth Troll
Putrid Leech
Golgari Signet
Dreg Mangler
[/Cards]
[/deck]

Simic

Simic is great because it lends us one of the very few combat tricks in the cube: [Card]Snakeform[/Card]! Again, because of our monetary restrictions, we are going to need to include some cards that are not as good, but may end up being more fun. So are they truly not as good, even when more fun? Only you can say.

[deck title=Simic]
[Cards]
Simic Growth Chamber
Simic Signet
Trygon Predator
Snakeform
Mystic Snake
[/Cards]
[/deck]

Izzet

Izzet is the most shallow of our guilds. The one staple that we have in this guild is [Card]Ral Zarek[/Card], but he doesn’t make or break the section. Again, here we have room for innovation. If you would like to push U/x tempo you could add [Card]Frostburn Weird[/Card] here. Use your imagination and see if you can come up with some fun things to include.

[deck title=Izzet]
[Cards]
Izzet Boilerworks
Izzet Signet
Fire // Ice
Izzet Charm
Prophetic Bolt[/Cards]
[/deck]

Boros

Here we have the home of aggro: one-drops and some burn spells. I would have included the Mirrodin talisman had it existed to help out aggro further. But I’m not sad to include the signet instead, because we have [Card]Wildfire[/Card] in the red section.  Not much else to be said here other than if you have an [Card]Ajani Vengent[/Card], you should get that guy in here because he is a pack one, pick one all day long!

[deck title=Boros]
[Cards]
Battlefield Forge
Figure of Destiny
Boros Signet
Boros Charm
Lightning Helix
[/Cards]
[/deck]

And So It Has All Come Together

Everything about cube can be debated. I invite that debate in the comment section. Considering that I have $8 left from the $200 budget, you could easily call me out for not including cards like [Card]Murderous Redcap[/Card]. However, I made sure each section got at least one or two of its non-budget inclusions and kept things at their lowest cost which I felt was in the spirit of this list.

Here I have included the link to this list on cube tutor so you can see it in its fullness.

I will be back next week to wrap up and reflect on this project and talk about some plans going forward. If you have any ideas of what you would like to see, please share them in the comment section. Or if you’ve been building this list as we have been going along, (and I know there is at least one or two of you), I would love to hear about it in the comment section. Or you can hit me up on Twitter @awcolman.

As always everyone, thanks for hangin’.

Andrew

It’s been a quiet week in the MTG world it seems. Or maybe I haven’t been paying any attention. I was stretching to come up with a topic that was related to the MTG world and my wife recommend to “just give them a good old history lesson.” I though that was a great idea but it needed to be inspired. I wandered over to the Mother Ship (Daily MTG) and there it was, [card]Black Lotus[/card], as the Card of the Day. That’s the hallmark beginning of the impressive history of our game.

The earliest beer has been a topic of beer scholars for around hundred years. They have found more than 800 paintings on the walls of the pyramids and had temples dedicated to the goddess beer. Home brewing was an everyday occurrence, and existed as sustenance for the people of the time. There were also major breweries alongside microbreweries. There were different styles, ingredients, and regions. So let’s dig in to some fun stuff.

The Gods and Goddess of Beer

As I think we can all remember from elementary school, Egyptians life revolved around the culture’s gods and the stories that surrounded them. Beer was no exception to this rule. It was believed that Dionysus was the inventor of beer. There is a somewhat contradictory story that reads that Dionysus actually fled to Mesopotamia because he was disgusted that the Egyptians enjoyed beer. Take from this what you will, it’s all here to say that the gods and beer were linked right from the beginning. If, however, Dionysus invented beer and somehow humans got a hold of it, we would need to be able to produce more of it. Since we are not gods who can just create things from nothing, we needed a process of making it: brewing. With that process came the goddess Hathor (see statue). She was the “inventress of brewing.” Another name that she carried was “the mistress of intoxication.” The temple that was dedicated to her was aptly named “the place of drunkenness.”  We then have another goddess associated with beer, her name is Menqet. She was often seen with Hathor and carried the name “the goddess who makes beer” and also “overseer of the brewery women.”

