Bonnie Berkowitz, Tim Meko, Manuel Canales and Leslie Shapiro
Beer is so old we don’t know how old it is. Most of the earliest known cultures brewed it, and some scholars believe it was the quest for beer, not bread, that motivated our hunter-gatherer ancestors to settle down and cultivate grain.
But ancient cave dwellers weren’t sitting around the fire quaffing crisp lagers. Archaeological evidence shows that beer took thousands of years to evolve into what we drink today.
Here’s a sampler of brews that represent important milestones and innovations.
Africa, pre-11000 BCE
Paleolithic mystery beer
Possible ingredients: Millet, fruit, spices, herbs and grasses ‒ and who knows what else
Possible flavour profile: Sour, tart, sweet, fruity, spicy, herbal
The first beer probably came from Africa, because that’s where the first people were, said Patrick McGovern, a biomolecular archaeologist at the Penn Museum and a long-time authority on ancient fermented beverages.
Beer is basically fermented grain. First, moisture makes the grain sprout, priming its enzymes to transform starch into sugar. Yeast then converts the sugar into alcohol.
Humans would have discovered the process by happy accident, probably in many places across the world at various times: a pile of grain left in the rain and sun, some wild yeast latched onto its sugar, and a few days later, whoa! They learnt to replicate the process, creating beer traditions nearly everywhere.
Although no evidence has been found of a Paleolithic African brew ‒ “the holy grail of fermented beverages,” according to McGovern ‒ he suspects it would have been made from wild millet or sorghum, grains long cultivated and used for beer in Africa, and flavoured with whatever grew nearby.
Drinking vessel: The first beer mugs may have been made of animal skins or tightly woven grasses, McGovern said.
Colour and clarity: Colour? Who knows. But it would’ve been cloudy, like all ancient beers, because filtration was tens of thousands of years in the future.
Israel, circa 11000 BCE
Stone Age gruel with a kick
Possible ingredients: Wheat, barley, dates
Possible flavour profile: Sour, sweet, bready
A waypoint between bread and beer is a kind of spiked porridge that would stretch any modern beer connoisseur’s definition of “chewy”.
A team of Stanford researchers found something like that in Israel in 2015 when they came across what may have been a 13 000-year-old beer-making operation in a burial cave near Haifa. It was used by the Natufian people, who were known to harvest and process wild grain.
In stone mortars carved into the cave’s bedrock floor, the team found traces of starch consistent with a thick wheat-and-barley-based alcohol. Some scholars would like more evidence that beer and not bread was being made in that specific cave, because the tools and processes are similar.
But it made sense that the Natufians would’ve been brewers, said Kirk French, who teaches Anthropology of Alcohol at Pennsylvania State University and was not involved in the Stanford study.
“They had grain for a long time,” French said. “If they weren’t making beer, it would be different than every other place in the world that has staple crops. If they had grain, they had alcohol.”
Drinking vessel: Li Liu, the Stanford professor whose team made the discovery, said Natufians may have drunk from wooden bowls.
Colour and clarity: The beer probably would have been “light yellowish”, Liu said, with a texture like gruel.
China, circa 7000 BCE
Neolithic grog mash-up
Possible ingredients: Rice, grapes or hawthorn fruit, honey
Possible flavour profile: Sour, tart, sweet, fruity, herbal
The first chemically confirmed evidence of a fermented beverage came from pottery found at the Neolithic settlement of Jiahu, and it must’ve been a taste sensation: rice beer, wine and honey mixed together.
The concoction was solid evidence that brewing dated at least from about the time nomadic people started to put down roots and develop agriculture, said McGovern, whose team analysed residue from broken pottery and identified the beverage in 2004.
Since then, evidence of brewing has been found at several Chinese sites from a similar era. A Dartmouth team found traces of a more beer-forward brew in 9 000-year-old beer cups in Qiaotou that contained rice, a grain called Job’s tears and some kind of tuber.
Drinking vessel: Researchers found clay beer jars at Jiahu and drinking cups at Qiaotou.
Colour and clarity: The reddish, cloudy Jiahu drink probably contained floating rice husks and yeast.
Mesopotamia and Egypt, circa 3500 B.C.
Roasted barley paycheck beer
Possible ingredients: Barley, emmer wheat, a sweetener, baked bread, spices
Possible flavour profile: Sour, sweet, malty, bready
We know beer was a key part of daily life for ancient Sumerians, Babylonians and Egyptians because they wrote about it. And their brews were a little closer to the stuff we drink today in some innovative ways: They roasted the grain to make dark beers, produced it in large breweries, and used barley, the most common ingredient in modern beers.
Among the world’s first known writing samples, clay tablets that contain Sumerian cuneiform, are beer receipts and brewing instructions, the latter in a poem that celebrates Ninkasi, the Sumerian goddess of ‒ you guessed it ‒ beer. McGovern and organic chemist Rudolph Michel confirmed the earliest chemical proof of barley beer, dating from 3500 to 3100 BCE, in jars found in the Sumerian outpost of Godin Tepe, in what is now Iran.
Fermenting grain was a practical way to preserve it between growing seasons for many ancient civilisations, and the beer that resulted was nutrient-dense.
