Discover the Oldest Beer Recipe in History From Ancient Sumeria, 1800 B.C.
22nd September 2015
Beer, that favorite beverage of football fans, frat boys, and other macho stereotypes—at least according to the advertisers—actually has a very long, distinguished heritage. It’s older, in fact, than wine, older than whiskey, older perhaps even than bread (or so some scholars have thought). As soon as humans settled down and learned to cultivate grains, some 13,000 years ago, the possibility for fermentation—a naturally occurring phenomenon—presented itself. But it isn’t until the 5th century, B.C. that we have sources documenting the deliberate production of ale in ancient Sumeria. Nonetheless, beer has been described as the “midwife of civilization” due to its central role in agriculture, trade, urbanization, and medicine.
September 22nd, 2015 at 12:24
There is even a school of thought among anthropologists that posits beer as the driving force behind the agricultural revolution of some 15K years ago, specifically that the cultivation of grain was adopted in order to provide a steady source of mash for fermentation. And of course people couldn’t move around, as the grain wasn’t mobile, and so they settled down…
It’s an interesting theory.