Celebrate International Beer Day With 17 Facts About Beer

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. (CBS Sacramento) - The first Friday of August is International Beer Day, reports the International Business Times.

The idea was started in Santa Cruz, California, in 2007 as a way to celebrate the alcoholic beverage all over the world.

Here are 17 facts about beer, collected from BeerAdvocate, Mental Floss and The Huffington Post:

1. Evidence of brewing goes back about 5,000 years.
2. The Sumerians had a goddess of beer named Ninkasi.
3. Guinness once estimated that about 93,000 liters of beer gets lost in the beards of Englishmen each year.
4. The study of fermentation in brewing is called zymurgy.
5. Light can make beer go bad, or get "skunked."
6. First American President George Washington loved beer and had his own special recipe.
7. The Texas State Fair is famous for serving fried beer.
8. The oldest still-operating brewery in the United States is the Yuengling brewery in Pottsville, Pennsylvania.
9. Beer was first packaged in a 12-ounce aluminum can in 1959.
10. China and the U.S. are the top beer-producing countries.
11. Legend has it that about 0.7 percent of the world's population is drunk at any given time.
12. The fear of having an empty beer glass is called cenosillicaphobia.
13. The strongest beer in the world is called Snake Venom, with an alcohol by volume content of 67.5 percent.
14. The Czech Republic drinks the most beer of any nation in the world, followed by Austria and Germany.
15. Former President Jimmy Carter legalized home breweries.
16. In 2004, a black bear drank 36 cans of beer at a resort in Washington and passed out.
17. Beer is the drink of choice for 44 percent of Americans.