The Hamburglar

We've been loudly alerted by a conservative gentleman on Fox News that Joe Biden is coming after our hamburgers, specifically the patriotic July 4th hamburgers we were really looking forward to. He's going to knock them right off our grill in the name of combating climate change, and Kamala's going to spit in our potato salad. Worse, they're going to make us drink plant-based beer.

I was more than a little disturbed because I had no idea there was meat in beer. In fact I'm a bit of a purist about beer. I don't even want fruit in it. Water, hops, and barley should cover the matter. This in fact is the whole point behind the famous Reinheitsgebot, the law named after that digestive condition that follows the ingestion of German beer, and follows it very closely.

I don't blame the beer. I credit it. I traveled to Germany when I was nineteen and the entire time I was there I had a rollicking case of Reinheitsgebot but it didn't bother me at all. Sure, it resembled Dire Rear in many respects, but there was no feeling of illness involved--it was more of an intestinal enthusiasm. My gut bacteria were totally thrilled with German beer and their zeal tended to become evident quickly. This was not a problem at all unless you couldn't make it to the toilet on time, but if you could, it was kind of fun. German toilets, at least in 1972, had a presentation dais upon which you could deposit and admire your output before whooshing it into the sewer. German people do not have to bother with the stupid little tissue in the stool sample kit and that is one big advantage to being elderly in Germany, along with the beer, which is magnificent. Why they ever went to war we'll never know.

Presumably German beer is great because it is water, barley, and hops only, thanks to the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot regulations that were instituted five hundred years ago to prevent people from introducing impurities into beer such as wheat or rice or Black Death. The Germans keep their meat utterly as a side dish to the beer and usually in the form of pig. If you look up meat-based beer, however, you naturally find bacon beer, because the modern merchant class can't be prevented from putting bacon or pumpkin spice in things, even though both are much better in their original containers (bacon and pumpkin pie). Meat can be and has been fermented, but we do not call it beer. We call it sausage, and it is less refreshing than you'd think, on a hot day.

If there is meat beer anywhere, it's probably in the Arctic, where they might have to brew beer out of caribou, because it's either that or tundra, and fermented tundra is bland. The only other exception that I know of is of course standard Budweiser, which is made out of Clydesdale urine, but you wouldn't want to drink it.

Now it is true that some brewers add animal-centric items to their beer to aid in the filtration process, such as your fish bladders, your decaying animal hides, boiled bones, sinew, and the hooves of animals specially bred for the purpose ("draft horses"). Most of these protein bits are sticky in nature and any random crap that you don't want in your beer will glom onto them and sink harmlessly away. They are not primarily meant to flavor the beer and are not considered ingredients in most countries, any more than your poop is considered one of your ingredients, even though it kind of is.

So based on my research, I would say that the distraught conservative gentleman was correct about Biden making us drink plant-based beer, and it is also true that he's coming after our hamburgers. But Trump would too. He loves hamburgers.