A History of Beer
The art of brewing is as old as civilization. Between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago, some humans discontinued their nomadic hunting and gathering and settled down to farm. Grain was the first domesticated crop that started that farming process.
Through hieroglyphics, cuneiform characters and written accounts, historians have traced the roots of brewing back to ancient African, Egyptian and Sumerian tribes. The oldest proven records of brewing are about 6,000 years old and refer to the Sumerians. Sumeria lay between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers including Southern Mesopotamia and the ancient cities of Babylon and Ur. It is said that the Sumerians discovered the fermentation process by chance. A seal around 4,000 years old is a Sumerian "Hymn to Ninkasi", the goddess of brewing. This "hymn" is also a recipe for making beer. No one knows today exactly how this occurred, but it could be that a piece of bread or grain became wet and a short time later, it began to ferment and a inebriating pulp resulted. These early accounts, with pictograms of what is recognizably barley, show bread being baked then crumbled into water to make a mash, which is then made into a drink that is recorded as having made people feel "exhilarated, wonderful and blissful!" It could be that baked bread was a convenient method of storing and transporting a resource for making beer. The Sumerians were able to repeat this process and are assumed to be he first civilized culture to brew beer. They had discovered a "divine drink" which certainly was a gift from the gods.
From the Gilgamesh Epic, written in the 3rd millennium B.C., we learn that not only bread but also beer was very important. This epic is recognized as one of the first great works of world literature. Ancient oral sagas from the beginning of human history were recorded in writing for the first time. The Gilgamesh Epic describes the evolution from primitive man to "cultured man".
"Enkidu, a shaggy, unkempt, almost bestial primitive man, who ate grass and could milk wild animals, wanted to test his strength against Gilgamesh, the demigod-like sovereign. Taking no chances, Gilgamesh sent a (prostitute) to Enkidu to learn of his strengths and weaknesses. Enkidu enjoyed a week with her, during which she taught him of civilization. Enkidu knew not what bread was nor how one ate it. He had also not learned to drink beer. The (prostitute) opened her mouth and spoke to Enkidu: 'Eat the bread now, O Enkidu, as it belongs to life. Drink also beer, as it is the custom of the land.' Enkidu drank seven cups of beer and his heart soared. In this condition he washed himself and became a human being. "
The Babylonians became the rulers of Mesopotamia after the Sumerian empire collapsed during the 2nd millennium bc. Their culture was derived from that of the Sumerians, and as a consequence of this, they also mastered the art of brewing beer. Today we know that the Babylonians new how to brew 20 different types of beer.
In ancient times beer was cloudy and unfiltered. The "drinking straws" were used to avoid getting the brewing residue, which was very bitter, in the mouth. Beer from Babylon was exported and distributed as far away as Egypt. Hammurabi, an important Babylonian King, decreed the oldest known collection of laws. One of these laws established a daily beer ration. This ration was dependent on the social standing of the individual, a normal worker received 2 liters, civil servants 3 liters, administrators and high priests 5 liters per day. In these ancient times beer was often not sold, but used as barter.
The Egyptians carried on the tradition of beer brewing. They also used unbaked bread dough for making beer and added dates to the brew to improve the taste. The importance of beer brewing in ancient Egypt can be seen from the fact that the scribes created an extra hieroglyph for "brewer".
Although beer as we know it had its origins in Mesopotamia, fermented beverages of some sort or another were produced in various forms around the world. For example, Chang is a Tibetan beer and Chicha is a corn beer and kumis is a drink produced from fermented camel milk. The word beer comes from the Latin word bibere, meaning "to drink", and the Spanish word cerveza originates from the Greek goddess of agriculture, Ceres.
After Egypt was succeeded by the Greeks and Romans, beer continued to be brewed. Plinius reported of the popularity of beer in the Mediterranean area before wine took hold. In Rome, wine became ambrosia from the god Bacchus. Beer was only brewed in the outer areas of the Roman Empire where wine was difficult to obtain. For the Romans beer was considered a barbarian drink. The oldest proof that beer was brewed on German soil, comes from around 800 B.C. in the early Hallstatt Period, where beer amphora found near the present day city of Kulmbach have been dated back to this time. As Tacitus, who first wrote about the ancient Germans or Teutons, put it like this: "To drink, the Teutons have a horrible brew fermented from barley or wheat, a brew which has only a very far removed similarity to wine". Beer of that era could not be stored, was cloudy and produced almost no foam. Early civilizations found the mood-altering properties of beer supernatural, and intoxication was considered divine. Beer, it was thought, must contain a spirit or god, since drinking the liquid so possessed the spirit of the drinker. The ancient Germans regarded beer not only a sacrifice to the gods but they, as in Egypt, also brewed beer for their own enjoyment. For example, in the Finnish poetic saga Kalewala, 400 verses are devoted to beer but only 200 were needed for the creation of the earth. According to the Edda, the great Nordic epic, wine was reserved for the gods, beer belonged to mortals and mead to inhabitants of the realm of the dead.
