A short history of beer

Nobody discovered beer. That is the honest answer, and it is a slightly disappointing one. Beer was not invented by a genius in a workshop — it was invented by a bowl of wet grain that someone forgot about, and by whoever came back a few days later, looked at it, smelled it, and thought: go on then.

On the eighth day, roughly speaking, there was beer. And on the ninth day somebody wrote down how much they were owed for it — which is how we know about any of this at all.

• c. 11,000 BC

  Older than bread. Possibly the point of bread.

  In Raqefet Cave in modern-day Israel, archaeologists found stone mortars lined with the residue of a fermented wheat-and-barley gruel, left by Natufian hunter-gatherers around thirteen thousand years ago. It predates farming. It predates the loaf.

  Which supports a genuinely debated theory: that we did not settle down and start growing grain in order to eat. We did it in order to drink.

• c. 3400 BC

  The first hard evidence, scraped off a jar.

  At Godin Tepe in the Zagros Mountains of Iran, a clay jar turned up with calcium oxalate crusted inside it — beerstone, the same stubborn residue that brewers still scrub out of tanks today.

  Five and a half thousand years of progress, and the cleaning has not improved even slightly.

• c. 2500 BC

  The pyramids ran on it.

  Excavations of the workers’ settlement at Giza uncovered a large-scale bakery and brewery. The labourers who built the pyramids were paid in rations, and a daily allowance of beer was part of the package — thick, soupy, and closer to liquid bread than to a pilsner.

  It is the earliest documented case of the beverage being, technically, a benefits package.

• c. 2050 BC

  The oldest receipt on Earth is a bar tab.

  A clay tablet from the Sumerian city of Ur acknowledges delivery of beer to a man named Alulu. It is one of the oldest known receipts of any kind, for anything.

  Writing was invented largely to keep accounts. The accounts were largely beer. Draw your own conclusions about civilisation.

• c. 1800 BC

  The recipe was a hymn.

  The Hymn to Ninkasi praises the Sumerian goddess of beer, and if you read it closely it is also a working set of brewing instructions — soak the bappir, spread it on reed mats, mix with honey and dates.

  Most people could not read. Everyone could sing. So the recipe was written as a song, which is the single most practical thing anyone has ever done about documentation.

• 1754 BC

  Watering it down became a capital offence.

  The Code of Hammurabi sets out rules for beer sellers. Law 108 deals with a tavern keeper who short-measures a customer or refuses grain as payment. The prescribed penalty is to be thrown into the water.

  Four thousand years on, we have settled for a one-star review.

• 1516

  Germany bans everything except three ingredients.

  The Bavarian Reinheitsgebot decrees that beer may contain only water, barley and hops. It was partly about quality and partly about stopping brewers competing with bakers for wheat.

  Yeast is not on the list. Not because it was banned, but because nobody knew it was there. For another three hundred years, fermentation was widely credited to God, luck, or the specific lucky stick used to stir the tun.

• 1620

  The Mayflower stopped because the beer ran out.

  The Pilgrims meant to land further south. They put in at Plymouth instead, and the journal kept aboard explains why with unusual candour: "our victuals being much spent, especially our beer."

  An entire national founding myth, and the deciding logistical factor was the bar running dry.

• 17 Oct 1814

  London was briefly flooded with porter.

  An iron hoop failed on a vat at the Horse Shoe Brewery on Tottenham Court Road. The vat burst, took the neighbouring vats with it, and sent something on the order of a million litres of porter through the wall and into the streets of St Giles. Eight people died.

  The brewery was taken to court and the flood was ruled an act of God, which is the only recorded instance of a higher power being formally blamed for a spilled pint.

• 1876

  Pasteur works out what is actually happening.

  Louis Pasteur publishes Études sur la Bière, establishing that fermentation is the work of a living organism and that spoilage is the work of a different one. It is the moment brewing stops being a folk art and starts being biology.

  His stated motivation included beating German brewers on quality. Modern microbiology exists, in part, out of spite.

• 1883

  Carlsberg isolates pure yeast and then gives it away.

  Emil Christian Hansen, working at the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen, isolates a single yeast cell and propagates it into a pure culture — the end of brews mysteriously going wrong. Carlsberg published the method and shared the strain with any brewery that asked, free of charge.

  Every clean lager you have ever had traces back to one cell and one company deciding not to patent it.

• 1920

  America bans it, and the malt syrup business booms.

  Prohibition closes the breweries. Several survive by selling malt syrup — sold for baking, labelled for baking, and shipped with a printed warning not to add yeast and leave it somewhere warm, because that would cause fermentation.

  Sales of a baking ingredient went up enormously during a period in which nobody was baking more.

• 24 Jan 1935

  Beer goes in a can.

  Krueger’s Finest Beer goes on sale in cans in Richmond, Virginia. The brewery was nervous enough about the idea that it test-marketed well away from its home city, so that a flop would be someone else’s problem.

  It was not a flop.

• 1978

  America remembers to re-legalise homebrewing.

  Prohibition ended in 1933 — but the repeal left homebrewing out, and nobody noticed for forty-five years. President Carter signed the fix in October 1978, and the craft brewing movement started in a great many garages shortly afterwards.

  Every craft brewery you like exists because of a clerical omission that went uncorrected for most of a century.

• Today

  One beer a day, and an argument about it.

  Thirteen thousand years of brewing, and the thing that has never changed is the bit around the drink: someone hands you one, everybody has an opinion, and the opinion is delivered with total confidence.

  That is the part this app is for. The rest is just chemistry.