LIQUID BREAD | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Aug 20, 1894

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 20, No. 41.

LIQUID BREAD.

I REMEMBER once seeing over a public house door in Liverpool; "Good ale is liquid bread." I went into the house and said, "Get me a quart of liquid bread."

The landlord said, "Ah, first-rate sign, isn't it?"

"Yes," said I, "if it's true."

"Oh, it's true enough; my beer is all right!"

"Well, give me a bottle to take home." He gave me a bottle of this liquid bread. I took it to Dr. Samuelson, an analytical chemist, and I said to him:—

"I want you to tell me how much bread there is in this bottle."

He smelled it and said, "It's beer."

"No, no," said I, "it's liquid bread."

"Well," he said, "if you will come again in a week, I'll tell you all about it." He charged me three guineas. In a week's time I went to know all about the liquid bread. The first thing about it was there was 93 per cent of water.

"It's liquid, anyhow," I said; "we'll pass that. Now let us get on to the bread."

"Alcohol, five per cent."

"What's alcohol?" I said.

"There's the dictionary; you can hunt it up for yourself." I hunted it up and found alcohol described as a "powerful narcotic poison." Well, I thought, this is the queerest description of bread I ever read in my life. Then he gave me a number of small percentages of curious things, which he had put carefully down on each corner of a piece of white paper, and which amounted to about a quarter of a thimbleful of dirty-looking powder. That was the bread—two per cent.

"And there would not be so much as that," said Dr. Samuelson, "if it were Bass' or Allsopp's. This is bad beer."

"So the better the beer the less bread there is in it?"

"Certainly. It is the business of the brewer to get the bread out of it, not to put bread into it."

This is the simple, scientific truth with regard to beer, and the case is stronger with regard to wine and spirits. There is practically no nourishment in them at all.—Sel.