by Joshua Bayes

Created on: June 14, 2008   Last Updated: February 14, 2011

Beer: The History of a Wonderful Thing

"Would you like a beer with your meal, Sir?"
"No thank you, I'd like a beer with my life".

As the light, crisp ale passed my lips and embarked upon its merry-making journey liver-wards, I was thankful. I was thankful that this wonderful drink, this small but reliable golden friend, was here to accompany me in this confusing but incredible thing we call 'life', enhancing my pleasures, lifting my mood and relieving my tensions; in short, just being generally a truly excellent thing. I was thankful, but I had no idea who to thank: God seemed a little too extreme, 'The Man who Invented Beer' seemed a little to vague and impersonal, 'Yeast for making it all possible' seemed a little too inanimate and fungal to appreciate my thanks fully, and so I settled on thanking the barman for being the middleman and resolved to do a little research to find out how this remarkable liquid had found it's way into your humble narrator's glass, and burrowed for itself a warm, loving place within the stony coldness of his heart.

Like all things that 'evolved' as opposed to actually being invented or discovered, the actual moment of beer's conception is vague and unclear and all a little too wishy-washy and imprecise for me to feel comfortable repeating as unequivocal, God-verified fact. After streaming through reams of text, I found that the most likely explanation is that it happened by way of a 'happy accident'. (Or tremendously gleeful and elated accident, if you're anything like me). It seems that the process which gives us beer, fermentation, owing to the fact that all cereals ferment with the introduction of yeast, was probably happening naturally and unaided (on account of an abundance of wild, airborne yeasts) for millennia before an incredibly clever man, probably a farmer whose harvested barley became wet and fermented, noticed its properties and rapidly harnessed this miracle. This genius, whose name and identity is unfortunately lost in the midst of time and inebriation, we can probably state as almost inarguable certainty (possibly), lived approximately 4000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, and, to be more specific, maybe lived in the kind of vicinity of modern day Iran.
Here is where beer began, in an insignificant rural area in what is now an entirely teetotal country, and here, therefore is where some of our thanks should be sent. This frothy, unrefined barley beer began to spread through Mesopotamia as the drink of choice

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