“Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”  Benjamin Franklin.

I don’t know about you, but I think that I can come up with better proof that God loves us.  But beer and the church are once again intersecting.

As brewing beer has become a more competitive industry, it would seem that marketers are now going after the faithful.  From the Chicago Tribune…

Charlie Papazian, author of “The Complete Joy of Homebrewing,” the undisputed bible of the craft, can cite many intersections of beer and the divine. Mayan and Aztec priests controlled the brewing of beer in pre-Columbian days, monks in Bavaria brewed strong bocks for sustenance during Lent and the first brewery in the Americas was founded by Belgium monks in Ecuador in 1534.

Before Louis Pasteur pinpointed yeast as the culprit in the 1850s, brewers didn’t know what caused fermentation, said Papazian, president of the Boulder, Colo.-based Brewers Association. So they invented one run-on word to describe the mysterious stuff at the bottom of the bottle: “Godisgood.”

“As you drain a glass of beer, look at the yeast at the bottom and be reminded that God is good, because that’s the way it feels,” Papazian said.

Like most business owners, brewers tend to avoid politics and religion out of fear of alienating customers. At the same time, microbrewing has become an intensely competitive industry, so putting a saint on a bottle can help a guy stand out.

When Brock Wagner was looking to name his new brewery in Houston 14 years ago, his search took him to the library of a local Catholic seminary. There, he found”the story of St. Arnold of Metz, the French saint of brewers and one of many patron saints of the brewing arts.

As the tale goes, Arnold (580-640) urged his people, “Don’t drink the water, drink beer” because he believed water boiled in beer was safer than tainted water sources.

Centuries later, St. Arnold Brewing Co. became Texas’ first craft brewery, with a “divine reserve” single-batch beer and 21 fermenters named for different saints.

“One purpose of religion is the formation of communities, and our brewery kind of has that effect, of bringing people together,” said Wagner, who describes himself as spiritual but wary of organized religion. “Some of our regulars say going on our brewery tour is going to church.”

Jeremy Cowan, the marketing mind behind He’Brew (the chosen beer), was absent from his company’s booth on the festival’s first day; it was Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement.

Established in 1996 (or 5757), Cowan’s Schmaltz Brewing Co. uses Jewish humor, scripture and imagery in packaging its beers, all of them kosher. There’s Genesis Ale (”our first creation”) Messiah Bold (”the one you’ve been waiting for”) and Jewbelation (”L’Chaim!”).

“I am passionately Jewish,” Cowan said. “I don’t get as caught up in the legal minutiae. I’m more fascinated in the project of Judaism as a civilization. This is the way I participate.”

There are a few more examples of this marketing ploy including the “X-Communicated Mormon Drinking Team,” “WWJB: What Would Jesus Brew?”, and the SBC church in Saint Louis in trouble for holding services in a microbrew.  You can read the article, here.

While you are at it, you can check out the chosen beer at the Ship of Fools. (via Signs and Blunders)