History

Beer is one of the oldest beverages man has produced, dating back to at least the 5th millennium BC and recorded in the written history of Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.

As almost any substance containing certain sugars can naturally undergo fermentation, it is probable that beer-like beverages were independently invented among various cultures throughout the world. Chemical tests of ancient pottery jars reveal that beer was (like wine) 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.

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 vessel (bowl). Beer is also mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and a 3900-year-old Sumerian poem honoring the patron goddess of brewing, Ninkasi, contains the oldest surviving beer recipe, describing the production of beer from barley via bread. Beer became vital to all the grain-growing civilizations of classical Western antiquity, especially Egypt and Mesopotamia.

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 Hellanicos of Lesbos says in operas. Their name for beer was brutos, or brytos.

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."

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.

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 Netherlands 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 Brewers 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.