About the Title: "Much Abrew About Nothing"

I crowd-sourced book/beer puns when titling this blog. Among the most delightful: "Yeast of Eden" for Steinbeck's East of Eden; "The Handmaid's Ale" for Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale; and "Beersburg, Ohio" for Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (and as a reference to my home-state, to boot).

I wanted to go with an allusion so classic that it would ring true with a wide audience. And Shakespeare sure fits that bill. His play Much Ado About Nothing will be an upcoming blog entry, for sure.

Obviously, I don't think that books and beer are "nothing." Far from it! For 16 years, my entire academic and professional life revolved around the written word, and my current professional life revolves around beer. The title "Much Abrew About Nothing," then, works because "nothing" wasn't nothing to Shakespeare, either. 

The "nothing" of the title in Much Ado About Nothing is a triple pun. My dear friend and Shakespeare scholar Katie Brokaw directed me to this Atlantic article that briefly explains the pun like this:

In Elizabethan English, the word “nothing” was pronounced as “no-ting,” and it suggested our modern sense of “noting” as “noticing” (and even as spying)—so, yep, yet another theme in the play.

But! There’s another pun, too. Wordplay-happy Elizabethans often used “nothing”/“no-ting” as a euphemism for ... “vagina.” (There’s no thing there, get it?) Which means that the title Much Ado About Nothing, on top of everything else, also suggests Much Ado About … yeah.

--Megan Garber, "What's Pun Is Pun" (ha!)

Much Abrew is all about noting, about reading texts and flavors carefully. And if Shakespeare's euphemistic pun about female genitalia is a bit of a reach, well, at the very least, I can say that I'm interested in involving more women in craft beer. The racy pun also inverts "nothing" to its complete opposite: the source of life. Beer sustained people when water was dangerous (did you know the Pilgrims built a brewery first-thing upon landing at Plymouth?) and literature sustains cultures (think of what essential knowledge about the human condition would go missing had Homer, Virgil, and Sappho's work not survived). Two very important things to note, if you ask me.