What Can We Learn From a Nearly 500-Year-Old Drinking Manual?
Illustration by The Daily Beast/Shutterstock
Before returning to bars, you may want to reconsider your drinking style with help from a 1536 German manual written by a poet.
“People are shirking their duty to human life by shutting everyone out and hiding away at home all day and night, and they gradually become like animals.”
Since March we’ve labored under a demi-Prohibition, a brief era of public drought when most saloons and taverns were shuttered by government decree. We took to drinking at home, in the dark. We lost contact with our pack; we have gone feral.
Yet now the doors are cracking open, gradually, and we’re being invited back into bars, albeit under new rules of engagement. Bar owners have had to hit a reset button, figuring out how to advance through a fog of public anxiety and fear.