The History of Beer

“Beer: it’s so much more than just a breakfast drink.” (traditional pub joke)

About eight or nine thousand years ago, people in the Middle East started to grow fields of grain. At the time, the region was much greener and wetter and so fields of grain multiplied alongside the lentils and chickpeas they already planted. This grain was meant for eating, usually as flat bread, but, by coincidence, these new farmers soon found that their grain would make beer as well.

It was almost certainly an accident. If you put a lot of grain, perhaps lightly burnt, into water, then natural yeast spores in the air will normally get into the mixture and trigger a process called ‘fermentation’. This is when the natural sugars in the grain turn to alcohol. Of course, grain does not have as much sugar as the grapes from which wine is made and so this early beer was only about 2% alcohol.

The earliest examples of this kind of beer have been found in modern day Iran and Iraq. Many factors caused the explosion in human population, lifestyle and technology that happened around that time – grain cultivation is key – but grain’s by-product, beer, had a big part to play too.

Whenever human beings abandon their naturally nomadic life and settle in one place, they face a serious problem: if a thousand or more people live close together, it is impossible to maintain a clean water supply as nearby rivers and streams become public toilets and rubbish dumps. Once this happens, dysentery can take hold and most people will die.

There are a number of simple ways to sterilise water for drinking but the fermentation process is guaranteed to kill all the bacteria in water as the sugars in the grain turn to alcohol. These early methods of brewing make beers of 2% or less and so a litre or two will not get an adult drunk. The beer can be brewed even lighter, about 1% alcohol, so that even small children can drink it.

But, beer’s contribution to human civilisation does not stop at providing a safe, clean drink full of vitamins. As people worked at trying to improve and vary beer, so they began to learn a lot about chemistry and engineering.

By about 700 A.D., the main producers of beer in Europe were the monasteries where, in the cellars, you would find a complex, chemical process going on, controlled by expert brewer-monks. They had learned how to vary the taste, colour, gaseousness and level of alcohol. They had also learned how to extract nearly pure alcohol from beer that was spoiled or unwanted. This alcohol could be used as a lamp fuel or a disinfectant; or in an increasing number of scientific processes.

When European chemistry and engineering really took off about five hundred years ago, much of the existing knowledge and equipment was borrowed from brewers. It is not too much to say that, without the development of brewing, the industrial revolution might not have happened.

Of course, most of the discoveries that brewers had made across the centuries were the result of experimenting to see what different kinds of beer could be produced. Which is why, today, we have such a wide variety of beers and ales. There are stouts and porters, dark beers made from well roasted grain. There are the bitters, usually reddish-brown in colour, not too gassy and, like their name, bitter in flavour. Lager is the most popular style of beer in the world these days. Light in colour and with a high gas content, it is served very cold which makes it as popular in hot parts of the world as it is in its native Central Europe. No doubt about it, the strongest beers are barley ‘wines’, served at room temperature and often containing 10% - 12% alcohol or more.

Beer can be stored in a number of ways. It is often transported in large barrels to the point of sale and then served in a glass or tankard. It is also very common in small bottles and, for sixty or seventy years now, beer has been sold in cans. However, the flavour of the beer suffers by its contact with the aluminium used these days and the cans are an environmental problem in a number of ways.

There are few monastic breweries in Europe nowadays but Europe remains the leader in beer production with the greatest variety and levels of alcohol. The brewing process became industrialised in the nineteenth century but, a beer-drinker backlash, starting in the UK in the 1970s, caused a surge of interest in ‘real ale’ from small, traditional breweries that rejected chemical additives or other processes that killed the flavour while making the product ‘long-life’ and cheap, which is what the industrial breweries wanted in order to maximise their profits.

Now, all across Britain, Europe and North America, micro-breweries have appeared everywhere, bringing a huge new range of beers onto the market and allowing some local specialities to exist. Many British industrial brewers have started to produce real ales as a response to the demand.

The micro-brewery revolution has completely revived beer-making as an art form in the U.S.A. where the ill-judged prohibition of alcohol from 1919 until 1933 had destroyed a strong, German-influenced, brewing industry.

Thirst-quenching and safe to drink, relaxing and healthy in moderation, beer is the world’s most popular alcoholic drink. However, we do not recommend it for breakfast!