Armando Duarte guides visitors through All About Alcohol, Goa's dedicated museum of drinking history, and in this conversation with Shweta's Talkies he sets out to correct a popular misconception before building his own case: beer was not invented by monks. The oldest surviving evidence points instead to Mesopotamia, where the Hymn to Ninkasi — a Sumerian hymn to the goddess of beer, preserved in an Old Babylonian copy from around 1800 BCE — doubles as history's earliest known brewing recipe. Duarte traces how Hammurabi's law code, more than 3,700 years old, used feminine grammatical forms in its tavern-keeping provisions, reflecting women's recognized legal role as Mesopotamia's original brewers and tavern owners — a genuinely underexplored gender-history thread hiding inside a museum-tour format. From there the conversation moves forward in time to the Reinheitsgebot, the 1516 Bavarian law limiting beer to water, barley, and hops, still cited today as the world's oldest continuously referenced food-safety regulation. Duarte connects that five-century-old regulatory instinct to the same impulse now governing food and beverage standards worldwide, before turning to Goa's own contribution: Feni, the region's GI-tagged cashew and coconut spirit, and the distillation science behind it. The conversation is, at its core, a case study in how oral, tour-guide-style heritage content works — confident delivery, real primary sources sitting alongside looser bar folklore — and a reminder that the best-verified material in any tour is often quieter than its best-loved anecdotes. For Shweta's Talkies, it is also a companion piece to the museum's founder, Nandan Kudchadkar, whose own episode covers the same institution from the ownership side. Recorded at All About Alcohol, Goa, as part of Shweta's Talkies' Heritage series.