As the cultivation of barley spread north and west, brewing went with it. As time passed, the production of beer came under the watchful eye of the Roman Church. Christian abbeys, as centers of agriculture, knowledge and science, refined the methods of brewing. Initially in the making of beer for the brothers and for visiting pilgrims, later as a means of financing their communities. However, there was still very little known about the role of yeast in completing fermentation. Beer brewing played an important role in daily lives. Beer was clearly so desired that it led nomadic groups into village life. Beer was considered a valuable (potable) foodstuff and workers were often paid with jugs of beer.
By the fifteenth century, there was a record of hops used in Flemish beer imported into England, and by the sixteenth century hops had gained widespread use as a preservative in beer, replacing the previously used bark or leaves. Perhaps the most widely known event in brewing history was the establishment of German standards for brewers. The first of these regulations was the inspiration for the Reinheitsgebot of 1516 - the most famous beer purity law. This pledge of purity states that only four ingredients can be used in the production of beer: water, malted barley, malted wheat and hops. Yeast, though not included in this list, was acceptable, as it was taken for granted to be a key ingredient in the brewing process. The "Reinheitsgebot" was the assurance to the consumer that German beers would be of the highest quality in the world and acknowledges the European disdain for adding adjuncts such as corn, rice, other grains and sugars.
The next great development occurred in the mid-nineteenth century, through work done by Louis Pasteur, the first to propose an explanation of how yeast worked. Shortly thereafter, samples of Bavarian yeast provided the successful identification of a single-cell and strain of the bottom-fermenting lager yeast. German brewers had started to make beer by lagering (storing) in 1402. Brewing was not possible in the warm months because wild yeasts prevalent in the warmer weather of summertime would sour the beer. Brewers discovered that brewing in the cold months and storing the beer in caves in the nearby Alps impacted stability to the beer and enhanced it with a cleaner taste, although they did not know why. Today, we know that the reason the beer was clearer and cleaner was due to the fermentation process the beer underwent in the cold, during which the chemicals and bacteria responsible for clouding beer were unable to thrive and were therefore filtered out of the beer. In 1880, there were approximately 2,400 breweries operating in the US embracing many of the classic brewing styles. Today, there are 375 breweries. The change can be traced back to the era of the Volstead Act of 1919 - this Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution ushered in Prohibition. During this time, the smaller breweries lay idle as the larger establishments limped by with the production of cereal malts and near-beers.
Following Prohibition came World War II, with corresponding food shortages and therefore increased substitution of adjuncts for malt - a lighter beer resulted. With a large part of the male population off fighting the war, the work force in America was made up largely of women; thus marketing to this population solidified the hold of a lighter-styled beer. Following the war, the large national breweries catered to the tastes of this expanded beer market. Today, there is a revolution in America as brewing returns to its roots, and a great variety of high-quality beers are being revived, imported and enjoyed !
Early beers
A replica of ancient Egyptian beer, brewed from
emmer wheat by the
Courage brewery in 1996
As almost any cereal containing certain
sugars can undergo spontaneous
fermentation due to wild
yeasts in the air, it is possible that beer-like beverages were independently developed throughout the world soon after a tribe or culture had domesticated cereal. Chemical tests of ancient pottery jars reveal that beer was produced about 5,500 years ago in what is today
Iran, and was one of the first-known
biological engineering tasks where the biological process of fermentation is used. Also recent archaeological findings showing that Chinese villagers were brewing fermented alcoholic drinks as far back as 7000 BC on small and individual scale, with the production process and methods similar to that of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.
In
Mesopotamia (Ancient Iraq), early evidence of beer is a 3900-year-old Sumerian poem honoring
Ninkasi, the patron goddess of brewing, which contains the oldest surviving beer
recipe, describing the production of beer from
barley via bread.
| “ | Ninkasi, you are the one
You are the one who holds with both hands the great sweet wort...
Ninkasi, you are the one who pours out the filtered beer of the collector vat, It is [like] the onrush of Tigris and Euphrates.
| ” |
Beer is also mentioned in the
Epic of Gilgamesh, in which the 'wild man'
Enkidu is given beer to drink. "...he ate until he was full, drank seven pitchers of beer, his heart grew light, his face glowed and he sang out with joy."