Brewers made low-alcohol versions for children and for everyday hydration, and some workers were paid partially in beer. Labourers who built the pyramids of Giza, for instance, received more than 10 pints a day. But brewers also knew how to bump up the alcohol content for special occasions and medicinal purposes.
Beer was even a part of the afterlife, or at least Egyptians hoped so.
In the Penn Museum’s collection is a part of a priest’s burial chamber covered in hieroglyphic instructions for living visitors. The gist was: “I just want as much beer and bread and meat as you can possibly bring, for eternity,” said Mark Van Horn, a PhD student and one of the writers of the Penn Museum’s Ancient Alcohol tour.
Mesopotamian and Egyptian brews were a long way from modern beers, though, in flavour and appearance.
Depictions of Sumerian beer-drinkers show people with reed straws sipping from communal knee-high pots. Van Horn said the beer made in those pots probably would’ve been chunky, with grain and soaked bread called bappir floating in it. The straws were probably for poking through or around a layer of yeast, spent grain and other stuff that floated on the top to get to the good stuff underneath.
Drinking vessel: The tomb of Queen Puabi of Ur, a Sumerian city, contained a silver beer container and the gold-leaf shell that had once covered a reed straw.
Colour and clarity: The queen’s beer could’ve been dark from the roasted grain with a little carbonation, but not foamy. An Egyptian brew, fermented in sealed jars, may have been the first effervescent beer.
Latin America, circa 550 AD
First beer in the Americas
Ingredients: Corn, fruit, spices, all kinds of things
Possible flavour profile: Sour, tart, sweet, fruity, spicy, herbal
Chicha de jora, a fermented corn drink dear to many Latin American cultures, was the first known beer in the Americas.
We’re slotting this beer into our story at 550AD, the time period of the chicha-loving people of Tiwanaku in modern Bolivia in South America, but it could go just about anywhere in the timeline: there is evidence that chicha was made 7 000 years ago, it was a diet staple in the Andean region for thousands of years, and it is common today.
Like most ancient beers, chicha was traditionally made by women, but the process was a little unusual. It was ‒ and sometimes still is ‒ made by chewing corn so that saliva releases the sugars and kick-starts fermentation. (Don’t worry, it gets cooked later.)
The original stuff was cloudy, yellow-orange and mealy or gritty with a little foam, said French, who re-creates a batch with one of his classes every year.
But now, just about anything goes, including leaving out the corn. Many regions make signature variations of chicha using different fruits, spices, flavours and even other grains, such as rice or quinoa. Some, such as Peruvian chicha morada, are non-alcoholic.
Drinking vessel: The Incas and their predecessors drank chicha from lacquered wooden tumblers called keros.
Colour and clarity: Ancient chicha would’ve been grainy, French said.
Bavaria, 770 AD
Hoppy Viking brew
Ingredients: Barley, hops
Possible flavour profile: Bitter, fruity, malty, spicy
We know the ancestors of modern Bavarians were brewing by the Bronze Age, because traces of beer bread flavoured with oak leaves, an ancient preservative, were found in a crock near Kasendorf that dates to 700BCE.
Their descendants would transform the flavour and aroma of beer forever with a different preservative: hops, a relative of the cannabis plant.
European hops originated in the Georgian region of Eastern Europe and western Asia, said Martin Zarnkow, a master brewer, malter and researcher at the Research Centre Weihenstephan for Brewing and Food Quality at the Technical University of Munich.
Zarnkow says he thinks it was the Vikings who were the first to add hops to beer. Evidence from relics found at a Viking settlement in northern Germany shows that they used hops for something, so it would make sense they used them to preserve the beer they exported by sea.
For sure, Benedictine monks in Germany, Belgium and north-eastern France were brewing with hops by the 9th century. The first written record of hops being used in beer is from a monastery in 822. Monasteries were great centres of brewing, in part because monks and nuns were among the few in the Dark Ages who could read and write, so they could document their recipes and techniques.
By the 14th century, beer made with hop flowers was common in much of Europe.
Drinking vessel: Ale from 700BCE was found in an amphora that resides at the Bavarian Brewery Museum at Kulmbacher Mönchshof in Germany.
Colour and clarity: Head brewmaster Tobias Zollo at Weihenstephan, a brewery that dates from 1040, described the old brews as hazy and brown, sweeter and less bitter than many modern beers.
Germany, circa 1400
Lager time
Ingredients: Barley, hops
Possible flavour profile: Bitter, spicy, crisp
For most of history, all beer was technically ale, because it was fermented at room temperature primarily by a yeast that rose to the top, “Saccharomyces cerevisiae”. (No yeasts were pure until 1883, said Mathias Hutzler, a microbiologist and colleague of Zarnkow’s who studies brewing yeast history.)
By the end of the Middle Ages, a mysterious hybrid type of yeast in Bavaria was doing something different: It sank to the bottom and fermented in cool temperatures. It took weeks or months instead of days, and it produced a lighter, milder-tasting beer that was easy to drink and didn’t spoil nearly as quickly as ale.
