As evidenced by its near ubiquity throughout the world, beer has probably shaped humanity more than any other drink. Much as it can be argued that even without the dubious historical practice of ‘gunboat diplomacy’ English would have become the default international language due to its flexibility in terms of accents, grammar, and vocabulary , the same can also be argued for beer.
The History of Beer I – Ancient Origins
Ancient Origins: Sumerians, Mesopotamians, and Egyptians
Fermented beverages can be traced back to pre-history, predating the advent of agriculture, and telling us something about our earliest priorities, but I want to start in a more modern time with the existence of proto-beer in 7,000 BCE in China where a fermented drink made from grain and fruit was consumed. Although we don’t know how much of this fruit beer was consumed, the archaeological evidence raises two important questions. Firstly, if the Chinese have been consuming alcohol for around 9,000 years, why do so many of them have such a strong physical reaction to it in the present day? The second question is, is this the current fad for fruit beers – I’m looking at you Taiwan Beer – the longest running case of what it old is new again? Perhaps these two questions cancel each other out when you consider the low strength of many of the fruit beers imbibed across Asia?
This is a sidetrack for another day, as whilst these drinks are interesting, they differ significantly from the grain-centric brews that we recognise as beer, so let’s move across the world to Mesopotamia.
Around 4,000 BCE during the Uruk period, beer became a key part of Mesopotamian daily life, and as this is a region with fair claim to some of the most important inventions in human history including the wheel, mathematics, astronomy, agriculture, and the bane of many a schoolchild, joined up writing, some of the credit for these developments can surely be attributed to beer. The importance of beer in human progress is something we will see again when we get to the Renaissance, but for now, let’s spend a bit more time in the ancient world.
Whilst it is well-known that beer was considered a safer drinking choice than water in medieval Europe, its presence in the daily lives of Mesopotamians, Sumerians, and Egyptians does not appear to have solely been the result of early health and safety initiatives. Beer was consumed by all levels of society, and it played a significant role in religious ceremonies, but then again, alcohol almost always gets a free pass from the religious if it is for ‘spiritual’ purposes rather than pleasure which seems to be frowned upon.
In Mesopotamia, the rise of brewing can be linked to the agricultural revolution of the time. The question of whether this was the result of needing to conserve grain that would have otherwise gone to waste, or if the demand for beer lead to the advancement of agriculture is hard to answer, we do know that there is a strong link between the growing of grain and brewing. It is worth noting that this period also saw the invention of writing, showing that for as long as we have had beer, we’ve had bills and bar tabs.
The beer produced by Sumerian brewing technology was still notably different from the beers people drink today. Firstly, hops were not used as a flavouring, a thought that will make the beards of the craft beer crowd itch with rage.
It was also much thicker than our modern brews which lead to the invention of the straw. Cylinder seals of the period show people sharing large bowls of beer, each person using their own straw. Hmm, not too dissimilar to the recent trend of fishbowl cocktails.
A little later, the Egyptians started to get into the brewing scene, most likely using knowledge gleaned from their neighbours through trade and cultural exchange, once again proving that people have always benefitted from relaxed trade regulations and the free movement of people.
While still eschewing hops, which to be fair they weren’t yet aware of, the Egyptians made significant advances in their manufacturing process. They malted their grains, heated the grain and water mixture, strained and filtered the product, and more. Their methods were surprisingly efficient. Testing of their techniques by the British Museum using a two-stage mash process without boiling of the mixture achieved a near 100% conversion of starched to sugars, which is better than the 80-85% efficiency of modern techniques. Fermentation was also faster, which suggests that the Egyptians were trying to get the beer on the table as quickly as possible, while the lack of boiling implies that it wasn’t expected to stick around for long!
Coming back to the title of this piece, in both Mesopotamia and Egypt, beer was more than just a beverage, it linked man to the gods, creation to destruction, and chaos to order, much as it still does on city centres throughout the world today. This is perhaps most clearly demonstrated by the Myth of the Destruction of Mankind, from the brilliantly titled Book of the Heavenly Cow. According to myth, Hathor was both a goddess with numerous responsibilities (joy, love, music, intoxication…) but also the “Eye” of Ra. One day, when humanity had been behaving rather poorly, Ra became angered and sent her in the form of a lioness to punish it. Now, like most people who’ve thrown a bit of a strop over a perceived slight, Ra started to regret his actions so decided to get Harthor so drunk that she’d pass out. It seems that when she awoke from her torpor she was in in a much better mood and humanity was saved from her wrath. Now, while anyone who has ever been around someone who has just woken up from a drunken slumber knows, there are problems with this tale, but the moral is that beer can avert disaster and restore balance to the world. Hoorah for beer!
During this period, beer became important in the economy. It was both a commodity and a form of currency, with payments being made in beer. Although pizza is not mentioned, it seems that the idea of paying your friends to help you move with beer is a millennia-old practice. Not only was it used as a form of barter payment, but the state also used it as a form of rations paid to state-employed workers making its production important to the central economies of these countries. As the state started to become more heavily involve in the production of beer, it became essential to its power and ability to function. Along with bread, beer built the pyramids as the state could use it to mobilise the population. Think about that next time you say you’d kill for a beer!
What other effects did beer have on ancient civilizations and their evolution? Well, while we have seen that beer acted as a social lubricant, bringing people together over shared drinks, and that state control created shared experiences for workers there were other impacts. From a societal perspective, stratification began to arise. While the workers were paid in beer, their higher-ups were drinking wine, further enhancing group identity. Furthermore, laws were created by the elite to control the consumption and production of beer. This regulation of alcohol can be seen globally in the modern age. In Sweden, for example, the Systembolaget is a state-owned monopoly that controls all sales of beer, wine, and spirits directly to the consumer unless it is purchased in a bar, restaurant, or nightclubs.
Beyond societal changes though, beer had other impacts, most notably on technology and innovation. It wasn’t that people tended to have brilliant ideas after an evening sucking beer gruel through a straw with friends, it was that the desire to produce beer, despite a limited understanding of the science involved lead to innovation.
Let’s go back to the beginning where I noted that some experts believe that the production of beer may not have been to use up and preserve excess grain, but rather that the desire to produce beer may have lead to the growing of ever greater quantities of grain. If this is indeed true, then a great many agricultural improvements may have been the by-product of the demand for beer! Grain storage and irrigation systems are definite possibilities, and with grain storage we come to the problems of rats leading to the domestication and later worship of cats!
When it comes to drinking and production technology, we have already seen how the consumption of thick Sumerian and Mesopotamian beer lead to the invention of the straw, but the production of beer also lead to advance in pottery and filtration. We can see evidence for this in Egyptian tombs where jars for storing and transporting beer were interred for the occupant to enjoy in the afterlife, and in Mesopotamian texts which detail the nature of the jars used.
Talking of texts, writing was also influenced by beer. As alluded to earlier, the production of beer required record keeping for the management of inventory and payments. This level of administration almost certainly contributed to the further development of writing systems, and much of our historical record of the time is concerned with the ingredients, production, and allocation of beer.
