If you’ve ever sung “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” (with or without actual beer drinking involved), then you know perfectly well the answer to the title’s question. The lyrics simply list a set of reasons why it’s always, always a good idea to drink beer, or ale, or anything else alcoholic, rather than to consume anything else. And since this is a folk song there are a number of variations; I’ll include these as well as the lyrics in the John Rutter arrangement that the Cherry Creek Chorale will perform in our October concert, “Harmony and Hops.” (Be sure to come if you can! Here’s the link to buy your tickets.)
Rutter set this text to his own music instead of that found in the original 15th century manuscript, calling upon the accompanists (either the original small orchestra or the piano reduction) to convey a sense of increasing inebriation even while the choir is supposed to maintain “strong rhythm and well-projected text” to the end.”1 The Chorale will try to fulfill this direction!
Perhaps I should explain, just in case it’s needed, what ale actually is, or was: “In medieval England, ale was an alcoholic drink made from grain, water, and fermented with yeast. The difference between medieval ale and beer was that beer also used hops as an ingredient. Virtually everyone drank ale. It provided significant nutrition as well as hydration (and inebriation).”2 Note that ale came in various alcoholic strengths, with “small beer” or “small ale” landing somewhere between 1-3%. Even children drank this version. The persistent belief that the alcohol in these everyday drinks killed the bacteria in the not-very-sanitary water is a myth; in reality the water was made safe to drink because the process of making the ale involved boiling the water. You would need an alcoholic content of somewhere above 60% to kill the pathogens. Yes, you read that right. We can be completely sure that no one had access to anything that strong. Once the water had been boiled, though, the alcohol would have been helpful in keeping the bacterial growth down.
But we all want to know what the weird verses mean, don’t we? So here are all the ones I could find with variations and probable meanings—just don’t try too hard to find anything logical about any of this. It’s all in good fun.
Bring us in good ale, and bring us in good ale;
For our Blessed Lady’s sake, bring us in good ale.
It may seem a little strange that the Virgin Mary (“our Blessed Lady”) would be invoked as the personage in whose honor all this drinking is occurring, but the sacred and secular mingled a great deal more in medieval times than we are used to today.
Bring us in no brown bread, for that is made of bran,
Nor bring us in no white bread, for therein is no game (or “gain”);
“Brown” or whole-wheat bread was for the lower classes and might indeed be mostly bran, since that part of the wheat kernel would have been sifted out to make white flour, which doesn’t have much substance, “game,” or “gain” but was seen as more, well, refined–which it is, and therefore more suitable for the upper classes. So either way, the song says, you’re better off with ale! (And beer or ale is sometimes called “liquid bread,” so there’s another layer of meaning.)
Bring us in no beef, for there is many bones,
But bring us in good ale, for that go’th down at once.
You have to remember, once again, that these are lower-class people who would be eating the bony parts of the cow–including the tail! (There are still recipes around today for oxtail stew–I’ve considered making it myself a time or two but never have.) If a stew is simmered long enough the collagen in the bones and connective tissue breaks down and becomes soft and savory, but you probably still have to eat off the shank bones, or tail bones, or whatever. No plastic-wrapped foam packages at the grocery store for these people! It’s simpler to just drink ale–fast, easy and cheap.
Bring us in no bacon, for that is passing fat,
But bring us in good ale, and give us enough of that;
This one’s pretty clear, no? And remember that pigs back them were much fattier, so your bacon might indeed be mostly (“passing” or “very”) fat.
Bring us in no mutton, for that is often lean,
Nor bring us in no tripes, for they be seldom clean;
We don’t eat mutton much nowadays, since we eat lamb, which hasn’t had a chance to mature into lean, tough mutton. And “tripes,” or the stomach of an animal, are very rarely used these days in anything but something like menudo, a Mexican or Spanish tripe stew. Not to be confused with chitterlings, or chitlins, the intestines of an animal, usually a pig. But both tripe and chitterlings require lots and lots and lots of washing to remove any (ahem) residue. If you don’t have access to clean running water you might not do as thorough of a job as one might like. But the rather unsavory parts of animals couldn’t just be thrown out! They were offal (not awful), and very commonly eaten by, again, the lower classes.
