GUEST BLOG—By the
HistoryChannel.com--Beer–it’s the chosen beverage of English kings, Egyptian
stonemasons and Homer Simpson. And it has a long and celebrated history going
back to 3400 B.C.
The first known written record of beer dates back to the
ancient Sumerians. It’s in the form of a hymn, to the goddess of beer named
Ninkasi. This earliest beer recipe calls for soaked grains to be mixed with
bread and water: The bread would provide the source of yeast, which was the
catalyst for fermentation. It isn’t known how Sumerians figured out bread could
start the fermentation process; probably it was just a happy accident by an
unsuspecting or unwitting inventor.
Beer brewing continued during the Babylonian and Egyptian
empires, and it’s estimated the Babylonians had recipes for as many as 20
different types. Hammurabi’s Code, the ancient Babylonian set of laws, decreed
a daily beer ration to citizens. The drink was distributed according to social
standing: laborers received two liters a day, while priests and administrators
got five. At the time, the drink was always unfiltered, and cloudy, bitter
sediment would gather at the bottom of the drinking vessels. Special drinking
straws were invented to avoid the muck.
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| Ninkasi, the Goddess of Beer |
Of course, ancient beers tasted much, much different than
our contemporary brews. Back then, it was common to add spices and herbs to the
fermenting mixture, as well as other ingredients that would seem downright
strange to us, including everything from olive oil, cheese and carrots to
hallucinogens like hemp and poppy. In addition to being cloudy and filled with
sediment, the liquid would be too heavy to create the head of foam so prized by
a good bartender today.
In spite of what was, to our tastes at least, a
less-than-appetizing finished product, brewers continued to mash, ferment and
consume beer—and quite a bit of it, if finds at archeological sites from the
Greek and Roman eras are to be believed. Pliny the Elder reported that beer was
popular around the Mediterranean years before wine production occurred. As time
went on, the science of beer making moved from the street to the cloisters.
Christian abbeys were the center of knowledge and learning in the Middle Ages,
so monks became the repositories of beer recipes and monasteries turned into
breweries. Their refined techniques resulted in the clear, frosty, frothy brews
we know today.
Did You Know?
The world’s oldest brewery is the Weihanstephan Abbey in
Bavaria, Germany. The Abbey was licensed as a registered brewery in 1040, and
monks continued to brew there until the monastery was dissolved under Napoleon
Bonaparte in 1803. The brewery now is owned by the state of Bavaria, and
continues to brew traditional lagers and wheat beers to this day.
Source: historychannelblogging.com
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