# Beer based economy



## Dwarven Gold (Feb 10, 2011)

In my world the main commodity is beer.  The darker the beer, the more valuable.  A pint of Guiness buys you a cow.

It's a fantasy world, but I want to use names of real beers.  Am I drinking more than I can swallow?


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## Juiceman (Feb 10, 2011)

Legally, if a work is done for profit, executives at breweries may have reservations about the unauthorized use of their trademarks, especially if they are not crazy about the way it is used.  However, if the work is popular and solid, the use of their products may be viewed as free advertisment.


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## Ravana (Feb 10, 2011)

What Juiceman said. I'd suggest assembling a good list of varieties of beer (porter, stout, lager, etc.) and then making up the actual names. If you don't mind looking somewhat parodic (or if that's what you're after in the first place), you can make the names transparently derivative: Rolling Stone, Cures, Budd's Wiser… perhaps Genius, for your top-end currency. I'd suggest putting more work into the names than the thirty seconds I spent on it: those are all pretty lame, apart from perhaps the last, after all. 

I would say that, if you want your economy to seem at all realistic, you will need to consider what actually goes into making beer, and how that relates to the value of other commodities. Anything can be used as a medium of exchange (i.e. money), as long as the society is willing to accept it, so as far as that goes, using beer for cash is not a problem. What may be a problem is having a pint of it–no matter how good it is–equal to the value of a cow. Other problems include how big one's wallet has to be to carry one's currency around, how one makes change ("Pardon me, but can you break a pilsner for me?"), and what you do to get the beer in the first place: wages? How many people would still have cash at the end of the week? (Or even the day?)


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## Donny Bruso (Feb 12, 2011)

Ravana makes some good points. With the water quality being what it was in Europe in medieval times, people were drinking beer as a matter of health, since the alcohol & brewing process killed the bacteria in the water. This of course led to people liking their beer, which, let's face it, really has no other use other than to be imbibed for pleasure in modern society. You would need to think up a reason why people aren't literally drinking away their money, and probably some reason why it is so valuable when it is inefficient to transport compared to the more common coinage.


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## Ravana (Feb 15, 2011)

Donny Bruso said:


> …and probably some reason why it is so valuable when it is inefficient to transport compared to the more common coinage.


 
Exactly. That's why coinage was invented in the first place: to have an easily transportable (and convertible) medium of exchange. Barter economies work fine at the local level, but imagine the difficulties if a merchant wanted to buy cloth at a distant port in exchange for chickens. Much easier to sell your chickens for coins and transport those. 

The medium of exchange doesn't even need to be valuable itself, so long as people at both ends of a transaction will accept it with the confidence that they too can use it for their own purchases. This is the basis for paper money–which, originally, was theoretically exchangeable for a certain amount of gold or silver–the British "pound sterling" was literally that: a piece of paper that could be traded in for a pound of silver–though in practice such exchanges rarely happened. Over the past century or so, nearly every country ended this practice, and few if any currencies are now based on silver or gold standards. (In fact, in today's world the majority of the wealth doesn't exist in physical form at all, even as printed money… when was the last time you received your pay in cash?) So perhaps you could have "beer notes," in the same fashion as "bank notes" were originally used; that would at least solve the transport problem. I can think of other ones, but unless you really want to delve deeply into the details of your economy, they probably aren't worth too much worry.


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## Legerdemain (Feb 21, 2011)

Ravana said:


> " you can make the names transparently derivative: Rolling Stone, Cures, Budd's Wiser… perhaps Genius, for your top-end currency.


 
Interestingly enough, I'm not that smart after several pints of Genius myself.


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## Ravana (Feb 21, 2011)

Legerdemain said:


> Interestingly enough, I'm not that smart after several pints of Genius myself.


 
Hee hee. So it's a false advertising claim. Take 'em to Beer Court. Though the most likely tack for the defense to take is that they never said the beer would make you smarter; they were merely implying that this is the beer smart people drink.


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## S.T. Ockenner (Feb 8, 2021)

Weird.


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## Toby Johnson (Feb 8, 2021)

love this idea, but how does it work, does richer and rarer beer mean more in 'money' and does watered down beer worth less?


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## S.T. Ockenner (Feb 8, 2021)

Toby Johnson said:


> does watered down beer worth less?


You mean IS watered down beer worth less? Please remember to use proper grammar.


