History of Beer - Complete Beer History

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Beer History

Man has been drinking bear for thousands of years. In fact, the history of beer is very interesting.

As almost any cereal containing certain sugars can undergo spontaneous fermentation 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 7,000 years ago in what is today Iran, and was one of the first-known biological engineering tasks where the biological process of fermentation is used in a process.

Drink a cool beer as you learn the history of beer. Better yet, make your own beer with your own beer making kit.

In Mesopotamia, the oldest evidence of beer is believed to be a 6,000-year-old Sumerian tablet depicting people drinking a beverage through reed straws from a communal bowl.

Beer is also mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Beer became vital to all the grain-growing civilizations of classical Western 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. The modern anthropologist Alan Eames believes that "beer was the driving force that led nomadic mankind into village life...It was this appetite for beer-making material that led to crop cultivation, permanent settlement and agriculture."

Knowledge of brewing was passed on to the Greeks. Plato wrote that "He was a wise man who invented beer."

The Greeks then taught the Romans to brew. The Romans called their brew "cerevisia," from Ceres, the goddess of agriculture, and vis, Latin for "strength."

Beer was important to early Romans, but during Republican times wine displaced beer as the preferred alcoholic beverage. Beer became a beverage considered fit only for barbarians; 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 in operas. Their name for beer was brutos, or brytos.

Beer in the Middle Ages

The addition of hops to beer for bittering, preservation, and aroma is a relatively recent innovation: in the Middle Ages many other mixtures of herbs were often employed in beer prior to hops. These mixtures are often referred to as gruit. Hops were cultivated in France as early as the 800s; the oldest surviving written record of the use of hops in beer is in 1067 by well-known writer Abbess Hildegard of Bingen: "If one intends to make beer from oats, it is prepared with hops."

Beer in early European history

In Europe, beer largely remained a homemaker's activity, made in the home in medieval times. By the 14th and 15th centuries, beermaking was gradually changing from a family-oriented activity to an artisan one, with pubs and monasteries brewing their own beer for mass consumption.

as early as 1400 in Winchester, and hops were being planted on the island by 1428. The popularity of hops was at first mixed — the In 15th century England, an unhopped beer would have been known as an ale, while the use of hops would make it a beer. Hopped beer was imported to England from the NetherlandsBrewers Company of London went so far as to state "no hops, herbs, or other like thing be put into any ale or liquore wherof ale shall be made — but only liquor (water), malt, and yeast." However, by the 16th century, "ale" had come to refer to any strong beer, and all ales and beers were hopped.

In 1516, William IV, Duke of Bavaria, adopted the Reinheitsgebot (purity law), perhaps the oldest food regulation still in use today. The Gebot ordered that the ingredients of beer be restricted to water, barley, and hops, with yeast added after Louis Pasteur's discovery in 1857. The Bavarian law was applied throughout Germany as part of the 1871 German unification as the German Empire under Otto von Bismarck, and has since been updated to reflect modern trends in beer brewing. To this day, the Gebot is considered a mark of purity in beers, although this is controversial.

Most beers until relatively recent times were what are now called ales. Lagers were discovered by accident in the 16th century after beer was stored in cool caverns for long periods; they have since largely outpaced ales in terms of volume.

Beer during the Industrial Revolution

The industrial revolution, gave brewmasters methods to prevent the souring of beer. Following significant improvements in the efficiency of the steam engine in 1765, industrialization of beer became a reality. Further innovations in the brewing process came about with the introduction of the thermometer and hydrometer in the 19th century, which allowed brew masters to increase efficiency and attenuation. Prior to the late 18th century, malt was primarily dried over fires made from wood, charcoal, or straw, and after 1600, from coke. In general, none of these early malts would have been well shielded from the smoke involved in the kilning process, and consequently, early beers would have had a smoky component to their flavors; evidence indicates that maltsters and brewers constantly tried to minimize the smokiness of the finished beer. The invention of the drum roaster in 1817 by Daniel Wheeler allowed for the creation of very dark, roasted malts, contributing to the flavour of porters and stouts. The discovery of yeast's role in fermentation in 1857 by Louis Pasteur advanced beer making as well.

Modern beer

Prior to Prohibition, there were thousands of breweries in the United States, mostly brewing heavier, European-style beers. Beginning in 1920, most of these breweries went out of business, although some converted to soft drinks and other businesses. Bootlegged beer was often watered down to increase profits, beginning a trend, still on-going today, of the American palate preferring lighter beers. Consolidation of breweries and the application of industrial quality control standards have led to the mass-production and the mass-marketing of huge quantities of light lagers. Smaller breweries, including microbreweries and craft brewers, and imports, have serviced the segment of the American market that prefers fuller-bodied beers.

In many countries, breweries that had begun as a family business by German or other European immigrants grew into large companies, often passing into hands with more concern for profits than traditions of quality, resulting in a degradation in the product. Often, however, these companies continued the traditions of excellence, while vastly growing in size. One example would be Tsing Tao Beer.

In 1953, New Zealander Morton W. Coutts developed the technique of continuous fermentation. Coutts patented his process which involves beer flowing through sealed tanks, fermenting under pressure, and never coming into contact with the atmosphere, even when bottled. His process is used by Guinness.

Today, the brewing industry is a huge global business, consisting of several multinational companies, and many thousands of smaller producers ranging from brewpubs to regional breweries. Advances in refrigeration, international and transcontinental shipping, marketing and commerce have resulted in an international marketplace, where the consumer has literally hundreds of choices between various styles of local, regional, national and foreign beers.

Etymology

Of the two terms, beer and ale, the latter is the older in English. It is believed to come directly from the proto-Indo European root *alu-, through Germanic *aluth- ([1]). The same word is the stem for Finnish olut, Estonian õlu, Danish and Norwegian øl and Latvian/Lithuanian alus. Beer, on the other hand, is considered to come from the Latin verb bibere (to drink, [2]). Old English sources distinguish between "ale" and "beer," but do not define what was meant by "beer" during that period, although there is some speculation that it refers to what would now be called cider, the alcoholic form. The Old English form of "beer" disappeared shortly after the Norman Conquest, and the word re-entered English centuries later, in exclusive reference to hopped malt beverages. The beverage is termed "cerveza", or a derivative, in the various dialects of Spanish and Portuguese, from Latin cerevisia. Most other Western European (and even some Eastern European) languages use a form similar to the English "beer." The Common Slavic *pivo, literally "beverage", is the word for beer in most Slavic languages, with minor phonetic variations.