In terms of information provided, most beer labels are like 1950s doo-wop music: skimpy on meaningful content. But I've found a fantastic Belgian beer (extremely hoppy, which means it moves right to the top of my charts!) with a label not unlike a Harry Chapin song - it tells an intriguingly complex story. The brewer, Yvan de Baets, was kind enough to share the details with me.
Borrowing from the Gogol novel, the Brasserie de la Senne in Brussels has come up with "Taras Boulba." The label shows an obviously irate man (in this case, a Flemish father, from the northern part of Belgium where Dutch is spoken) about to crack open the skull of another man (his son) with a beer barrel. The man has just learned that his son has committed the unpardonable sin of falling in love with a girl from Wallonia (the southern part of Belgium where French is spoken). He angrily calls him a "Smeirlap," akin to "bastard" in Dutch. The words in the lower right corner tell the sad story, in the unique dialect used only in and near Brussels.
The point, you ask? As Mr. de Baets tells it, he is making a humorous political statement here about the sharp divisions between the linguistic/ethnic groups in Belgium. Belgium, a somewhat artificially created part of the Netherlands thanks to the Congress of Vienna in 1815, only became independent in 1830, with a dividing line (which has become much more pronounced over the past 20 years or so) between Dutch-speaking Flanders in the north and French-speaking Wallonia in the south. Neither group seems to care too much for the other.
The joke is that a father could become so outraged over his son's love of a girl from the "other group," a la Taras Bulba in the novel, that he would actually do the boy in. Mr. de Baets assures me he is not taking sides here; next year, he says he may reissue the label, this time with a French-speaking father and son.
So there you have it, a brief history of Belgium, thanks to beer and a Russian novel!
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