A Hobbled History of Beer: Staggering from Sumeria to Rome by Cub Lea Last updated 09/00

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

The brewing of beer from barley bread continued for thousands of years with little change, for fairly obvious and practical reasons. All one needed was leavened (yeast-raised) bread. Just add water, wait a few days for nature to take its course and you had beer. No messy bottles or cans to return, no cumbersome grain to sprout or grind, no Teamsters or surly corner-store night clerks to deal with. Surely some epicure had tried brewing beer with flour or ground grain before the Northern Europeans refined the process in the Dark Ages, but any innovator this industrious must have appeared to his or her peers to be positively masochistic. After all, why do it the hard way when a goatskin of water and loaf of bread, which already contained the needed yeast, was the equivalent of a complete beer-making kit?

Sumeria eventually fell into decline and gave way to the Babylonian empire which adopted many of its predecessor's traditions and developed a many more of their own, some of which survive to this day. Babylonian fathers-of-the-bride would provide a new son-in-law with all the honey beer (mead) he could drink for a full month as part of the dowry. The "honey month" evolved into what we now know as the honeymoon. Babylonians had already developed 20 distinct styles of brew, only eight of which were based on barley. The remainder were made from emmer wheat or a blend of emmer and barley. The sacrificial beer described on the ancient Sumerian tablet mentioned on the previous page was adopted by the Babylonians for temple use as well. Other types of beer were used as medicines and for paying or feeding laborers, and both of these uses for beer continued right up until the 1700s in Europe.

The Egyptians took to beer with a passion and applied their superior technological know-how to the craft. They used breads of millet and spelt as well as the traditional barley and emmer wheat. Beer apparently fed the hordes who built the pyramids. Egypt even considered Osiris to be the patron god of brewers. They also knew by this time that unbaked or lightly baked breads produced a superior-tasting product, and probably one with higher alcohol content and faster fermentation, since baking kills the yeast needed for fermentation.

The brewing of bread beer is still practiced today in some communities along the Nile, albeit in a different form than in ancient times, but the original practice may not be entirely lost. Many modern hobby brewers have attempted to duplicate early bread beers, and their exploits are well-represented on over a dozen websites. You can search out the experiments of these intrepid home brewers by searching on the phrase "Egyptian beer bread".

Much of Egypt's history and technological know-how was permanently destroyed in the fire which consumed the great library of Alexandria, but some beer-related lore survives.

For example, in the legendary Egyptian Book of the Dead, one of the gods speaks of drinking celebratory jugs of beer at day's end. The Book of Dreams, a lesser-known companion volume, speaks of dreaming of beer as a good omen. An Egyptian apothecary (pharmacy) manual circa. 600BC featured 700 different prescriptions, of which 100 contained beer. Offering a young lady a sip of your beer was a solemn act tantamount to a proposal of marriage. The practice of spicing beer with herbs and condiments also became popular in ancient Egypt, and among the more popular seasonings were wormwood (later used in the dreaded absinthe), dandelion, mint, horehound and the ever-popular balsam.

These early Middle Eastern concoctions were all top-fermented, ale-style beers, as were all beers brewed up until about 1500 when bottom fermenting was finally refined enough to produce a palatable lager-style brew. A residue would form at the top of brewing vessels consisting primarily of bitter dormant or dead yeast. Egyptians and Babylonians both adopted the practice of using hollow reeds to drink from below this residue, the first appearance in history of the drinking straw. Many early physicians suspected that the use of straws might be a decadent practice, but it wasn't until the 20th century when they were finally proven correct. As unpleasantly bitter as grain-fed brewer's yeast might taste, it turns out that dried brewer's yeast is one of the most nutritious foods known to humanity, so bypassing the bitter yeast significantly decreased the food value of the beer. In the last twenty years or so, this bitter grain-fed yeast, a popular health food for decades, all but disappeared to be replaced by much tastier (and some say less nutritious) brewer's yeast fed primarily on beet syrup and other inexpensive sugars.

