Chapter BEECHMÁN to BEGAR of B by The Hobson Jobson Dictionary

39.

1810.—“Porter, pale-ale and table-beer of great strength, are often drank after meals.”—Williamson, V. M. i. 122.

1814.—

“What are the luxuries they boast them here?
The lolling couch, the joys of bottled beer.”

From ‘The Cadet, a Poem in 6 parts, &c. by a late resident in the East.’ This is a most lugubrious production, the author finding nothing to his taste in India. In this respect it reads something like a caricature of “Oakfield,” without the noble character and sentiment of that book. As the Rev. Hobart Caunter, the author seems to have come to a less doleful view of things Indian, and for some years he wrote the letter-press of the “Oriental Annual.”

BEER, COUNTRY. At present, at least in Upper India, this expression simply indicates ale made in India (see COUNTRY) as at Masuri, Kasauli, and Ootacamund Breweries. But it formerly was (and in Madras perhaps still is) applied to ginger-beer, or to a beverage described in some of the quotations below, which must have become obsolete early in the last century. A drink of this nature called Sugar- beer was the ordinary drink at Batavia in the 17th century, and to its use some travellers ascribed the prevalent unhealthiness. This is probably what is described by Jacob Bontius in the first quotation: 1631.—There is a recipe given for a beer of this kind, “not at all less good than Dutch beer.…Take a hooped cask of 30 amphorae (?), fill with pure river water; add 2lb. black Java sugar, 4oz. tamarinds, 3 lemons cut up, cork well and put in a cool place. After 14 hours it will boil as if on a fire,” &c.—Hist. Nat. et Med. Indiae Orient., p. 8. We doubt the result anticipated.

1789.—“They use a pleasant kind of drink, called Country-beer, with their vietuals; which is composed of toddy…porter, and brown-sugar; is of a brisk nature, but when cooled with saltpetre and water, becomes a very refreshing draught.”—Munro, Narrative, 42.

1810.—“A temporary beverage, suited to the very hot weather, and called Country-beer, is in rather general use, though water artificially cooled is commonly drunk during the repasts.”—Williamson, V. M. ii. 122.

BEER-DRINKING. Up to about 1850, and a little later, an ordinary exchange of courtesies at an Anglo- Indian dinner-table in the provinces, especially a mess-table, was to ask a guest, perhaps many yards distant, to “drink beer” with you; in imitation of the English custom of drinking wine together, which became obsolete somewhat earlier. In Western India, when such an invitation was given at a mess-table, two tumblers, holding half a bottle each, were brought to the inviter, who carefully divided the bottle between the two, and then sent one to the guest whom he invited to drink with him.

1848.—“‘He aint got distangy manners, dammy,’ Bragg observed to his first mate; ‘he wouldn’t do at Government House, Roper, where his Lordship and Lady William was as kind to me…and asking me at dinner to take beer with him before the Commander-in-Chief himself…’”—Vanity Fair, II. ch. xxii.

1853.—“First one officer, and then another, asked him to drink beer at mess, as a kind of tacit suspension of hostilities.”—Oakfield, ii. 52.

BEETLEFAKEE, n.p. “In some old Voyages coins used at Mocha are so called. The word is Bait-ul- fakiha, the ‘Fruit-market,’ the name of a bazar there.” So C. P. Brown. The place is in fact the Coffee- mart of which Hodeida is the port, from which it is about 30 m. distant inland, and 4 marches north of Mocha. And the name is really Bait-al-Fakih, ‘The House of the Divine,’ from the tomb of the Saint Ahmad Ibn Musa, which was the nucleus of the place.—(See Ritter, xii. 872; see also BEETLEFACKIE, Milburn, i. 96.)

1690.—“Coffee…grows in abundance at Beetle-fuckee…and other parts.”—Ovington, 465.

1710.—“They daily bring down coffee from the mountains to Betelfaquy, which is not above 3 leagues off, where there is a market for it every day of the week.”—(French) Voyage to Arabia the Happy, E. T., London, 1726, p. 99.

1770.—“The tree that produces the Coffee grows in the territory of Betel-faqui, a town belonging to Yemen.”—Raynal (tr. 1777), i. 352.