It All Starts with the Egyptians…
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Beer brewing was practiced in Egypt and Mesopotamia at least 5,000 years ago, and beer was an important part of the
Egyptian culture. In fact, the hieroglyphic symbol for food was a pitcher of beer and a cake of bread. -
The Egyptians passed their knowledge on to the Greeks. Reaction to beer in wine-loving Greece was mixed. Despite Plato’s assertion that “He was a wise man who invented beer,” some Greek physicians thought beer caused leprosy, or at least too-frequent urination.
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The Greeks, in turn, taught the Romans to brew. The Romans called their brew “cerevisia,” from Ceres, the goddess of agriculture, and vis, Latin for “strength.” This is the root of the modern Spanish word for beer, cerveza.
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When the Romans began their conquest of the British Isles in 55 BC, the Britons were already making ale from barley. The Romans refined the British brewing methods and, unbeknownst to them, started a long love affair between the British and their bitter.
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Spontaneously fermented beers (using wild yeast that floats into the brew on its own) occur all over the world, from Africa to the Andes. When Columbus arrived in the “New World” in the 1490s, he found Indians making beer from corn and black birch sap. Other cultures use the grains native to their region, from millet, maize and cassava in Africa to rice and sorghum in Asia.
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The mortal Vikings brewed ale on board their ships, spreading their ale throughout Europe as they raided and colonized during the 8th through 10th centuries. Viking brewers commonly used juniper berries as a preservative and bittering agent in place of hops. (Other cultures developed similar substitutes, such as the heather and pine ales produced in the Scottish isles.)
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During the Dark Ages and Middle Ages, many of the key advancements in brewing science and styles came out of monasteries. Some credit the 12th century mystic, St.
Hildegard of Bilgen, with introducing the use of hop flowers in brewing. Others say the Bohemians and others were already cultivating and using hops as early as the 800s A.D. In fact, Bohemian hops were so prized that King Wenceslas (yes, that King Wenceslas) ordered the death penalty for anyone caught exporting the cuttings, from which new plants could be grown. Regardless of the source, hops helped preserve the beer and paved the way for wider distribution. -
It was during the first half of the Middle Ages (500-1000 AD) that brewing begin to shift from a household chore to centralized production in monasteries and convents, which provided hospitality for traveling pilgrims.
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Sir Walter Raleigh’s colony in Virginia brewed the first European beer in the New World in 1587, but the colonists still sent requests to England for better beer.
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During the colonial period, the tavern was the focal point of the community, as it was in England. Even the Puritans, with their strict religious beliefs, realized that the early American settlers were going to drink and promoted beer over “demon rum” and whiskey.
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Brewing became a big business in the latter part of the nineteenth century, as German immigrants (Anheuser-Busch, Miller, Coors, Stroh, Schlitz and Pabst among them) introduced lager to the US. After 1890, beer surpassed distilled spirits as the principal source of beverage alcohol in the American market.
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In 1876 Louis Pasteur figured out how yeast works in the fermentation process, and also developed pasteurization to stabilize beers (22 years before the process was applied to milk), further enabling mass distribution.