Brussels Journal

A History of Beer – Part 1

From the desk of Fjordman on Sat, 2009-08-22 23:37

As always when writing about a specific topic, I have used a
combination of different sources when doing research for this essay,
but the single most important source of information was A History of
Beer and Brewing by I. Hornsey. His book is perhaps a little bit too
much focused on Britain but is overall very comprehensive and well
worth reading. It traces the history of brewing from prehistoric times
until the turn of the twenty-first century. Another work I found
valuable was Richard W. Unger’s book Beer in the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance. Unger’s text contains a little information on
brewing-practices in the ancient world and even less of the
scientific-industrial brewing that we know after the Industrial
Revolution. However, his coverage of the Middle Ages and the early
modern period is quite good, and I will quote his work extensively
when writing about this period.

Fermented beverages brewed from grains such as rice or wheat have been
used in East Asia for thousands of years and played an important role
in the early religious life of China. The use of alcohol in moderation
was believed to be prescribed by heaven. Inscriptions on bones and
tortoise shells as well as bronze inscriptions preserve many records
of people from the Shang era (second millennium BC) worshiping their
ancestors with a variety of alcoholic beverages. Such beverages were
widely used in all segments of Chinese society for hospitality and as
a source of inspiration. During the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907), the
Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup included some of the greatest scholars
and poets in China’s history, among them Li Bai and Du Fu, known for
their love of alcoholic drinks. Fermented beverages made from grapes
were not totally unknown in East Asia, but wine was never as widely
consumed there as it was in the western regions of Eurasia, although
this is slowly changing now due to Western cultural influences.

Kaffir beer is the traditional drink of the Bantu peoples of southern
Africa. It has been likened to "bubbling yogurt." The shelf-life of
the product is restricted to a few days, and "unlike most European
beers, African products contain a mixture of acids and alcohols, and
have a sour taste." In Mesoamerica, fermented drinks were known,
including one made from cacao beans, but north of Mexico, few or none
alcoholic beverages were produced in pre-Columbian times. The Berbers
of North Africa grew barley and wheat and made wine for centuries, but
beer was unknown in the region until it was introduced in modern times
by Europeans.

In South America, chicha is the generic name applied to native
beer. This brew typically contains a slight amount of alcohol,
1-3%. The Incas used the drink for ritual purposes, and traces of its
making have been found at the city of Machu Picchu. According to
scholar Terence N. D’Altroy in his book The Incas, fermented beverages
were so much a part of the cuisine in the Andes region `that being
forced to drink water was a form of punishment.’ The Incas around AD
1500 ruled over a vast empire stretching from Ecuador to central
Chile, despite many natural obstacles in this mountainous region, held
together by a network of roads and chains of runners who bore messages
either orally or recorded in quipu, a code of knots in colored cords.

As historian J. M. Roberts states, `Though preliterate, the Andean
empire was formidably totalitarian in the organization of its
subjects’ lives. The Incas became the ruling caste of the empire, its
head becoming Sapa Inca – the `only Inca’. His rule was a despotism
based on the control of labour. The population was organized in units
of which the smallest was that of ten heads of families. From these
units, labour service and produce were exacted. Careful and tight
control kept population where it was needed; removal or marriage
outside the local community were not allowed. All produce was state
property; in this way agriculturalists fed herdsmen and craftsmen and
received textiles in exchange (the llama was the all-purpose beast of
Andean culture, providing wool as well as transport, milk and
meat). There was no commerce. Mining for precious metals and copper
resulted in an exquisite adornment of Cuzco which amazed the Spaniards
when they came to it. Tensions inside this system were not dealt with
merely by force, but by the resettlement of loyal populations in a
disaffected area and a strict control of the educational system in
order to inculcate the notables of conquered peoples with the proper
attitudes.’

