History of Beer
Article Index
History of Beer
Ancient Literature
Egypt to Rome
Middle Ages
Use of Hops
Purity Law
Wood Smoked Malts
New Inventions
Today
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Beer became vital to all the grain-growing civilizations of classical Western antiquity 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. The modern anthropologist Alan Eames believes that "beer was the driving force that led nomadic mankind into village life...It was this appetite for beer-making material that led to crop cultivation, permanent settlement and agriculture."

No one can say with authority exactly when beer was first brewed. The oldest confirmed records of brewing are about 6000 years old and refer to the Sumerian's. Chemical tests of ancient pottery jars reveal that beer was produced about 7,000 years ago in Samaria, and was one of the first-known biological engineering tasks where the biological process of fermentation is used. Samaria lay between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, encompassing Southern Mesopotamia.

It is believed that the Sumerian's discovered the fermentation process by chance. How this happened, no one can say for sure, but it could be that a piece of bread became wet and was simply forgotten. After a short time the bread began to ferment and an alcoholic mush resulted. 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. The Sumerian's were able to repeat this process and are assumed to be he first civilized culture to brew beer. This newly discovered mixture was deemed so important that they offered it to their gods. Much like one of my first homebrews the original beer was cloudy, unfiltered and full of sediment (trub). The predecessor of the drinking straw was used to avoid getting the trub, which was very bitter, in the mouth. A 6,000-year-old Sumerian tablet depicts people drinking beer through reed straws from a communal bowl.


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