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## SinghSong (Feb 8, 2021)

How does this actually work, though? What type of fantasy world is this? I mean, is this some sort of world where magic exists, and where there's some sort of rule that beer (which is unique when compared to other alcoholic drinks because it's unstable in the final package) actually does convey empowerment in some manner? And why dark beer in particular? Trying to come up with a detailed, vaguely plausible explanation myself- the most well-described flavor-active esters in beer are ethyl acetate (solvent-buttery like aroma), ethyl caproate, ethyl caprylate (sour apple-like flavor and aroma), isoamyl acetate (fruity, banana aroma), isobutyl acetate, phenylethyl acetate, and ethyl octanoate (honey, fruity, roses, flowery aroma); with the presence of these varied esters (in traces) presenting synergistic effects on individual flavors and interfering with the whole traditional profile of beer.

It's well established that brewing with high gravity worts results in a significant overproduction of acetate esters, and that the balance between esterases (enzymes that hydrolyze esters), and ester-synthesizing enzymes, may be critical for the final ester concentration in finished beer. This balance is achieved during beer aging, since there is a decrease in yeast metabolism due to a lowering in the internal temperature, and an increased rate of ester resorption by the yeast itself; and several parameters, used in the malt production, can also affect the final flavor and aroma of beer, increasingly more so for darker malts. This sensory profile is mainly a result of the Maillard reaction products (MRPs), which are synthesized due to the high temperatures used in dark malts production, with the processing baseline used in dark malt production widely interfering in the Maillard reaction-derived aroma compounds present in wort and, consequently, the beer flavor profile, with studies showing that ester levels decreased with the use of darker malts, most likely due to their higher levels of magnesium;  a key cofactor during the brewing process because it acts in a large number of catalytic reactions and plays a major role in yeast cells protection against environmental stresses, such as the high ethanol concentration in fermenting wort. Amongst its many functions, magnesium acts as a cofactor for phosphoglycerate kinase in the synthesis of pyruvate and ATP, and is directly involved in the reduction of fusel alcohols to fusel acids, since it activates the cytosolic aldehyde dehydrogenase ALD6 enzyme.

So then, if you've got any of these things (i.e, magnesium, phosphoglycerate kinase, the ALD6 enzyme, pyruvate and/or ATP) as your  equivalent of 'midichlorians' in your fantasy world, then sure, it could work.


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## Saigonnus (Feb 9, 2021)

I would think that even if your entire entire economy is based on beer and all of it's constituent parts (a diverse economy is always better than a specialized one), you'd still have to have a medium of exchange, money. The medium wouldn't have to be inherently valuable; like stone chits or whatever, where one is worth a pilsner, another an ale etc... Think about how easy it would be to ruin someone's personal economy just by busting open all their casks and letting the beer pour out onto the ground. An invading force is marching on the capitol, drinking/capturing/destroying all the beer in their wake, leaving all the lords paupered, unable to even pay their troops. Or maybe an unusually hot summer scorches all of the wheat, barley and whatnot, and suddenly, the beer production is 20% of normal. 80% less money means people starve.

For me at least it doesn't sound like it would be terribly smart to have 100% of your economy based on beer and it's subsidies.


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## S.T. Ockenner (Feb 9, 2021)

Saigonnus said:


> For me at least it doesn't sound like it would be terribly smart to have 100% of your economy based on beer and it's subsidies.


ARRR! WE BE PIRATES! WE THINK WITH ARRRRR BEARDS, NOT OUR BRAINS!


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## Electric Bone Flute (Feb 9, 2021)

Dwarven Gold said:


> In my world the main commodity is beer.


What inspired you to do this? Is it based on a joke you made to a friend, a dream you had? This might help.


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## Queshire (Feb 10, 2021)

Eyyyyyyy, this thread is now officially a decade old.

Hmm.... the water runs as red as blood from runoff from the mountain. Drinking it... well, it won't immediately kill you but you'll wish it had. Beer, something safe that you can drink, is wealth. It's come to the point that many miners will take their salary in booze and there's a brisk trade in bottle caps going around.


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## Electric Bone Flute (Feb 10, 2021)

Whoa, really? I didn't notice. I just saw that there were recent replies and joined in.
To be fair, I don't understand the notion of "necroposting." If a conversation is good it should continue. Duplicates just clutter search results.


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