Chicha was most commonly associated with maize, but other raw
materials could be used, for instance potatoes. The greatest diversity
in wild potato species occurs in the Lake Titicaca region of Peru and
Bolivia, where the now-familiar crop probably was domesticated between
10,000 and 7,000 years ago. According to Ellen Messer in The Cambridge
World History of Food, "In their Andean heartland, potatoes have
always been consumed fresh (boiled or roasted) or reconstituted in
stews from freeze-dried or sun-dried forms. They have been the most
important root-crop starchy staple, although other cultivated and wild
tubers are consumed along with cereals, both indigenous (maize and
quinoa) and nonindigenous (barley and wheat). Despite the importance
of the potato, cereals were often preferred. For example, Inca ruling
elites, just prior to conquest, were said to have favored maize over
potatoes, perhaps because the cereal provided denser
carbohydrate-protein-fat calories and also was superior for brewing."

According to scholar Patrick E. McGovern in his book Ancient Wine: The
Search for the Origins of Viniculture, `The discovery and rediscovery
of how to make a fermented beverage from a natural or derived source
of simple sugars has occurred in many places and at many times. Before
the modern period, only the Eskimos, the peoples of Tierra del Fuego
at the southern tip of South America, and the Australian aborigines
apparently lived out their lives without the solace and medical
benefits of alcohol. The polar regions lacked good resources for
monosaccharides; bear meat and seal fat may degrade and go rancid, but
they do not ferment. Temperate parts of the globe, by contrast, were
blessed with honey and fruit, above all the grape, and the tropics
were awash in sugar-rich plants.’

Exactly when humans first began making alcoholic beverages is not
known with certainty. A major turning point in human history was the
transition from an extractive economy (foraging and collecting) to a
productive, agrarian economy with domesticated plants and animals, the
so-called Neolithic Revolution, a term coined in the 1920s by the
Australian scholar Gordon Childe (1892-1957). This gradual transition
from the life of nomadic hunter-gatherers to more settled communities
of food producers happened independently in several parts of the
world, but very early (ca. 9000-7000 BC) in the Near East and the
Fertile Crescent, where many useful plants and animals were naturally
available. It is theoretically possible that alcoholic beverages could
have been made prior to this. Some raw materials of fermentation
(i.e. sources of sugar) were naturally available to pre-Neolithic
peoples, primarily wild berries and fruits, tree sap and honey. These
raw materials and end-products were unstable and not available for
consumption at all times of the year. However, it is unlikely that
reproducible beers could be brewed until after the invention of some
sort of pottery vessels. The earliest pottery containers we currently
know of were produced before 10,000 BC in China and Japan, somewhat
later in other regions.

In temperate zones there were relatively few abundant sources of
sugar. According to Hornsey, `Thus, for much of Europe, at least,
honey is the logical candidate for being the basis of the original
fermented beverage, some sort of mead. According to Vencl (1991), mead
was known in Europe long before wine, although archaeological evidence
for it is rather ambiguous. This is principally because the confirmed
presence of beeswax, or certain types of pollen (such as lime, Tilia
spp., and meadowsweet, Filipendula ulmaria), is only indicative of the
presence of honey (which could have been used for sweetening some
other drink) – not necessarily of the production of mead. For more
southerly parts of Europe, and for the Eastern Mediterranean and the
Near East, the fermentation of the sap and fruits of tree crops, such
as the date palm (Phoenix dactylifera L.), offers the most likely
means by which alcoholic drinks were first produced with any degree of
regularity. The date palm was one of the first fruit trees to be taken
into cultivation in the Old World (ca. mid-4th millennium BC), and its
sap and fruits contain one of the most concentrated sources of sugar
(60-70%) known on the planet.’

Moreover, as Hornsey states, `In more temperate zones, mature
specimens of trees such as birch (Betula spp.) and maple (Acer spp.)
were bored early in the year (January or February) and sap was
collected until the trees set bud. In early spring it has been
reported that a mature birch can yield some 20-30 litres of sap daily
(with a sugar content of 2-8%, plus some vitamins and minerals), some
of which can be stored until summer. Such activities are historically
attested for in North America, Scandinavia, and eastern Europe, and in
many instances it would appear that the sap was consumed `neat’….It
is thought that sap was more important than fruit juices in
prehistoric times, especially in northern Europe, something that can
be gleaned from the fact that the Finnish word for sap is mahla, and
that this gave its name to the month of March in both the old Finnish
and Estonian languages. The sugar levels of tree sap can be
concentrated by boiling, and it is of note that maple sugar was
manufactured in Europe until the early 19th century (and still is in
North America in the 21st century).’

