One of the joys—and, indeed, perils—of the world wide web is that a simple query can lead you from one place, to another, to another, until you’re far beyond what you were originally searching for. Case in point:

A simple query for beer led me to The Old Foodie, where Mr. Foodie talks about a snippet he read in the New York Times about historical happenings on May 30. Specifically, in 1995:

Using one of the world’s largest radiotelescopes, British scientists have analyzed an interstellar gas cloud and calculated that it contains enough alcohol to make 400 trillion trillion pints of beer.

He then goes on to speculate as to whether U.S. or British trillion is meant, whether that would be low- or high-alcohol beer, and so on. (He gives a little dig against beer drinkers, suggesting the alcohol might be better as champagne, but we’ll ignore that for now.) He then follows with four recipes from the late 19th century, including one for German beer soup.

Professing his ignorance on the topic, he calls for help:

If there is an Astronomer Reader following this blog, please contact me and offer to do a guest blog post…and give us some more information on this massive untapped resource.

And, of course, a “Guest (G)Astronomer” comes to his rescue:

But never despair. There are many varieties of interstellar clouds, and of the type in this case…there are probably somewhere in the neighborhood of three to ten thousand in our own Milky Way galaxy. That still means enough booze for up to four million trillion trillion (a four with thirty zeroes after it) pints! That’s about a million pints per person on Earth…each minute…for the next billion years.

As a bit of an astronomy fan, I found a lot of the information quite fascinating. I especially like his reference to light-struck beer. The best bit though, to me, was the song attributed to the Sumerian Goddess Inanna:

While I circle around the abundance of beer,
While I feel wonderful, I feel wonderful,
Drinking beer, in a blissful mood,
Drinking liquor, feeling exhilarated,
With joy in the heart [and] a happy liver —
While my heart full of joy,
[And my] happy liver I cover with a
garment fit for a queen!
The heart of Inanna is happy again,
The heart of the queen of heaven is happy again!