"If
Bacchus is the God of Wine, then who is the God of
Beer?"
Gambrinus! Sometimes called "the Saint" or the "King" of Beer, he's the inventor of toasting, the patron of brewers, and his birth, somewhere in the far mists of the Middle Ages. Somehow I always thought of him as being like King Lear, living somewhere in the Dark Ages, perhaps mythical, like the Chinese Emperors who invented hunting and literature. It was in with a kind of shock I read in the words of the Gambrinus Importing Company:
The name "Gambrinus" is a corruption of the name of a thirteenth-century Belgian Duke, Jean I or "Jan Primus" of Brabant.
Now you know.