| History of Beer |
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.
A 3900-year-old Sumerian poem honoring Ninkasi, the patron goddess of brewing, contains the oldest surviving beer recipe, describing the production of beer from barley via bread. Ninkasi, you are the one who bakes the bappir in the big oven, Puts in order the piles of hulled grains, You are the one who waters the malt set on the ground... You are the one who holds with both hands the great sweet wort... Ninkasi, you are the one who pours out the filtered beer of the collector vat, It is [like] the onrush of Tigris and Euphrates. Beer is mentioned in the oldest know work of world literature, the Gilgamesh Epic, which was written in the 3rd millennium B.C. In the pages of this epic we learn of the importance of beer. The epic has been written and rewritten by scribes over centuries but only a copy, written approximately 3200 years ago on stone tablets has survived. It was found in the library of the Assyrian capital of Nineveh on the banks of the Tigris River now on display at the Louvre in Paris. The Gilgamesh epic references the origin of man as a descendent of a savage half-man/half-bull called Enkidu and about the power of beer to transform primitive man to a cultured man.
Without getting into a literary study on the Gilgamesh epic suffice it to say that the epic tells us that when Enkidu drank beer, he became civilized man. The king of the civilized city of Uruk sent one of temple maidens (a harlot) out to the plains with the mission to seduce Enkidu. Her mission was a success, she instructed him in the art of love, after which she offered him a meal of bread and beer. Enkidu knew nothing of eating bread, of drinking beer. He had never learned. The harlot made her voice heard and spoke to Enkidu, "Eat the food, Enkidu, The symbol of life. Drink the beer, destiny of the land." Enkidu ate the bread until he had had enough. He drank the beer, seven whole jars, relaxed, felt joyful. His heart rejoiced, his face beamed and became like any other man awake. Basically what the epic is saying is that beer is the force that transports man from a primitive nature to a civilized one, and it is beer that makes us human. Or one could also conclude that a harlot or temple maiden and a good meal with a good beer can make you feel like a new man. And you just thought beer tasted good!
As history moves forward we learn that the Sumerian empire collapsed during the 2nd millennium B.C. and the Babylonians became the rulers of Mesopotamia. They also mastered the art of brewing beer, brewing 20 different types of beer. Of these, 8 were brewed from pure emmer, 8 from pure barley and 4 from a mixture of grains. The Egyptians carried on the tradition of beer brewing. They also used unbaked bread dough for making beer. Peasants along the Nile, the so-called Fellahs, still make beer the same way today. The Egyptians added dates to the brew to improve the taste. The importance of beer brewing in ancient Egypt, can be seen from the fact that the scribes created an extra hieroglyph for "brewer".
Beer continued to be brewed after Egypt was succeeded by the Greeks and Romans. Plinius reported of the popularity of beer in the Mediterranean area before the growing of grapes for wine took hold. Thereafter, in Rome itself, wine became the drink of the gods (Bacchus). Beer was only brewed in the outer areas of the Roman Empire where wine was difficult to obtain. For the Romans, who almost exclusively drank wine, beer was a horrible barbarian drink. In my opinion this surely this was the primary reason or the fall of Rome.
The oldest proof that beer was brewed on German soil comes from the early Hallstatt Period (about 800 B.C.). Bier amphora's found near the present day Kulmbach have been dated back to this time. A few hundred years after the birth of Christ, beer was a standard commercial article. This was confirmed by the finding of a beer seller's mug near Trier. The ancient Germans regarded beer not only as a sacrifice to the gods but also brewed beer, as in Egypt, for their own enjoyment and it played an important role in their daily lives. For example, in the Finnish poetic saga Kalewala, 400 verses are devoted to beer but only 200 were needed for the creation of the earth. According to the Edda, the great Nordic epic, wine was reserved for the gods, beer belonged to mortals and mead to inhabitants of the realm of the dead. Baking bread and brewing beer were the work of women in the first centuries after the birth of Christ and remained so until the Middle Ages.
During the Middle Ages beer was consumed daily by all social classes in the northern and eastern parts of Europe where grape could not adequately be cultivated. Though wine of varying qualities was the most common drink in the south, beer was popular among the lower classes. Since the purity of water could seldom be guaranteed, alcoholic drinks were both a wise and a popular choice. The water would have been boiled as part of the brewing process and the alcohol in beer killed bacteria and other parasites. Beer also provided a considerable amount of the daily calories in the northern regions. In England and the Low Countries, the per capita consumption was 275-300 liters (60-66 gallons) a year by the Late Middle Ages, and beer was downed with every meal.
The use of hops in beer was written of in 822 by a Carolingian Abbot. Again in 1067 by Abbess Hildegard of Bingen: "If one intends to make beer from oats, it is prepared with hops." Flavoring beer with hops was known at least since the 9th century, but was only gradually adopted because of difficulties in establishing the right proportions of ingredients. Before that a mix of various herbs, had been used, but did not have the same conserving properties as hops. Beer flavored without it was often drunk soon after preparation and could not be exported. The only other alternative was to increase the alcohol content, which was rather expensive. Hopped beer was perfected in the towns of Germany by the 13th century, and the longer lasting beer, combined with standardized barrel sizes, allowed for large-scale export. The German towns also pioneered a new scale of operation and a level of professionalism. Previously beer had been brewed at home, but the production was now successfully replaced by medium-sized operations of about eight to ten people. This type of production spread to Holland in the 14th century and later to Flanders, Brabant and reached England by the late 15th century.
