Sad News for all adventurous drinkers:
Beer's "Indiana Jones" researched worldwide
By Douglas Martin
The New York Times
Article Last Updated: 03/01/2007 10:24:54 PM MST
Alan D. Eames followed beer to 44 countries. (The Denver Post)Dummerston, Vt. - Alan D. Eames, who cultivated his reputation as "the Indiana Jones of beer" by crawling into Egyptian tombs to read hieroglyphics about beer and voyaging along the Amazon in search of a mysterious lost black brew, died Feb. 10 at his home. He was 59.
His wife, Sheila, said he died after suffering respiratory failure while he slept.
Eames called himself a beer anthropologist, a role that allowed him to expound on subjects like what he put forward as the world's oldest beer ad, dating to roughly 4000 B.C.
In it, a Mesopotamian stone tablet depicted a headless woman with enormous breasts holding goblets of beer in each hand. The tag line, at least in his interpretation, was: "Drink Elba, the beer with the heart of a lion."
He explored similar topics in seven books, the best known of which was "The Secret Life of Beer" (1995); in myriad radio and television appearances; and in speeches at colleges and other institutions. A typical title: "Beer: A Gift From God, or the Devil's Training Wheels."
Eames followed the golden liquid to 44 countries.
His favorite and perhaps most startling message was that beer is the most feminine of beverages. He said that in almost all ancient societies, beer was considered a gift from a goddess, never a male god. Most often, women began the brewing process by chewing grains and spitting them into a pot to form a fermentable mass.
Eames was born April 16, 1947, in Gardner, Mass. His father was Warren Baker Eames, a Harvard-trained anthropologist. By the time he was 11, young Alan was advertising his magic act. He graduated from Mark Hopkins College in Brattleboro, Vt., now closed.
In 1968, he moved to New York City and opened an art gallery. He spent evenings at the New York Public Library researching beer.
Eames, who never learned to drive or use a computer, wrote his last article about witchcraft and beer. He stopped drinking the stuff eight years ago.
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