For what it's worth, we know that the Orientals were acing out their Occidental counterparts in technique and delivery as early as 2000BC, producing tasty, clarified beers from millet long before malt brewing took hold in Europe. If they had indeed been in the game long before that, it was simply their misfortune not to have had a film crew handy at the time to prove it. Middle Eastern cultures, on the other hand, had integrated brewing so deeply into their culture that they had written laws regarding beer in the Code of Hammurabi, and parts of this code continued to be enforced right up to the Renaissance, so they take credit as our oldest, most famous beer pioneers.

If it can be said without blaspheming, even the God of the Christians knew a good thing when he saw it. We know that Mesopotamian cultures fell victim to the great flood documented in the Old Testament. Noah, whose ark reputedly held two of every living thing found in the Tigris/Euphrates delta, is believed to have saved even brewer's yeast from loss to the floods. The nature of yeast's action wasn't well understood at this time, but it was known that a small amount of the last batch of beer or bread was needed to leaven the next batch. Beer was part of Noah's provisions, so brewer's yeast - and brewing - naturally survived the flood. Even if Noah had not taken beer along, it's likely that the craft would not have been lost. Enough yeast circulates in the air that eventually an experiment or accident would have produced the next generation of fermented bread, starting the cycle all over again.

The Roman era: conquest and repression

The history of beer from this point on is, at least as we tell it today, disproportionately European. We can blame this in part on the fact that the media of the day didn't find brewing in Africa, Asia and the Americas to be quite as sexy a story as the potboiler developing in Europe. After all, the situation in Rome had all the elements for ratings-grabbing scrolls and songs: sex, conquest, technology, treachery, violence and political intrigue, and the producers knew a good thing when they saw it, following up that long-running hit with the Holy Roman Church, still a popular melodrama today.

The Roman era was witness to a dramatic decrease in the popularity of beer in Southern Europe at the expense of rapid growth in winemaking. The Bible appears to indicate that the popularity of wine long precedes the Roman Empire, but that remains in dispute. A few scholars maintain that wine was substituted for beer in numerous references to beverages in the Old Testament, and by the time the King James version was rendered, "beer" was reinterpreted as "strong drink", muddying the waters even further. We do know that with the rise of the Romans, beer did in fact fall into disfavor. Wine was seen as the drink of choice throughout the Mediterranean region. It kept far longer in warmer climates, certainly must have tasted far better than beers of the time, and produced much more alcohol per barrel.

By the time of Augustus and Julius Caesar, around the period when Jesus was alive, the consumption of beer had been socially marginalized to the more northerly "barbarian lands". How brewing migrated north from Mesopotamia, or whether it was discovered independently in the northern nations, is still unknown.

Early Teutonic tribes in what is now Germany were certainly brewing beer as early as 800BC. By the time Rome was given over to the Christian church, it had become a staple commercial commodity there. The great Finnish epic Kalewala devotes a full 400 verses to beer, but only 200 to the creation of the world, suggesting that the Finns must have had their problems with societal depression even then. Edda, another famed Nordic epic, speaks of wine as the domain of the gods, beer as the beverage of mortals, and mead as the drink of the dead.

But by this time a fairly clear line had been drawn from Germany in the east to Britain in the west, and the lands north to Scandinavia came to be seen by subjects of the Roman Empire as the domain of uncivilized, beer-drinking savages. Beer may have been less a matter of preference than necessity in these regions. Grains grew well in more northern climes; while there was a period of several centuries in which grapes flourished as far north as Belgium, the northern tribes not allied with Rome continued to select beer as their drink of choice.

But if it was seen by Romans as a barbarian's drink, the Romans might have done well to take a lesson from their "uncivilized" foes. Beer had a clear advantage over wine in virtually any situation in which it might be drunk, from breakfast to battle to bedtime: protein. Wine might be a fine addition to a meal of fish, but it's nowhere near a complete food in and of itself. A flagon or goatskin of ale, on the other hand, could sustain a warrior throughout the day when no other food was available.