Archaeologist Merryn Dineley claims that ritual brewing in Neolithic
ceremonies in Scotland dates back at least to 3000 BC. Meadowsweet,
the addition of which can extend the shelf-life of such early beer by
several weeks, was one component of a number of possible prehistoric
brews discovered in Scotland. This ale would have been flavored with
meadowsweet in the manner of a kvass made by various northern European
tribes, including the Celts and the Picts. We know of several ancient,
simply prepared fermented drinks that might have been precursors of
what we today know as beer. One of these is braga (or bosa), which has
been made until recent times over a huge area of Europe, from Poland
to the Balkans and eastwards into Siberia. Kvass or kvas is a
fermented beverage, typically with an alcoholic content as low as 1%,
which has been produced and consumed in Russia, the Ukraine and many
Eastern and Central European countries for a very long time, often
flavored with fruits or herbs. It may constitute a "fossil beer," and
there are those who believe that the beers consumed in early
Mesopotamian literate civilizations may have been a form of kvass.

Recorded human history begins with the rise of urban literate
civilization in Mesopotamia and the Middle East, starting with the
Sumerians and the cities of Uruk, Ur, Lagash and Kish in the fourth
millennium BC. These civilizations had access to barley and wheat,
which by consensus would be regarded as the preferred grains by most
brewers. The origin of wheat and barley is believed to lie in the
Fertile Crescent. Wild barley grew in Israel and Syria, the Jordan
Valley with the extremely ancient Neolithic town of Jericho via
eastern Anatolia to northern Mesopotamia and western Iran. Apart from
barley, all of the major cereal crops such as wheat, oats, rye,
millets, maize, sorghum and rice can and have been used to make
beer. Some of the oldest written texts in the world contain lists of
grains and ingredients for making beer. Sumerian Mesopotamia produced
a great variety of beers, most of which were probably weaker than the
European beers of medieval times. Wine was made in the Zagros
Mountains in Iran and imported to the main urban sites. Beer was a
popular drink in Mesopotamia during all eras and was consumed by all
social groups, interlinked with mythology, religion and medicine,
synonymous with happiness and a civilized life. Both filtered and
unfiltered beers were brewed in the region.

According to I. Hornsey, `Beer that had not gone through any sieving
or settlement phase was always drunk through straws, in order to avoid
gross sediment. Numerous cylinder seals have been recovered which show
individuals (usually two) drinking through straws from a communal
vessel, something that supports the notion that drinking beer was a
social activity….Drinking straws were usually made of reeds, and
hence have long since perished, but one or two elaborate and more
substantial structures have survived. Three such items were recovered
from a royal tomb at Ur. One was made of copper encased in lapis
lazuli; one was made of silver, fitted with gold and lapis lazuli
rings, and the third was a reed covered in gold, and found still
inserted in a silver jar. The silver tube was an impressive L-shaped
structure, being ca. 1 cm in diameter, and some 93 cm long. A number
of metal `straws’ have also been recovered from Syrian
sites. Unfiltered Mesopotamian beer, which was thick and cloudy, was
low in alcohol but high in carbohydrate and proteins, making it a
nutritious food supplement.’

Beer played an important role in the ceremonial life of ancient Egypt,
too. As Douglas J. Brewer and Emily Teeter state in their book Egypt
and the Egyptians, second edition, `The most popular drink in Egypt
was beer, and we assume that all Egyptians – rich and poor, male and
female – drank great quantities of it in spite of advice such as
`Don’t indulge in drinking beer, lest you utter evil speech, and don’t
know what you are saying’ (from the `Instructions of Ani’). Wages were
paid in grain, which was used to make two staples of the Egyptian
diet: bread and beer. Beer was made from barley dough, so bread making
and beer making are often shown together. Barley dough destined for
beer making was partially baked and then crumbled into a large vat,
where it was mixed with water and sometimes sweetened with date
juice. This mixture was left to ferment, which it did quickly; the
liquid was then strained into a pot that was sealed with a clay
stopper. Ancient Egyptian beer had to be drunk soon after it was made
because it went flat very quickly. Egyptians made a variety of beers
of different strengths.’

