The History of Beer - Part 1: Origins

Read the first in a remarkable series by author Pete Brown about the history of beer

There’s a lovely story about the origin of beer that’s repeated in many books and magazines, including my own first book.

Brewing is such a complex and wonderful thing, it argues, that it was probably first discovered by accident. Somewhere in the Middle East, some farmer gathered grain in one of the earliest clay pots and left it outside. Soon after, it rained and the grain got wet, and softened. Natural airborne yeasts swooped in, and fermented the warm mush into beer. The hapless farmer tasted the result, and realised they had somehow invented one of the cornerstones of civilization.

The problem, as with so many great stories, is that it’s almost certainly wrong.

There’s a big difference between grain and fruit when it comes to natural fermentation. Fruit is generally soft-skinned. If it falls and begins to rot, or is damaged, yeasts clinging to the hairy legs of insects lured by the rich aromas will get deposited on the fruit and begin to ferment its sugars. Simple as that. Wine was almost certainly invented by grapes or juice being carried in some kind of animal skin bag, being jostled and fermenting in this way.

But beer – and anything else made from grain – is different. The sugars in grains need to be ‘modified’ first, to break down their matrix of big starch molecules into the simpler sugars yeasts can eat. That involves a much longer process of wetting, steeping, sprouting and then drying if it’s going to work.

Could all that still happen accidentally in a pot of grain that fills with rainwater and then perhaps dries out naturally? Probably not. In 1993, Canadian paleontologist and brewer Ed Hitchcock attempted to recreate the ‘happy accident’ that might have given birth to beer. His plan was to soak some grain until it sprouted, then pound it to a pulp, leave it to dry in the sun, and then attract wild yeasts to ferment it. After no more than a day of soaking, however, wild bacteria had infected the pot, which bubbled, grew mould and gave off foul gases. Hitchcock eventually did manage to produce something resembling beer, but only by using much more careful and precise processes.


If that seems to take some romance away from the birth of brewing, consider this: before we could ever brew beer successfully, we had to figure out how to modify grains. Today, we refer to this process as malting, and we know that what we’re doing is tricking the grain into thinking it’s sprouting, so that each kernel activates enzymes ready to break down big walls of starch into sugar for the seedling. We then kill that seedling, and in the mashing stage of brewing, the enzymes break down starches into sugars ready for the yeasts to ferment. It’s all about the enzymes, and enzymes were first identified in 1833. But somehow, we figured out how to manipulate them around 10,000 years ago.

Civilization began with farming, and farming began with grain. The jury is still out on whether we first cultivated grain to bake bread or brew beer, and it probably always will be. The architectural record for something like beer is limited, and we’re talking about an age before writing was invented. But strong circumstantial evidence points to beer being drunk from around 7000BCE in the area of the Middle East known as the ‘Fertile Crescent.’


That date is significant because it’s when the first fragments of pottery date back to, and some surviving shards bear deposits of calcium oxalate or ‘beerstone,’ a mineral residue that builds up on surfaces that remain in long-term contact with beer. But there are signs that malting was practiced long before these shards belonged to beer-filled pots. Flat, smooth floors with impressions of grain in them, with tools for grinding in close proximity, date back to around 10,000BCE. This may mean we were modifying grain for bread rather thousands of years before we were using it for brewing – you don’t necessarily need clay pots to bake and store bread. But some archaeologists believe beer could have been brewed in holes in the ground, lined with clay, long before pottery came along.

Maybe the distinction doesn’t matter anyway – to some extent, beer and bread were the same thing. In early brewing, malted grain was made into bread cakes that could be stored, before being pulled out and dissolved in water to start a brew.

This technique was described in the Hymn to Ninkasi – one of the oldest pieces of writing yet discovered, and certainly the oldest recipe for beer. It was written on stone fragments that date back to 1800 BCE, probably after being passed down orally through generations. Ninkasi, ‘given birth by the flowing water,’ makes beer by mixing dough in a pit to make bread with ‘sweet aromatics,’ then waters the ‘earth-covered malt’ and cooks it, brewing with honey and wine (or grapes) which would have kick-started fermentation thanks to the sugar and the yeast on the skins of the fruit.

