Brewing History

Impacting world history and the global market

In Mesopotamia, the oldest evidence of beer is a 6,000-year-old Sumerian tablet depicting people drinking a beverage from a communal bowl. A 3900-year-old Sumerian poem contains the oldest surviving beer recipe, describing the production of beer from barley.

Beer is also mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

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."

During Roman Republican times wine displaced beer as the preferred alcoholic beverage and beer became a beverage considered fit only for barbarians.

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.

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.

However, by the 16th century, "ale" had come to refer to any strong beer, and all ales and beers were hopped.

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.

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