Bed Time Stories

I heard An old story from Mesopotamia (today Iraq/Iran area) telling how a human found beer.
Many, many years before the fridge and ice boxes (maybe even longer than that), humans grow wheat and made bread.
The locals wanted to preserve the bread for times of need, so they would put it in a clay pot and close it, but somehow rainwater found its way in.
A few months later, the locals wanted to eat the preserved bread as there was no fresh wheat to make bread from, so they opened the clay pots and found a weird liquid and very wet and not the delicious bread.
A brave one tried to drink the liquid and found it very good. They called it beer (the local word for liquid bread).

This story comes from a monastery somewhere in Belgium. This story tells how the monasteries around Europe started brewing their beer.
Now, in Christianity, there is a month that religious people are not allowed to eat meat.
A monastery that had been brewing beer wanted the Pope's blessing and approval to drink beer during that month.
So, they sent a delegation with a keg or two to Rome for approval from the Pope.
Just a quick reminder: It was the day before fridges and coolers and excellent smooth roads.
Back to our story:
The roads were hard to travel and slow (hops were yet to be part of the beer). After long weeks on the roads, the monks arrived in Rome and met the Pope. They gave him a taste of the beer and asked for his approval and blessing. The Pope smelled and tasted the weird liquid, and (not surprisingly) the taste was horrible and disgusting. The Pope looked at this liquid and thought they could have the approval and blessing if they wanted to drink it, an awful thing during this month. They returned to their home monastery with the good news, and the rest (as they say) is history.
Thanks to this, we have one of the best beers - Monastery beers.

A story that comes from the port of London of old.
In the old times, we didn't have cranes to load and unload the ships, so humans had to load and unload the cargo from the ship.
These people who worked in the port and worked very hard had the privilege of having a beer for lunch as it was believed to regain strength. The bars around the harbor were aware of it and sold beers, but toward the end of lunchtime, most of the beer was sold, and all left were a few drops here and there in the barrels.
What can the bar owner do?
Well, they found a simple solution: put all the leftovers in one barrel and sell it (it was cheaper than the original beers, by the way). They got a strong taste and smell and a dark color, but the people who drank it loved it, and slowly they wanted this drink and not the other ones. The bar started to mix these beers and create this new beer, but a name must be chosen for this new mixed beer,
so he named it after the people who had it: Porter.