Beer is sacred business, a mood-altering food substance that may have preserved the human species. To drink beer is to be human.

Beer was the driving force that led nomadic mankind into village life. It was this appetite for beer-making material that led to crop cultivation, permanent settlement and agriculture.

This is all thousands of years old. It's the same the world over. Anyone who has ever walked upright has loved beer, celebrated over it, told talks over it, hatched plots over it, courted over it. It's what we do as a species. It's what makes us human. We brew.

I asked these Indians: Do men ever make Chicha? My question was met with gales of laughter. The women howled. Bent over in hilarity, one replied, Men can't brew. Chicha made by men would only make gas in the belly. You are a funny man! Beer is women's work.

Beer is a gift from the goddesses, a soothing balm given our species to bring joy and comfort in compensation for the curse of self-awareness, the awful realization of our mortality