by V. Kumar

Created on: June 13, 2008   Last Updated: December 13, 2011

The stack of beer bottles that you purchase every week provides no clue about the long and arduous journey this glorious drink has taken to reach this far. This journey has gone parallel with that taken by mankind from being nomadic hunters roaming in the woods to the modern high fliers wanting to visit the moon to kill their boredom. The history of beer is just about as inseparable from human history as is modern beer from our lives.

ORIGIN OF BEER

The history of beer begins at a point about as ancient and pre-historic as the history of grains. Beer, in contrast to wine, results from fermentation of grains, usually barley but also wheat, corn and rice. It is believed that the first sample of beer tasted by humans would have been a product of fermentation of leftover staple food, something like bread or rice left in water, which, infected by common yeast available in the surrounding environment, would have fermented the starch. Subsequently, this effect of fermentation would have been observed, repeated and gradually improved upon by ancient agrarian societies, gradually developing and refining their brewing skills.

Thus, one thing that seems certain is that beer was introduced to humans after they shifted from nomadic tribal hunting lifestyles to agrarian societies harvesting cereals and using them as their staple foods. This, incidentally, coincided with the first steps of human civilization, making beer one of its first luxuries and enjoyments.

BEER IN ANCIENT HISTORY

It seems that different civilizations discovered and refined their own beers at different points of time in their individual histories. The first historical account of beer comes from the chemical analysis of ancient pottery jars pertaining to pre-historic Indo-Iranian societies that existed where modern Iran thrives, around 6000 years ago, even prior to the development of Mesopotamia as one of the oldest centres of civilization.

Mesopotamia provides the oldest historical artefact suggesting consumption of beer, in the form of a 4,000-year-old Sumerian tablet that shows people drinking beer from a communal bowl. Greater supportive details about the consumption of beer in Mesopotamia come from a contemporary Sumerian poem in the honour of a patron goddess of brewing, Ninkasi, which contains what is probably the oldest surviving recipe for making beer. Sumerian people brewed beer from bread made of barley.

Another historical account of beer in ancient Sumerian civilization comes from the Epic

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