My grandfather-in-law was born in England in the 1920s and fought in World War II. Somewhere along the line he acquired the habit of salting his beer before drinking it, which persisted for the rest of his life. I'm as curious about the cultural genesis of the practice as the food science of it – was there perhaps something about wartime beer that made it unpalatable without salt? I know there were other wartime food customs like [bread and scrape](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bread_and_scrape) so it doesn't seem implausible, but the "why" of this one isn't so obvious.