"Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy "

Yeah, that was me.

Yeah, I was there when he said it.

Phil =====visit the New York City Homebrewers Guild website:

*For what little it's worth (one can't prove a negative), I just checked five quotations dictionaries (Oxford, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, etc.) and a book of Franklin's lesser-known, less politically-correct essays ("Fart Proudly"), and came up empty. If I Google the expression, I come up with every beer-buff's home page citing that quote.

Anyone got a trustworthy source for that quote?

Yes, Phil, I didn't know if you wanted me to mention you or not (knowing you're a bit sensitive about your age...) BUT, since you've fessed up, it's only fitting to give the COMPLETE quote:

"Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy, particularly when Phil's buying!"

I told you, I was there when he said.

Phil =====visit the New York City Homebrewers Guild website:

(Ignoring the rediculous other comments from others that seem to think they're funny except Alexander....)

Thanks Alexander! You see, when I tried to research it as well, I too came up empty. I'm beginning to think this is an urban legend and he never said it.

So, in other words, no. Thanks for playing. One of those sites even has *two* versions of the same quote.

There is no evidence that Franklin originated the quote. "Poor Richard's Almanack" was just a collection of common quotes - er, "wisdom" - of the time. The beer quote could have come from just about anyone.

*More trustworthy than a web site or the word of an alt.beer wonk, please? Such as a Franklin biography?

I second the "urban legend" speculation.

Well, he did spend a lot of his time in France which is just a hop, skip, and le jump from Belgium. ;^)

Best regards, Bill

Well, Franklin is mentioned several times in BREWED IN AMERICA by Baron (1962) but the quote isn't there. DRINKING IN AMERICA by Lender/Martin (1987) also has brief mention of BF and his spuce beer recipe, but no quote. Ehret's 25 YEARS OF BREWING concentrates on NYC & area and skips Philly and the other colonies. Schmidt's 1960 book TAVERNS OF YESTERDAY discusses Philadelphia brewing without mentioning Franklin. WINES & BEERS OF OLD NEW ENGLAND again mentions Franklin's spruce beer recipe AND notes that it can be found in the 1958 book BENJAMIN FRANKLIN ON THE ART OF EATING (which might have the quote?). However, a UK book, THE BEER DRINKERS COMPANION contains this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson (a generation or two after Franklin, of course):

"God made yeast, as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he loves veetation."

Correcting the typo above in "vegetation".

Looked through a bunch more of "older" beer books and, besides being frustrated at the lack of a index in so many of them (100 YEARS OF BREWING, Will Anderson's various books on beer, Weiner's TASTERS GUIDE TO BEER (1977), Butcher's ALE & BEER A CURIOUS HISTORY, etc) I find that Greg Smith's BEER (1995) has a page or so on Franklin, including a verse he wrote about beer, but not THE quote.

I think if you go through the archives of this newsgroup you will find a detailed explanantion of how this saying came about. From memory, Benjamin Franklin never said that but did make reference to something similar in regards to wine. Also, it wasn't said alone but was part of speech, I believe, and should not be taken out of context. Steve W.

Will do Steve. If what you say is true in regards to wine (!), I'd love to see what the original set of posts dealt with! Hard not to take the supposed original sentence "Beer is living proof...." and relate that to anything other than beer! Sounded pretty direct to me. I will google the archives.