A Hobbled History of Beer: Early Brewing History by Cub Lea Last updated 09/00

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If we define beer as an alcoholic beverage created from the fermentation of grain, then the date when beer was discovered will likely never be known. We can guess with reasonable certainty that some ancient gatherer tribes discovered it by accident after a porridge, dough or soup made from gathered grain was unintentionally allowed to ferment. Intoxication was observed when drinking the result, and the first question likely asked at that moment was "how can we make more of this?"

How often this happy accident occurred across the globe in prehistory will remain forever a mystery, but we like to think that beer was discovered, lost and rediscovered countless times before history was first recorded. We can say with near-100-percent certainty that beer was the first alcoholic beverage discovered by humanity, and that it has been consumed in higher volume than any other alcoholic beverage, perhaps more than any processed beverage of any kind with the possible exception of yogurt, which as it happens also owes its existence to the action of microbes...in this case, beneficial bacteria, single-celled animals, rather than yeast, which are single-celled plants.

We can also assume that the craft brewing tradition of using real barley malts extends right back to the beginning. After all, barleys were the first grains cultivated by man, and likely one of the first wild grass seeds to be gathered in sufficient quantities that beer could or would result from a storage mishap.

The Babylonians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Hebrews, Africans, Chinese, Incas, Teutons, Saxons and nomadic tribes the world over all apparently discovered various forms of beer by various independent means. Until quite recently, it was thought that either the Indians or those ever-clever Chinese were the first to deliberately brew beer. Archaeological evidence now points to an area of Sumeria near the southern end of Iraq as the likely birthplace of brewing, but let's not be too hasty about giving Mr. Hussein yet another reason to crow until we're certain, ok?

Estimates of brewing's actual birthdate range from 10,000 to 25,000 years ago. We don't know exactly when beer was first brewed, but we do know that the Sumerians were writing about it 8,000 years ago. In fact, as of mid-2000, the oldest known written document on Earth was a Sumerian clay tablet inscribed with cuneiform and accurately dated to around 6,000BC. This tablet describes the brewing of beer for sacrifice to the god Ninkasi. This tablet predates the first Chinese record of the brewing of "kiu" by a good four millennia, and is also significantly older than any known record of Incan or African brewing.

From venerable barley came the first breads, and it appears that the first beers were likely produced from leavened, lightly-baked barley bread. (The use of crushed, malted grain in brewing would only become popular several millennia later.) Even before the dawn of recorded history, it is likely that beer was known as the meal replacement drink of its day, "liquid bread" that could supply both food and drink from a single container.

Perhaps the most controversial notion surrounding the birth of brewing is that civilization itself might have emerged from the thirst for beer. Some anthropologists actively question whether the development of cultivation, which directly led to the establishment of civilized culture, was a direct consequence of need not for food (which was relatively plentiful year-round in the Mesopotamian valleys and deltas at that time) but for drink...specifically the need for more grain to make more beer. The evolution of pottery during this period certainly appears to owe much of its heritage to the need for more and larger vessels for storage of fermenting broth, so it's not inconceivable that farming might have also arisen from thirst for the brew.

Ponder that during the next time you watch the X-Files.