Bring us in no eggs, for there are many shells,
But bring us in good ale, and give us nothing else.
This one’s reaching a little, don’t you think? But you do have to realize that eggs weren’t necessarily all that cheap. (We’ve experienced that very same phenomenon over the past few years, haven’t we?) So just bring us our nice, cheap ale that we don’t have to peel!
Bring us in no butter, for therein are many hairs;
Nor bring us in no pig’s flesh, for that will make us boars (or “bears”);
Butter was churned by hand, of course, and its cleanliness would depend on the milkmaid’s care and also how well-swept the barn was. Human or animals hairs might indeed get into the mix. And people loved their pork, but there has to be some reason to prefer beer to it, so it might turn us into pigs ourselves, or boars. But “bears” rhymes with “hairs,” so that’s probably how that change came about. (Circe would have approved of this verse, I think. Little Odyssey joke there.)
Bring us in no puddings, for therein is all God’s good (or “all goat’s blood”);
Nor bring us in no venison, for that is not for our blood (or “good”–if the previous line doesn’t use the word “good”);
Here you can see clearly how an alternate wording came about. A “pudding” back in the Middle Ages wasn’t something sweet you ate out of a bowl; it was a sausage, an item typically made up of the bits and bobs of meat left over after butchering an animal. So “all God’s good” means “all of the varied stuff that God has provided” (another religious reference that seems strange to us). But maybe someone misheard, or didn’t want to use God’s name that way, so “God’s good” became “goat’s blood.” And there is indeed something called a “blood pudding,” even today, in Britain, although it’s not necessarily made with goat’s blood. I’ll leave it up to you to look that one up.
And we still have to get to the venison! “That is not for our blood” probably/certainly refers to the idea that venison was for the rich, as they would have deer living on their estates which were available only for their use. Poaching, the unlawful hunting of game on these estates, could be severely punished and would only be carried out by lower-class men, of lower-class blood, who needed the food. So either way, eating venison wasn’t a good idea for the crowd at the local tavern.
Bring us in no capon’s flesh, for that is often dear;
Nor bring us in no duck’s flesh, for they slobber in the mere.
The commonly-known verses of the song end with two types of birds that could provide meat. First, what on earth is a “capon”? It’s a castrated rooster. Let’s see–how deep in the weeds do I want to get here? Normally roosters would be kept around for their, shall we say, generative abilities, and people would eat the hens after they’d fulfilled their egg-laying function. A rooster would be killed and eaten only after it had reached the end of its active life, and it would be pretty tough and stringy at that point. Since a rooster gets much bigger than a hen, though, sometimes they would be turned into capons for their superior meat production and also their tenderness and taste. But–they would have to be castrated before they matured, as cockerels. If you turned a cockerel into a capon, though, you’d lose the bird’s abilities to produce fertile eggs in the hens. So, to wind this up, finally, this giving-up-the-rooster-as-lord-of-the-hen-harem process was what made capons “dear,” or expensive. Shakespeare mentions this idea in his “seven ages of man” monologue in As You Like It: “The Justice, In fair round belly, with a good capon lin’d.”
The duck, on the other hand, is portrayed as a bird who grubs around in the “mere,” or “mire,” and therefore whose meat is suspect–a dirty bird, as it were. I love the word “slobber”!
So everyone pounds the table and demands more ale. And that’s how the song ends, with a shouted “good ale!”
I looked around for an individual performance that I liked and this one jumped out, even though it’s a men’s choir and so the soprano and alto lines are sung by male voices. They seem to be having a good time, and be sure to listen to the piano!
- From the “performance hints” on the intro page of the sheet music, John Rutter, (c) Oxford University Press 2016. ↩︎
- From the Facebook page for an organization named Medieval Fayre, 2019. ↩︎
(c) Debi Simons