Confirmed written evidence of ancient beer production in
Armenia can be obtained from
Xenophon in his work
Anabasis (5th century B.C.) when he was in one of the ancient
Armenian villages in which he wrote (Book 4, V).
| “ | There were stores within of wheat and barley and vegetables, and wine made from barley in great big bowls; the grains of barley malt lay floating in the beverage up to the lip of the vessel, and reeds lay in them, some longer, some shorter, without joints; when you were thirsty you must take one of these into your mouth, and suck. The beverage without admixture of water was very strong, and of a delicious flavour to certain palates, but the taste must be acquired.
| ” |
Beer became vital to all the grain-growing civilizations of Eurasian and North African antiquity, including
Egypt—so much so that in 1868 James Death put forward a theory in
The Beer of the Bible that the manna from heaven that God gave the Israelites was a bread-based, porridge-like beer called
wusa.
These beers were often thick, more of a
gruel than a beverage, and
drinking straws were used by the Sumerians to avoid the bitter solids left over from fermentation. Though beer was drunk in
Ancient Rome, it was replaced in popularity by wine.
Tacitus wrote disparagingly of the beer brewed by the
Germanic peoples of his day.
Thracians were also known to consume beer made from rye, even since the 5th century BC, as
Hellanicus of Lesbos says. Their name for beer was
brutos, or
brytos. The Romans called their brew
cerevisia, from the Celtic word for it.
Ancient
Nubians had used beer as an antibiotic medicine
Medieval Europe
Beer was one of the most common drinks during the
Middle Ages. It was consumed daily by all social classes in the northern and eastern parts of Europe where
grape cultivation was difficult or impossible
[citation needed]. Though wine of varying qualities was the most common drink in the south, beer was still popular among the lower classes. Since the purity of water could seldom be guaranteed, alcoholic drinks were a popular choice, having been boiled as part of the brewing process. Beer also provided a considerable amount of the daily calories in the northern regions. In England and the
Low Countries, the per capita consumption was 275-300 liters (60-66 gallons) a year by the
Late Middle Ages, and beer was drunk with every meal.
[citation needed] Though probably one of the most popular drinks in Europe, beer was disdained by science as being unhealthy, mostly because
ancient Greek and more contemporary
Arab physicians had little or no experience with the drink. In 1256, the Aldobrandino of
Siena described the nature of beer in the following way:
| “ | But from whichever it is made, whether from oats, barley or wheat, it harms the head and the stomach, it causes bad breath and ruins the teeth, it fills the stomach with bad fumes, and as a result anyone who drinks it along with wine becomes drunk quickly; but it does have the property of facilitating urination and makes one's flesh white and smooth. | ” |
The use of
hops in beer was written of in 822 by a
Carolingian Abbot. Flavoring beer with
hops was known at least since the 9th century, but was only gradually adopted because of difficulties in establishing the right proportions of ingredients. Before that,
gruit, a mix of various herbs, had been used, but did not have the same conserving properties as hops. Beer flavored without it was often spoiled soon after preparation and could not be exported. The only other alternative was to increase the alcohol content, which was rather expensive. Hopped beer was perfected in the
towns of
Germany by the 13th century, and the longer lasting beer, combined with standardized barrel sizes, allowed for large-scale export. The German towns also pioneered a new scale of operation and a level of professionalization. Previously beer had been brewed at home, but the production was now successfully replaced by medium-sized operations of about eight to ten people. This type of production spread to
Holland in the 14th century and later to
Flanders,
Brabant and reached
England by the late 15th century.
English ale and beer brewing were carried out by separately, no brewer being allowed to produce both. The Brewers Company of London stated "no hops, herbs, or other like thing be put into any ale or liquore wherof ale shall be made — but only liquor (water), malt, and yeast." This comment is sometimes misquoted as a prohibition on hopped beer. However, hopped beer was opposed by some, eg.
Ale is made of malte and water; and they the which do put any other thynge to ale than is rehersed, except yest, barme, or goddesgood [three words for yeast], doth sophysticat there ale. Ale for an Englysshe man is a naturall drinke. Ale muste haue these properties, it muste be fresshe and cleare, it muste not be ropy, nor smoky, nor it must haue no wefte nor tayle. Ale shulde not be dronke vnder .v. dayes olde …. Barly malte maketh better ale than Oten malte or any other corne doth … Beere is made of malte, of hoppes, and water; it is a naturall drynke for a doche [Dutch] man, and nowe of late dayes it is moche vsed in Englande to the detryment of many Englysshe men … for the drynke is a colde drynke. Yet it doth make a man fatte, and doth inflate the bely, as it doth appere by the doche mennes faces and belyes.
