Ed Calkins: How Beer Came to Ireland

Dear MOMI,

The story starts as all legends do, in the middle. It might have looked like the end, be we know it’s the middle, (because I said it was). 

One hundred years before the first Pyramids were built and one thousand years after the labyrinth of Tara was constructed, a hero was facing his disgrace. The tragic frame of Captain O’Winfree begins the tale with his disembarking on the banks of a seamlessly endless river. 

The eight remaining of his nineteen crew who had left Ireland fifteen years earlier and had endured starvation, dehydration, and death with dry eyes now wept openly as they watch their leader do the intolerable… the unthinkable.

What had become of the proud sailors and the embarked to trade their cargo of perfume to Sicilian metal minors for their wares? In short, they got lost. 

Capt. O’Winfree was as skilled and brave as any sailor in the Irish trading feet but he had no sense of direction. It was said that in the fifteen years of his sailing the globe, he never once found his cabin. Each night his respectful men would set up a cot at the place where he gave up searching, never once questioning his pretense that he preferred to sleep under the stars.

As to where he and his crew had actually sailed, we can only guess. Doubtlessly, he was the first captain to keep his single ship afloat while sailing around the world but it didn’t count because no one at that time knew the world was round. 

Anyway, he must have landed in the Americas somewhere around present day L. A. because he called the land, West Sicily. It wasn’t till then that the crew must have wished that they had a living crew member that spoke Sicilian. Some believe that the crew that left port had such a man, but they ate him thirty days after running out of food. This can not be confirmed.

I should point out that this oversight is not as egregious as might be thought of today because there was an ancient protocol for bargaining on docks everywhere along Mediterranean shores. The sailors would wait until no one was on the dock, as being taken as slaves was always possible, and then unload a small portion of goods on the dock before hiding themselves on the ship. 

In turn, the dock workers would land their wares beside the imports and hide themselves. If the sailors felt the goods laid where enough, they would load the dock wares fixing a price. If not, they would load back some (but not all) of their own wares that leaving their counter offer. Barter continued without the merchants ever talking or seeing one another.

Native Americans at this point in time had a different protocol. They usually honored foreign merchants by eating them without ketchup, but if a seaworthy ship were to honor them by leaving gifts of tall, smelly jars on their dock, they could respond in kind. 

To the horror of the hiding crew, they dumped the perfume, and washed out the vessels. The Chief called to his greatest fishermen to produce a fish which they wrapped ceremoniously, to drum sound of the finest drummers, with the current edition of the local newspaper as the wrapping paper.

Seeing no one on the deck, surprised by the lack of greeting, and unintentionally terrifying the crew with his display of unconcern, the chief tossed the fish unto the deck, shrugged his shoulders and returned to his meal of the last merchants to appear at his palace.

Capt. O’Winfree, believing that he was in Sicily, got the idea that he had somehow offended the Mafia. Attempting to sail back the way he had come, he must have sail either south of the horn of South American or north of North American but in either case, into the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea. 

Maybe someone on the ship realized that they were near the coast where Africa and Europe all but touch at the Straits of Gibraltar, which, somehow that passed without knowing. Still looking for those straits the must have found the Nile and continued sailing, hoping to find the Atlantic and take a right to their home in Ireland. Was it the sight of crocodiles that told them they were lost?

So now we are back to the shores of the Nile with Capt. O'Winfree about to do what no man should. I know you know what I’m about to say, but the women among the readers are going to make us say it away, aren’t you? Capt. O’Winfree was going to ask for directions!

An African woman watched in wonder at the approaching ship. It was unlike any vessel she had ever seen, but it smelled like an answered prayer. She was a failing businesswoman trying to upstart her own line of fishnet lingerie, but the local fishermen’s wives and daughters did not think wearing their nets made them attractive. If only she could put that smell in a bottle.

Her name, as she introduced herself to the visibly deflated captain was simply “O”. There are competing accounts as to why. The more credible is that her actual name was fourteen syllables long, each more unpronounceable as the last. 

The other is that her line of lingerie was not meant to be worn, but rather tossed around potential husbands. ‘O’ was the response of the any unenlightened woman she informed who dressed in one. History can not be sure if either was the reason neither her nor her customers ever married locally.

In any case, it is certain that O invited the captain in to her household for a drink to question him about the smells coming from his ship, while he accepted, hoping to learn where he was without admitting he was lost. With many awkward miss-starts, a language common to both of them was discovered and sense found its way into the resulting conversation.

“Perfume you say? And it comes in a bottle? Yes, I know someone who would want your wares. What I don’t know it how to pay for it. This drink we’re having, why it’s called ‘beer’. I’m sorry, I don’t know how to make it. They make it up north in a country called Egypt. Yes, you’re on the Nile river now.”

What can be said about an evening with an Irishman and beer? It was early morning before Capt. O'Winfree staggered to his ship and found his cabin on the first try. The stunned crew was still awake, debating on what fib they would create to explain their captain’s fall from masculinity. It wasn’t till noon the next day when the O boarded the ship that the new plan was explained to them.

Firstly, they were introduced to their new navigator, who know nothing of foreign landscapes but seemed to know instinctively when they were lost and who to ask for directions. Secondly, they were told they were sailing to Egypt to trade the perfume and O’s fishing nets for beer. On the way to Egypt, they did not get lost once.

The trading went very well. After only two months the ship was emptied of perfume and filled to the brim with beer. Only O’s fishing nets were unsold but those found use and beer battered cod became an Irish dish before it came to Ireland. In record time the ship made it back to the Emerald Isle. 

However, some change had happened not explained by the time it took to sail. Not all the beer made it to port, and O and O’Winfree were husband and wife. Some say she got him so drunk and told him of their wedding the next morning but more then likely he had simply gotten used to doing what she told him to do.

To say that the beer sold well in Ireland would be an understatement. In the first week, O’Winfree and his crew became the ten richest people in Ireland with prospects to get even richer on the next trip to Egypt. 

Within two weeks the ship was loaded with perfume to be traded. But about that time, the panic started and Irish everywhere began a frantic search for ways of the Inland. You see, all of Ireland was running out of beer. Suddenly, the perfume merchant vessel was being retooled for passengers hoping to land somewhere were beer was plentiful and cheap.

O’Winfree, his wife, crew, and two hundred passengers became the first of the Irish abroad, whose bodies lie in ever country on the globe but whose hearts never left. You hear their songs in the legends of the wild geese thought to be the souls of those who died away, but return in such form.

Of O’Winfree’s ship, there is no definitive proof that the ship made it back to Ireland, but common sense tells me it did. Beer is a complicated recipe by ancient standards, yet every continent in the world brews it. 

Consider the tales of Dr. Livingston first meeting somewhere deep in the Congo were empires and risen and fallen for centuries with no contact beyond its jungled borders. Consider that the first thing that famed monarch did was offer him a beer.

Now, if there was a single man in history credited with bring beer to Ireland, everyone would have heard his name before Ed Calkins recounted it. To this I point out that a different man was so noted for his courage that he blotted out O’ Winfree when he took the last beer in Ireland and reverse engineered it. This man’s name is Robert Guinse.

              May the roof over your head never fall in, and may the people under it never fall out.

                Ruthlessly yours,

                Ed Calkins, Steward of Tara