Laws to enforce the use of hops in beer were introduced in England in the 14th century, and later similar laws were introduced in other countries. In England, these laws lead to peasant uprisings, since it was considered to spoil the taste, but these uprisings were brutally put down. In Europe, beer largely remained a homemaker's activity, made in the home in medieval times. The oldest still operating commercial brewery is the Weihenstephan (Bavaria) abbey brewery, which obtained the brewing rights from the nearby town of Freising. By the 14th and 15th centuries, beer making was gradually changing from a family-oriented activity to an artisan one, with pubs and monasteries brewing their own beer for mass consumption. In 15th century England, an unhoped beer would have been known as ale, while the use of hops would make it beer. Hopped beer was imported to England from the Netherlands as early as 1400 in Winchester, and hops were being planted on the island by 1428. The popularity of hops was at first mixed and the Brewers Company of London went so far as to state "no hops, herbs, or other like thing be put into any ale or liquor whereof ale shall be made” but only liquor (water), malt, and yeast." However, by the 16th century, "ale" had come to refer to any strong beer, and all ales and beers were hopped.
In 1516, William IV, Duke of Bavaria, adopted the Reinheitsgebot (purity law), perhaps the oldest food regulation still in use through the 20th Century (the Reinheitsgebot passed formally from German law in 1987). The Gebot ordered that the ingredients of beer be restricted to water, barley, and hops, with yeast added after Louis Pasteur's discovery in 1857. The Bavarian law was applied throughout Germany as part of the 1871 German unification as the German Empire under Otto von Bismarck, and has since been updated to reflect modern trends in beer brewing. To this day, the Gebot is considered a mark of purity in beers, although this is controversial. Most beers until relatively recent times were what are now called ales. Lagers were discovered by accident in the 16th century after beer was stored in cool caverns for long periods; they have since largely outpaced ales in terms of volume.
Following significant improvements in the efficiency of the steam engine in 1765, industrialization of beer became a reality. Further innovations in the brewing process came about with the introduction of the thermometer in 1760 and hydrometer in 1770, which allowed brewers to increase efficiency and attenuation.
Prior to the late 18th century, malt was primarily dried over fires made from wood, charcoal, or straw, and after 1600, from coke, the solid carbonaceous material derived from destructive distillation of low-ash, low-sulfur bituminous coal. In general, none of these early malts would have been well shielded from the smoke involved in the kilning process, and consequently, early beers would have had a smoky component to their flavors; evidence indicates that maltsters and brewers constantly tried to minimize the smokiness of the finished beer. Writers of the period describe the distinctive taste derived from wood-smoked malts, and the almost universal revulsion it engendered. The smoked beers and ales of the West Country were famous for being. This is from "Directions for Brewing Malt Liquors" (1700): "In most parts of the West, their malt is so stenched with the Smoak of the Wood, with which 'tis dryed, that no Stranger can endure it, though the inhabitants, who are familiarized to it, can swallow it as the Hollanders do their thick Black Beer Brewed with Buck Wheat." [sic]
Wood-dried malt had a horrible taste, but some London brewers did once use it because it was cheap and after long aging in a heavily-hopped beer you didn't notice the vile smokiness any more. However, the straw-dried brown malt preferred in London was the least affected. That was the very reason it was valued above the wood-dried variety.
The hydrometer transformed how beer was brewed. Before its introduction beers were brewed from a single malt: brown beers from brown malt, amber beers from amber malt, pale beers from pale malt. Using the hydrometer, brewers could calculate the yield from different malts. They observed that pale malt, though more expensive, yielded far more fermentable material than cheaper malts. For example, brown malt (used for Porter) gave 54 pounds of extract per quarter, whilst pale malt gave 80 pounds. Once this was known, brewers switched to using mostly pale malt for all beers supplemented with a small quantity of highly-colored malt to achieve the correct color for darker beers.
The invention of the drum roaster in 1817 by Daniel Wheeler allowed for the creation of very dark, roasted malts, contributing to the flavor of porters and stouts. Its development was prompted by a British law of 1816 forbidding the use of any ingredients other than malt and hops. Porter brewers, employing a predominantly pale malt grist, urgently needed a legal colorant. Wheeler's patent malt was the solution. The discovery of yeast's role in fermentation in 1857 by Louis Pasteur gave brewers methods to prevent the souring of beer by undesirable microorganisms.
Unlike in many parts of the world, there is a significant market in Europe (the UK in particular) for beer containing live yeast. These unfiltered, un-pasteurized brews are awkward to look after compared to the commonly sold dead beers: live beer quality can suffer with poor care, but many people prefer the taste of a good live beer to a dead one. While beer is usually matured for relatively short times (a few weeks to a few months) compared to wine, some of the stronger so-called real ales have been found to develop character and flavor over the course of as much as several decades. Prior to Prohibition, there were thousands of breweries in the United States, mostly brewing heavier beers than modern US beer drinkers are used to. Beginning in 1920, most of these breweries went out of business, although some converted to soft drinks and other businesses. Bootlegged beer was often watered down to increase profits, beginning a trend, still on-going today, of the American palate preferring weaker beers. Consolidation of breweries and the application of industrial quality control standards have led to the mass-production and the mass-marketing of huge quantities of light lagers. Smaller breweries, including microbreweries and craft brewers, and imports, have serviced the segment of the American market that prefers fuller-bodied beers.
Today, the brewing industry is a huge global business, consisting of several multinational companies, and many thousands of smaller producers ranging from brewpubs to regional breweries. Advances in refrigeration, international and transcontinental shipping, marketing and commerce have resulted in an international marketplace, where the consumer has literally hundreds of choices between various styles of local, regional, national and foreign beers. |
