A Hobbled History of Beer: 200-1000AD

A Hobbled History of Beer:
Pious-eyed Again... (200AD - 1000AD)
by Cub Lea
Last updated 09/00

Intro | Prehistory | -200AD | 200-1000AD | 1000-1400AD | 1400-1599AD | 1600s | 1700s | 1800s | 1900s | Canada

200AD: The Christians and barbarians take their turn

While beer is typically looked upon as a macho drink, and brewing seen as a man's profession, it should never be forgotten that early brewers were almost exclusively women. Beer was food, not just an intoxicating refreshment. Cooking was the domain of women, so brewing - and serving - were part and parcel of women's role in society. This gender territoriality extended from the first Incan brewers all the way to Babylon, where priestesses of the temple were also the communities' brewmistresses, and the first beer halls were also brothels...a convenient fit, since legends persist that beer was discovered by a concubine of a Sumerian king whose libido, laid bare by the alcohol fermented into her bread and water, so pleased the king that he ordered the recipe duplicated for all his concubines.

Even in the British Isles, women dominated the craft. Women were the physicians, herbalists and arbiters of food and drink for nearly all pre-agricultural civilizations, so this naturally extended to brewing. On this side of the Atlantic, the Incas had long since established a tradition that only the Sun virgins - women, of course - should be allowed to make maize (corn) beer for the king. Throughout the world, from central Africa to the Amazon, we still discover records indicating that whatever the local grain, bean or starchy root, women were the driving force behind its conversion to alcohol.

Ah, but this was about to come to an abrupt end in Europe. Enter a new religious leadership with a decidedly paternalistic bent and a love for pointy hats and our-churches-are-bigger-than-Ottoman-churches games, and in a relatively short time it was determined that brewing was not the sort of thing a proper Christian lady should be involved in. (Unless, of course, that woman happened to be wearing a nun's habit, in which case it was okay, since the lack of payment for this work apparently made it eminently more pious.) How interesting that women's role was stripped not by warrior-princes or legislators, but by "gender-neutral" priests...men not permitted by their vows to exercise their manhood.

I'll leave the psychoanalysis of all this sexual repression to the experts and limit our inquiry to a single question: what on Earth was the church thinking? Were these monks drunk with power?

Why you've never heard the expression "drunk as a monk"

Perhaps they were just plain drunk. It has been suggested that beer in medieval times wasn't nearly as strong as it is today, but that seems doubtful. A properly-brewed heavy ale nutritious enough to have high food value must surely have pulled its weight in the alcohol department as well. It's not inconceivable that early "abbey ales" weighed in at an average of 5%-7% alcohol. Monks typically drank oat beer, reserving barley beer for paying patrons and guests, but even that brew must have been fairly rich to provide the nourishment expected of a proper beer.

Historians apparently don't believe that hordes of staggering monks wandering the countryside potted on oat beer were a common sight in days of old. Even with the level of alcohol consumption of the day, drunkenness was still a sin. But it should also be noted, as anyone who has been in drug treatment (or dreams of a vacation there) knows all too well, that daily use of alcohol promotes a physical and psychological tolerance to intoxication. A hard-core alcoholic might literally show no measurable signs of impairment after guzzling a six-pack, so it's quite conceivable that the monks of old might feel (or notice) very little intoxication from even substantial quantities of beer on a daily basis, especially after a steady diet of the stuff since early childhood. This much alcohol must have ravaged their systems and contributed to shorter life expectancy, and since beer was not considered in violation of any religious fasting, it was always available. Some accounts claim that monks were permitted, if not downright encouraged, to drink up to five litres of beer daily.

800AD: Commerce marches on

But all was not praise-the-lord-and-pass-the-pitcher. And we do in fact know where some of that repressed sexual energy went: into the development of technology and technique. The era of the abbey breweries saw some of the most significant advances in the development of modern brewing. It was in these times that the brewing of beer from malt began in earnest on the European mainland, and when large-scale production was first undertaken. While most of Northern European technology was still trying to catch up with discoveries that the Egyptians had long since forgotten, records as far back as the fifth century tell of brewing techniques far more technically advanced than those of the Egypt at the height of its empire.

By the ninth century, we find records of great brew houses in the abbeys of Switzerland capable of serving not just the abbey's residents but the entire surrounding area as well. Soon after the Christian church took the reins of power in Rome, the abbeys were given permission to brew not just for themselves and the steady stream of pilgrims and passers-by, but for the surrounding community as well, all this for just one small franchise payment to the church. What would they expect to pay for all this power? Don't answer yet, because this special offer also included tax-free status for their beer. Now what would they expect to pay? Don't answer yet, because if they ordered within 14 days, they also got a special one-time-only bonus gift: the right to actively promote their own pubs. Which they apparently did...in many cases with a fittingly religious zeal. Armed with all this power and motivation, abbey ale was good to go and ready to dominate Europe for centuries. Now how much did they pay? The answer, of course, is: Heaven only knows.