Funerary model bakery and brewery Keith Schengili-Roberts

Encapsulating this knowledge in the form of a hymn reflects the sacred role that beer had in early societies. Intoxication has always been seen as a gift from the gods, and was thought to bring people closer to their deities. Its religious role pre-dated its later transformation into an everyday refreshment and livener.

That transformation happened as beer made its way through the Fertile Crescent, and the civilizations that adopted it gradually became more sophisticated. Beer was being brewed in Ebla (now in Syria) by 2500 BCE, and the Babylonian King Hammurabi including the earliest recorded regulation of tavern keepers in 2100 BCE.

All this comes as a surprise to many beer lovers, who have read or heard that beer was ‘invented’ by the Ancient Egyptians. The reason for this misconception is that when the civilization of the pharaohs arose, descriptions of beer of brewing went from scraps here and there to being meticulously recorded.

The accounts for the building of the pyramids were scrupulously kept, and show that the builders were paid a daily ration of beer for their toil.

Forty per cent of all the grain harvested went into making beer. One popular proverb went, ‘The mouth of the perfectly happy man is filled with beer.’ Beer had its own hieroglyph which, along with the symbol for bread, was compounded to create the symbol for food.

So beer was intoxicant, spiritual lift, currency and foodstuff. This latter role is easier to understand when you appreciate that ancient beer wasn’t separated out from the grains that made it: rather, it was served in large bowls or pots and drunk through long straws.

Ancient carvings from the sides of ornamental bowls, still on show in the British Museum, show people drinking beer from gourds through long straws along with wine from individual goblets. Modern eyes accustomed to wine being seen as a superior drink to beer saw in this the modern hierarchy repeated in ancient times – until the excavation of a tomb, the Midas Tumulus, in central Turkey at the ancient site of Gordion, in 1957. The tomb is believed to be that of either King Midas or his father, Gordius, and was piled high with ceremonial drinking vessels. These included large gourds resembling those depicted in the ancient carvings, but they were made from precious metals and inlaid with jewels, as were the straws used for drinking from them. Beer wasn’t necessarily a commoner’s drink – but it has always been a more sociable drink, drawing people together around it. The longer the straws, the more people can crowd around the communal pot.

From the Fertile Crescent beer slowly spread around the world – or at least, that’s one way of looking at it. Much time has been spent pondering how the Romans, or maybe the seagoing Phonecians, managed to take beer across Europe and ultimately to Britain and Scandinavia.

But as the rest of the world has been explored by beer drinking westerners, they’ve discovered ancient brewing traditions everywhere that grain is grown, from the rice wines of Asia (technically beer, as they’re fermented from grain) to the maize-based chicha of Central and South America. The Middle East may be where the earliest writing and the earliest cities have been discovered, but it’s likely brewing was figured out in parallel in other parts of the world. In any location where the ingredients and environment allowed it to be brewed, beer was just too good an idea to remain undiscovered.

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HISTORICAL TIMELINE

10000 BCE: Flat, smooth floors with impressions of grain in them, with grinding tools found, suggesting grain was being modified.

7000 BCE: Strong evidence from fragments of pottery with beer residue on them that beer is being drunk in the ‘Fertile Crescent’.

5000 BCE: Evidence that workers in Uruk, an ancient region of Sumer, and later Babylonia, now on the bed of the Euphrates river, were paid in beer.

3000 BCE: Beer is well established as the everyday drink for Egyptians, being healthier than water. Pictured: Egyptian cuneiform for beer.

2600 BCE: Egyptians built pyramids and kept meticulous detail of the process, including the beer rations.

2500 BCE: Beer was being brewed in Ebla (now Syria).

2100 BCE: Babylonian King Hammurabi regulated tavern keepers.

5000 BCE: Hymn to Ninkasi, one of the oldest pieces of writing discovered, recalls the brewing process.

800 BCE: Beer brewed in Germany by Romans.

332 BCE: Greeks, no fans of beer, take control of Egypt. Beer exported from Egypt to Palestine and other countries.

AD 500: Beer making well established in monasteries in western Europe