Part 1: Who Made the First Beer?
Crack open a beer and you’re taking part in a tradition that goes back thousands of years.
And we mean thousands.
Long before taprooms, beer flights, aluminum cans, and someone asking whether you’d like to start a tab, humans were figuring out that grain, water, and fermentation could produce something pretty interesting.
Beer Before Civilization?
Pinpointing exactly who brewed the first beer is nearly impossible. Fermentation has been happening naturally for far longer than humans have understood what causes it.
But archaeology gives us some fascinating clues.
Evidence of a beer like beverage dating back roughly 13,000 years has been found at Raqefet Cave near Haifa in present day Israel. The site was used by the Natufians, a semi nomadic people who appear to have produced a thick, gruel like fermented beverage for ritual gatherings.
It certainly would not look much like the pint sitting in front of you today, but the basic idea was there.
Grain. Water. Fermentation.
Beer was getting started.
More Ancient Evidence
There is also evidence suggesting beer production at Göbekli Tepe during the Pre Pottery Neolithic period, roughly 8500 BC to 5500 BC.
Farther east, chemical evidence of barley based beer dating to approximately 3500 to 3100 BC has been discovered at Godin Tepe in the Zagros Mountains of western Iran.
Beer may be even older.
Cereal cultivation began around 10,000 BC, and some historians have wondered whether the desire to make fermented grain beverages might even have encouraged early humans to grow grain.
Bread gets plenty of credit for civilization.
Beer may deserve a seat at the table too.
Nobody Had a Recipe Book
Early beer probably happened partly by accident.
Grain gets wet. Natural yeast finds its way into the mixture. Fermentation begins.
Eventually somebody tastes it.
And apparently somebody decides, “We should make more of this.”
Obviously, we don’t know that conversation took place. But at some point humans figured out how to repeat the process intentionally.
Different cultures likely discovered fermentation independently. Wherever people had starch rich plants, water, and naturally occurring yeast, the ingredients for experimentation were already available.
It Didn’t Look Like Today’s Beer
Ancient beer was probably thicker, cloudier, and much less predictable than modern beer.
There were no stainless steel fermenters, temperature controls, packaged yeast cultures, or neatly printed recipes.
Early brewers worked with what they had and learned through experience.
Yet the basic transformation was already taking place. Starches became sugars. Yeast fermented those sugars. Alcohol and carbon dioxide followed.
Thousands of years later, we’re still doing essentially the same thing.
We’ve just gotten considerably better equipment.
Next Pour
Beer may have started as a simple fermented grain drink, but it wasn’t going to stay simple for long.
Next in The Story of Beer, we’ll head to some of the world’s earliest cities, where beer became part of religion, work, writing, and everyday life.
Marisa Fancy along with her husband and four children dreamt of moving “Up North”. They had vacationed for years in northern Michigan and in 1995 they finally made the move.