Beer Buddies - A short history of Beer

It could have been one pleasant morning, about ten thousand years ago, on a sunny hillside in the Middle East. The cradle of the Mesopotamian crescent civilization (to be precise), when an errant child saw a pile of grain going pulpy due to the rains a few nights before. Anything, almost anything could have set off the process of fermentation. We already know about it, they didn’t. For the Sumers and the locals, it was magic! The pulp gave off a putrid smell but when the kid (okay, teenager), dipped a finger in the liquid oozing out of the pile, it tasted strong, bitter. Curiosity led to more dipping and tasting and then, his parents would have to solve the mystery of their teenage son turning cartwheels along the hilly slopes. No, it couldn’t have been as dramatic as that, but certainly, the discovery was one of the most significant for the modern world. Imagine what would have happened if the boy’s mother had boxed his ears and thrown away the fermented grains to burn for manure? The divine drink would’ve been dead even before it was born.

Jokes apart, this is what actually happened.

In the region of the ancient cities of Babylon and Ur, a part of the Sumerian civilization that flourished between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers about 7 centuries ago. The earliest records of fermenting grain (or bread) to get beer have been found to be about 6000 years old, the most accepted notion is that it was a piece of bread that became fermented due to the action of naturally occurring yeast, resulting in an inebriated pulp. Thus was born beer. In their culture it rose to divine proportions, even hymns were written in its honor. The `Hymn to Ninkasi", the goddess of brewing has been found on a seal dated that time, and this hymn actually talks about brewing processes. Talk of functionality!!

This could be easily the oldest recognized description of the process, written about 4000 years ago. The process talks about baked bread crumbled into water, forming a pulp that could be fermented to make a drink which was exhilarating and made its drinker feel blissful and happy. This drink, they named, was god’s gift to mankind….and most of us still believe that. Towards the second millennium BC, when the Babylonians took over the Sumerian empire, the original culture that was derived from Sumerians only, became stronger. Today we know that they know how to brew 20 different types of beer. They even manufactured it in commercial quantities and exported it to places as far away as Egypt. An interesting fact is that brewing beer was a woman’s job for many millennia, in fact until the advent of the second millennium (the beginning of the Middle ages). The reason was that in ancient Babylon women brewers were priestesses of the temple, and this also served to connect beer to religion for the first time.

The drink again finds mention in a five thousand year old epic, Gilgamesh one of the oldest recognized works of literature, as one of the elements that facilitated human evolution from a primitive man to cultured man (read civilized). Things have not changed much since then, have they?

The original beer was a cloudy, evil smelling brew, whose suspended content could not be consumed. It was most probably not sold, but used as barter.

The trade between Babylonians and Egypt ensured that the fine art of brewing traveled to Egypt too, and then the brewing started in Egypt also, albeit there was an added taste. The ancient Egyptians used dates to improve its taste. How seriously they took the power of the drink, is evident from the fact that the ancient hieroglyphics have a separate identification for a brewer!!

With passing centuries, the use and brewing of beer grew, with a lot of additions in terms of taste and preservations, even appearance, in some cases. The Greeks and Romans who succeeded in Egypt merrily brewed their way through centuries. It was a very popular drink in the Mediterranean before wine took over. In fact, wine also did not really dampen the popularity of beer because wine could not be made in the rural areas of the Roman Empire. So beer continued to hold sway. As a result, those posh Romans who had the good fortune of being in the heart of the empire turned up their noses on beer, and considered it the drink of barbarians.

Around 800 BC beer came to Germany, at least that’s what history tells us. It was in the early Hallstatt period, and the proof is a beer amphora found near the modern city of Kulmback. Actually it must be have born earlier because this is the date when it has been recorded by Tacitus, who first documented the Teutonic civilization (modern day Germany) saying ""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". These ancient Germans considered it not only an intoxicant but also for sacrifice to the Gods. It was able to induce such pleasurable feelings; it surely had to have godly qualities. So much so that in the ancient Finnish epic, Kalewala, 400 verses are devoted to beer but only 200 were needed for the creation. In their culture, beer was even used as a mode of payment to workers, in jug-fulls. Often, it was their only form of nutrition in a stressful, hostile lifestyle, and poverty.

By the puritan middle ages, beer drinking was being considered a manly thing to do and the ownership of brewing processes had passed out of the domain of the womenfolk. Now it was the turn of the monasteries to control brewing, and they had a valid reason. Controlling religious behavior had by now passed out of the hands on priestess to the monks in monasteries, besides, they were men. The monks wanted a good brew because on many days, beer was their only sustenance. Hence beer drinking in monasteries reached shocking levels, historians report that there were times when monks were able to consume almost 5 liters of beer in a day. Beer was also sold from these monasteries and in the monastery pubs. The quality of beer improved and after reformation, these monasteries often brewed under the royal license. In the ninth century, brewers in Brabant monasteries (what is now Belgium) had already started cultivating hops and introducing them to their beer, giving us the forefather (at least in appearance) of the beer we consume today. The King Gambrinus, of the region claimed to be the father of `brewing beer’, and even today King Gambrinus is considered the patron saint of beer.

Whatever be the claims, it was around this time that a variety of flavorings were being added to the brew….among other things, juniper berries, sweet gale , blackthorn, aniseed, bay leaves, yarrow, thorn apple, gentian, rosemary, oak bark, wormwood, caraway seed, tansy, Saint-John's-wort, spruce chips, pine roots and henbane. Some of these herbs were poisonous, and thence started the tales of `brew witches’, the guilty party when brewing went wrong. These poor women were even burnt at stake, and the last known burning is supposed to have happened in 1591. Then the use of hops caught on and fewer things went wrong with the brew, so less witches had to be hunted.

In 1516, beer was finally standardized when Wilhelm IV, Duke of Bavaria passed the decree that beer could be made only using barley (later malted), hops and pure water.

It was only in the nineteenth century, 1876, that Louis Pasteur discovered the world of microorganisms. Then a Danish scientist, Christian Hansen successfully isolated a single yeast cell and induced it to reproduce in artificial culture medium. This finally brought out the secret of fermentation; yeast was now identified as the responsible factor. Now, armed with this knowledge, it is possible to get a purer tasting beer, again and again and again.

The last development to this world of putrid, fermented barley water, took place in 1964 when metal kegs were introduced in Germany. Bar personnel now had it easy and the patrons of the drink never had it so good.

Today the good King Gambrinus indulgently looks on as the generations of confirmed beer drinkers revel in its taste, and toast him.