The Earliest Home Brew

It is not a surprise, then, that the people who made the beer in this culture were the women. At home the women would have often brewed the beer as it may have been considered a task akin to cooking daily meals. Reasons for this might have been that beer was safer to drink than the water and it was also a source of calories and nutrients. They were not yet using hops to preserve their beer, so this home brewed beer would have been much lower in alcohol content. Therefore, it would not have been able to keep infections at bay for very long. So it would have been consumed very fresh, possibly as soon as the primary fermentation was complete. If the beer is only being made at two to three percent alcohol, it would only take a few days to completely ferment and would need to be consumed within a few days. It seems like it would not be unreasonable to say that they may have been brewing at home two or three times a week.

If you read my Grain to Glass post, you’ll have a good idea how beer makes into your glass. The process used in ancient Egypt, however, has been hotly debated. In the last thirty years, the argument has been distilled down into what we can actually discern from the information that’s left to us. The debate stems from a long artistic interpretation tradition of beer scholars. Scholars took art on the walls of the pyramids and used it to discern ingredients, processes, and other elements of the beer culture in ancient Egypt. These interpretations have led to some misconceptions, but it is now generally agreed that the beer was actually made from bread that had lots of yeast added to it. It was lightly baked and then stomped to break it up much like wine grapes. It would have been put into a large vessel for fermentation, then strained and put into a jar to be sealed for storage or transportation.

Big Business

Wait a second, I just said that these beer would have been made every few days and drunk very quickly. But just like we have big breweries today, there were big breweries back then. Egyptian beer was produced at such high volumes that breweries were able to supply all the local demand as well as leave some left over for export. The most popular beer from Egypt would have been from a city called Pelusium. It was so popular, in fact, in later times it was exported to Rome. Ian Hornesly writes in his book what this exported beer might have looked like.

“The possibility exists that we are looking at an ancient equivalent or our much-exported “India Pale Ale” from the ninetieth century. Beer destined for export must have had some “keeping quality to them, maybe via a herbal addition. Maybe IPA actually signified ‘Imperial Pelusian Ale’ ”

Making a Living

With all of this beer being brewed in Egypt and imported from abroad, you might wonder what it is that they did with it. Or maybe you don’t, drinking it seems like a fairly obvious answer, but that is only part of the story. Beer and bread were actually a means of payment for working certain jobs. One person might be paid four khar (ancient Egyptian unit of measurement) of emmer (a type of wheat) and 1.5 khar of barley per month. This works out to roughly 202 kilograms or 444 pounds of grain per month. The person being paid does not receive this as raw grain, but rather receives it in its processed form of beer and bread. To put this into some perspective, it takes around 10 pounds of grain to make five gallons of 4%-ABV beer. So, 444 pounds of grain will make you 44.4 five-gallon batches of beer. Each five gallon batch of beer yields around 55 bottles, so in the end you end up with 2,420 bottles of beer per month, or 80 per day. There are, however, a great number of caveats to these calculations, not all of which I will be able to discuss here. I’ll mention a couple, though, the first one being that one person’s wage would probably be feeding a whole household. It would also be fair to say that a given household might want some bread during a given month, which would cut down drastically on the amount of beer it would get, especially with a larger family. So after these, and still other, allowances have been made, it’s probably fair to say that a worker would earn about a six pack of beer per day. Not too bad if you ask me.

And finally I’ll end with a list of names that the Ancient Egyptians would have called the varying styles of beers.

Dark beer, Sweet Beer, Thick Beer, Iron Beer, Garnished Beer, Friend’s Beer. Beer of the Protector, Beer of Truth, Beer Which Does Not Sour, and Beer of Eternity. I personally want to try the Friend’s Beer and the Beer of Truth, which was drunk by the 12 gods who protected the Shrine of Osiris.

There’s much I have sadly had to leave out, but I’ll have another swing at the ancient Egyptian beer culture one day. Until that day, I’ll leave you with the main resource I used so you can go dig in for yourself if you’d like. The book is called The History of Beer and Brewing by Ian S. Hornsey, Published by the Royal Society of Chemistry in Cambridge, England.

Style of the Week: Wheat Beer/ Hefeweizen