A few years back, I was working on a project about the 17th century mystic Anna Trapnel. (A good text to start with is The Cry of a Stone.) Her prophecies are wild, and her visions frequently exhausted her to the point that she needed bed rest, sometimes for weeks at a time. Accounts of these experiences almost always refer to Trapnel eating next to nothing and drinking only water and “small beer.”
It turns out that Anchor brews something by that name; tonight I finally decided to try it. If my experience is any indication, Trapnel sacrificed by abstaining from the “good stuff.” The beer isn’t exactly bad, but it’s not much tastier than PBR. Thus ends this experiment in history, never to be repeated.