History of Beer - Early Beers

Early Beers

As almost any cereal containing certain sugars can undergo spontaneous fermentation due to wild yeasts in the air, it is possible that beer-like beverages were independently developed throughout the world soon after a tribe or culture had domesticated cereal. Chemical tests of ancient pottery jars reveal that beer was produced about 3,500 BC in what is today Iran, and was one of the first-known biological engineering tasks where the biological process of fermentation is used. Also recent archaeological findings showing that Chinese villagers were brewing fermented alcoholic drinks as far back as 7000 BC on small and individual scale, with the production process and methods similar to that of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.

In Mesopotamia (Ancient Iraq), early evidence of beer is a 3900-year-old Sumerian poem honoring Ninkasi, the patron goddess of brewing, which contains the oldest surviving beer recipe, describing the production of beer from barley via bread.

Beer is also mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which the 'wild man' Enkidu is given beer to drink. "...he ate until he was full, drank seven pitchers of beer, his heart grew light, his face glowed and he sang out with joy."

Confirmed written evidence of ancient beer production in Armenia can be obtained from Xenophon in his work Anabasis (5th century B.C.) when he was in one of the ancient Armenian villages in which he wrote:

Beer became vital to all the grain-growing civilizations of Eurasian and North African antiquity, including Egypt—so much so that in 1868 James Death put forward a theory in The Beer of the Bible that the manna from heaven that God gave the Israelites was a bread-based, porridge-like beer called wusa.

These beers were often thick, more of a gruel than a beverage, and drinking straws were used by the Sumerians to avoid the bitter solids left over from fermentation. Though beer was drunk in Ancient Rome, it was replaced in popularity by wine. Tacitus wrote disparagingly of the beer brewed by the Germanic peoples of his day. Thracians were also known to consume beer made from rye, even since the 5th century BC, as Hellanicus of Lesbos says. Their name for beer was brutos, or brytos. The Romans called their brew cerevisia, from the Celtic word for it.

Ancient Nubians had used beer as an antibiotic medicine.