Beer based economy

[Dwarven Gold]

In my world the main commodity is beer. The darker the beer, the more valuable. A pint of Guiness buys you a cow.

It's a fantasy world, but I want to use names of real beers. Am I drinking more than I can swallow?

 

[Juiceman]

Legally, if a work is done for profit, executives at breweries may have reservations about the unauthorized use of their trademarks, especially if they are not crazy about the way it is used. However, if the work is popular and solid, the use of their products may be viewed as free advertisment.

 

[Ravana]

What Juiceman said. I'd suggest assembling a good list of varieties of beer (porter, stout, lager, etc.) and then making up the actual names. If you don't mind looking somewhat parodic (or if that's what you're after in the first place), you can make the names transparently derivative: Rolling Stone, Cures, Budd's Wiser… perhaps Genius, for your top-end currency. I'd suggest putting more work into the names than the thirty seconds I spent on it: those are all pretty lame, apart from perhaps the last, after all.

I would say that, if you want your economy to seem at all realistic, you will need to consider what actually goes into making beer, and how that relates to the value of other commodities. Anything can be used as a medium of exchange (i.e. money), as long as the society is willing to accept it, so as far as that goes, using beer for cash is not a problem. What may be a problem is having a pint of it—no matter how good it is—equal to the value of a cow. Other problems include how big one's wallet has to be to carry one's currency around, how one makes change ("Pardon me, but can you break a pilsner for me?"), and what you do to get the beer in the first place: wages? How many people would still have cash at the end of the week? (Or even the day?)

 

[Donny Bruso]

Ravana makes some good points. With the water quality being what it was in Europe in medieval times, people were drinking beer as a matter of health, since the alcohol & brewing process killed the bacteria in the water. This of course led to people liking their beer, which, let's face it, really has no other use other than to be imbibed for pleasure in modern society. You would need to think up a reason why people aren't literally drinking away their money, and probably some reason why it is so valuable when it is inefficient to transport compared to the more common coinage.

 

[Ravana]

…and probably some reason why it is so valuable when it is inefficient to transport compared to the more common coinage.

Exactly. That's why coinage was invented in the first place: to have an easily transportable (and convertible) medium of exchange. Barter economies work fine at the local level, but imagine the difficulties if a merchant wanted to buy cloth at a distant port in exchange for chickens. Much easier to sell your chickens for coins and transport those.

The medium of exchange doesn't even need to be valuable itself, so long as people at both ends of a transaction will accept it with the confidence that they too can use it for their own purchases. This is the basis for paper money—which, originally, was theoretically exchangeable for a certain amount of gold or silver—the British "pound sterling" was literally that: a piece of paper that could be traded in for a pound of silver—though in practice such exchanges rarely happened. Over the past century or so, nearly every country ended this practice, and few if any currencies are now based on silver or gold standards. (In fact, in today's world the majority of the wealth doesn't exist in physical form at all, even as printed money… when was the last time you received your pay in cash?) So perhaps you could have "beer notes," in the same fashion as "bank notes" were originally used; that would at least solve the transport problem. I can think of other ones, but unless you really want to delve deeply into the details of your economy, they probably aren't worth too much worry.

 

[Legerdemain]

" you can make the names transparently derivative: Rolling Stone, Cures, Budd's Wiser… perhaps Genius, for your top-end currency.

Interestingly enough, I'm not that smart after several pints of Genius myself.

 

[Ravana]

Interestingly enough, I'm not that smart after several pints of Genius myself.

Hee hee. So it's a false advertising claim. Take 'em to Beer Court. Though the most likely tack for the defense to take is that they never said the beer would make you smarter; they were merely implying that this is the beer smart people drink.