All kinds of workers were paid in grain and in grain products such as
beer and bread. People at all levels of Egyptian society drank beer,
with brewing not as tied to the temples as it was in Mesopotamia,
although there was some government interference and regulation here as
well. Breweries in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and Syria could be
large, but in the warm climate the beer would quickly become
undrinkable and could thus not be transported too far or exported to
distant regions. Baking and brewing often went on in shared quarters
on the estates of Egypt since these two processes involved the same
raw materials and similar equipment. Artistic evidence suggests a
strong link between brewing and bread-making, both being domestic
duties usually performed by women. Women made much of the beer in
medieval Europe, too, until brewing become a major, capital-intensive
industry and gradually became dominated by men. The roles of
microscopic organisms in baking and brewing, however, were not fully
appreciated until the scientific advances of nineteenth century
Europe.

Beer was also consumed by many other ancient peoples, including the
Hittites, Hebrews, Philistines, Thracians, Illyrians, Phrygians and
Scythians. Some peoples, like the Nubians and the Ethiopians, would
appear to have developed their own methods of brewing, making use of
indigenous raw materials. The Eskimos drank chiefly iced water and
warm blood before they were confronted by Europeans and their
alcoholic drinks.

Wine has frequently throughout recorded history enjoyed greater
prestige than beer and has often been the preferred choice of the
wealthy and the privileged. It is difficult to say why. Maybe it was
because wine was usually stronger than beer or that it kept longer. We
cannot say with certainty that it always tasted better. Regardless of
the reason for this, it is a fact that wine was often valued more
highly. This attitude arguably still exists today, when beer is often
viewed as the drink of the "common man," while those eating at
expensive restaurants will normally prefer a glass of fine wine rather
than a glass of beer to accompany their food.

Wine was widely consumed in the ancient Middle East, and sometimes its
effects were enhanced by additives. Along with eating and drinking
went song and dance. Egyptians and Mesopotamians found it difficult to
grow large amounts of grapes for wine and instead imported what they
could not make. Thousands of wine jars were deposited in the tombs of
the first pharaohs of Egypt at Saqqara (Memphis) and Abydos, the main
centers of the recently united country. The about 700 jars of wine
found in the tomb of one of Egypt’s first kings at Abydos, Scorpion I,
contain some of the earliest known hieroglyphic writing ever
discovered in Egypt, from before 3100 BC. This wine was apparently
imported from southern Palestine, and it is quite clear that there was
large-scale production of wine in the Levant – present-day Syria,
Lebanon, Israel and Jordan – already at this early date.

Nikolai Vavilov, a Russian botanist, has suggested that the first
"wine culture" emerged in Transcaucasia, the region stretching between
the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, comprising modern Georgia, Armenia
and Azerbaijan. Not all scholars agree with this theory, but it is
clear from archaeological evidence that the Black Sea region and the
Eastern Mediterranean contain some of the earliest wine-producing
regions in the world. The Phoenicians from present-day Lebanon brought
wine to new areas in Spain and Portugal, a number of Mediterranean
islands as well as Carthage, the Phoenician-derived North African city
which was to prove a serious challenge to the emerging Roman supremacy
in the Mediterranean world during the Punic Wars, especially under the
leadership of the great Carthaginian general and military strategist
Hannibal (ca. 247-ca. 183 BC).

The Phoenicians competed with and taught another wine-loving people,
the Greeks, as both groups plied their ships throughout the
Mediterranean, traded their goods and planted vineyards as they
went. One of the fruits of these contacts was the Greek – and by
extension the Roman or Latin – alphabet, adopted with added vowel
letters from a modified version of the early Semitic alphabet employed
by the Phoenicians before 1000 BC. Where the Greek alphabet was first
created is not clear, but it may well have been on some of the islands
where the ancient Greeks came into frequent contact with Phoenician
traders, for instance Cyprus or Crete, possibly around 800 BC. The
period from roughly 800 BC to 500 BC saw the establishment of Greek
city-states. By the time of Aristotle in the fourth century BC, Greek
colonies existed in southern France, the Iberian Peninsula, southern
Italy, Asia Minor and in what is now southern Russia and
Georgia. Krasnodar Krai on the Black Sea coast remains an important
Russian wine district to this day.

