Things that annoy me, part one

You may have seen this image, on a poster or a fridge magnet or a birthday card or some other flat surface:



You know what annoys me about it? Beer hasn't been helping ugly people have sex since 1862 - it's been helping ugly people have sex since at least 7000 BC¹, and probably as far back as 9000 BC. Our oldest written recipe for beer dates from 1800 BC, and even older beers have been reconstructed from chemical evidence.

Now, you can argue that much of the beer we know today owes a lot to industrial and microbiological advances in the latter half of the 19th century - Saccharomyces carlsbergensis was isolated in 1883, for instance - but why 1862, for God's sake?

¹ Not least by keeping them alive long enough to make it through puberty.