Brewers called the style “lager”, from the German word meaning “to store”, and they created what is the world’s most popular style of beer. Like ales, lagers can be light or dark, depending on how the grain malt is roasted. The early ones had a smoky, spicy flavour but not a lot of carbonation.
The yeast that makes lager was later dubbed “S pastorianus” for Louis Pasteur, who in 1857, figured out how fermentation worked.
Drinking vessel: German beer tankards originated about the same time as lager, with lids to keep out flies that were thought to spread disease.
Colour and clarity: Lagers probably were the first clear beers.
England, 1600s to 1700s
Home brews in a New World
Ingredients: Barley, hops
Possible flavour profile: Sour, sweet, bitter, fruity, malty
British brewing goes back at least to the 1st century and probably earlier. Shortly after English colonists settled in Jamestown in 1607, they started importing ‒ and soon, home-brewing ‒ English ale. (Within a few years, Dutch immigrants began the first US commercial brewery in what is now New York.)
Beer was “liquid bread” to the early American colonists, said Frank Clark, the master of historic foodways at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Clark said everyone drank beer as a cornerstone of their diet. First, it was English ale. Then, thick porters, which originated in London in the 1700s, became popular with the working class on both sides of the pond.
English ales were ‒ and are ‒ less bitter and skunky than modern American porters and ales, thanks to different hops, Clark said. The porter back then, aged in oak barrels, also was more sour than current ones, in part because of bacteria that infiltrated the yeast they used.
Clark said he was amused by the recent infatuation with sour beers, because 18th-century brewers did everything they could ‒ which wasn’t a lot ‒ to keep bacteria from spoiling, or souring, their beer.
Drinking vessel: Settlers sipped fine ale from dainty glasses and chugged porters from leather tankards called blackjacks.
Colour and clarity: Ales were lighter and more effervescent than dark, muddy porters, said Clark said.
Early America, circa 1750
Pre-Civil War ‘small beer’
Ingredients: Molasses, wheat bran, hops, spices
Possible flavour profile: Sweet, malty, herbal
The first predominantly US beer was a molasses “small beer”, which exploded in popularity in the mid-18th century after trade relations with Caribbean countries made the sticky refined sugar cheap and easy to import, Clark said. Another type of small beer ‒ so named because of its low alcohol content, typically 2 to 4% ‒ was made by reusing grain from a previous brew.
People of all social classes drank some version of molasses beer – even George Washington. It was sometimes flavoured with creative ingredients, such as sassafras, ginger, coriander or cayenne.
A recipe for it appears in the 1824 compilation “The Virginia House-wife” by Mary Randolph, which is considered to be the first Southern cookbook.
Drinking vessel: Pewter mugs held everyday small beer.
Colour and clarity: The look would’ve varied, but Clark tried a version that was light brown and cloudy and said it tasted “pretty beerlike”.
San Francisco, 1965 to present
Big Beer vs. funky microbrews
Ingredients: Grain, hops, anything goes
Possible flavour profile: Sour, tart, sweet, bitter, fruity, malty, spicy, crisp, bready, herbal
In the mid-1800s, German, Austrian and Czech immigrants built an enormous lager industry in northern and Midwestern US cities such as Milwaukee, Pittsburgh and St Louis.
Tech innovations ‒ such as mechanical refrigeration, the mercury thermometer, and the hydrometer, which measured alcohol content ‒ helped them standardise their products. New railroads let them transport around the country. In the mid-1900s, the metal became a de facto symbol of Big Beer.
Then came a microbrew rebellion that was started by a Maytag and propelled by Jimmy Carter.
Fritz Maytag, from the washing machine family, bought and rejuvenated a struggling historic San Francisco brewery in 1965 and profitably produced Anchor Steam ‒ a crossover between lager and ale ‒ and other old-style beers.
Theresa McCulla, the curator of the American Brewing History Initiative at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, said that by revitalising historic styles using traditional techniques and authentic ingredients, Maytag “showed a model of what a new generation of American beer could look like”.
For a while, not a lot of others built on that model.
In 1978, the US had 89 breweries, a post-Prohibition low, according to Brewer’s Association data. But that year, Carter signed a bill that made home-brewing legal in the US.
Soon, hobbyists-turned-entrepreneurs opened start-up microbreweries, including two on the coasts that would grow into early craft powerhouses: Sierra Nevada in the west and Sam Adams in the east.
“Once those two blew up, everybody just started jumping in line, and everybody wanted to do it,” French said. As of 2022, there were 9 709 US breweries.
In July, Anchor Brewing closed, but Maytag’s spirit and tradition lives on with every oddly flavoured, bizarrely named quaff in neighbourhood brewpubs across the country.
Drinking vessel: Until recently, cans symbolised Big Beer, and craft brewers rarely used them.
Colour and clarity: Colour and clarity? You can see every possible variation at your local market or brewpub.
Your palate might have matched nicely with some of the beers from history. And you never knew when you might get the opportunity to try one, or at least a plausible re-creation. Craft brewers hoping to satisfy customers’ desire for novelty had turned to resurrecting old, even ancient, recipes, McCulla said.
“Reaching back for these historic recipes is just a way to get something new,” she said. - The Washington Post
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