As scholar Nicholas Ostler puts it, `the colonisation of the
Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts by Greek cities lasted from the
middle of the eighth to the early fifth century BC. The question why,
of all the inhabitants of these shores, only the Greeks and the
Phoenicians set up independent centres in this way has never been
answered. The foundations clearly served a variety of purposes, as
political safety valves, as trading posts for raw materials, and as
opportunities to apply Greek agriculture to more abundant and less
heavily populated soil, but it is noteworthy that they are exclusively
coastal, never moving inland except on the island of Sicily. The Greek
expansion came after the period of Phoenician settlements (eleventh to
eighth centuries), so it may be that the most important factor was who
had effective control of the sea.’

The ancient Greeks and Romans were familiar with beer, but to them,
drinking alcohol above all meant drinking wine. Wine was
civilization. When Classical authors did mention beer, its most
beneficial property was considered to be its ability to soften ivory
to make jewelery. Beer was nevertheless consumed within the Roman
Empire, especially in the border regions in the north. Most of the
major wine producing regions in Western Europe today, and some of
those in Eastern Europe, were established by the Romans, including
probably the famous Bordeaux region of France. Wine production grew so
much that some provinces soon exported wine back to the Italian
Peninsula.

By the third century BC the Celtic world consisted of a series of
autonomous tribes stretching across much of Europe from Ireland to
Poland and Hungary, plus pockets of Celtic influence in Anatolia, the
Iberian Peninsula and elsewhere. After this, the Celts were more and
more under pressure by the advancing Romans and the Germanic
peoples. The loss of northern Spain and Italy, but especially France
(the Gaul) to the Romans was a serious setback, and the Celts of the
Danube soon disappeared. This left mainly the British Isles as a
Celtic repository. In Britain, the Celtic-speaking peoples were
eventually pressured into Ireland, Scotland (Calcedonia) and Wales. In
France, even the name `Gaul’ disappeared. It’s current name comes from
a post-Roman Germanic tribe, the Franks, although Celtic speech
survived in some northern regions such as Brittany (Bretagne in
French).

The standard container for wine, olive oil, grain and other
commodities in the ancient Mediterranean world was the amphora, a clay
vase with two handles. According to Julius Caesar, the Gauls in the
first century BC were happy to swap a slave for a 25-liter amphora of
wine. A slave would have been worth six times more in the Roman
marketplace. The amphora was eventually superseded by the wooden
barrel for the transport of wine.

As Hugh Johnson writes in his book The Story of Wine, `Wood and metal
were the Celts’ favourite materials. So skilful were they with roof
beams that some of the more ambitious of the stone vaults of Rome
could not have been achieved without Celtic carpenters to make the
templates. Iron wood-working tools have been found from the La Tène
culture of Switzerland in the fifth century BC which would be familiar
in a cooper’s shop today. The earliest barrels even had iron hoops,
which gave way to wooden encircling bands in Roman times, only to be
reinstated in the barrels of the seventeenth century. The historical
trend has been for barrels to become shorter and fatter – otherwise
there has been almost no change in form. The Romans soon realized the
superiority of the light, resilient, rollable barrel over the
cumbersome, fragile amphora, particularly in cooler northern climates
with high humidity. The one advantage of the amphora that the barrel
did not possess was that it could not be made airtight. Wood
`breathes’; wine cannot be `laid down’ to mature for years in a
barrel, as it can in an amphora.’

The Celts drank mead at certain great calendar festivals; otherwise
they primarily consumed beer. As Richard W. Unger writes in his
well-researched book Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance:

`In the early fifth century, Orosius said that beer was the typical
drink of those living in the high plains of Spain and, in all
likelihood, the peoples of Celtic origin in that part of the Roman
Empire continued the practice of brewing throughout the Middle Ages as
did many others in the lands once ruled from Rome. Beer drinking was
identified with Germans, including those who lived on both sides of
the northern limits of Roman rule. The description of daily life among
Germans in Germania by the first-century Roman historian Tacitus gives
a documentary basis for the connection. A law of one German tribe, the
Alemanii, set a contribution of beer to be made annually to a temple,
so the drink may have had a religious function among the Germans.’