What in the world is beer!?: Part I

Before we dive right into the urine-laced shallow end of the pool, let's slow it down a bit and start in the very beginning by just dipping our little blogger toesies in the water.  You drink it, you surround yourself with it, you've gained 20lbs from it, you've lost family relationships over it, you've sworn it off many sickly mornings, etc. but what exactly is this source of all your joys and shortcomings?

Beer, in it's absolute simplest definition, is a divine concoction of three ingredients: water, grain, yeast.  I can hear you double IPA fanatics screaming from here, but hops were not widely used in the brewing process until the early to mid 2nd millennium AD.  That's right gang, hops were not used in beer until thousands of years after beer was discovered.  Which brings us to the question, when, how, and where did beer come from?

Not surprisingly, beer emerged simultaneously with the advancement of human civilization.  Although the first ancient civilizations (Sumerians, Babylonians, Indus River) most likely were brewing between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago, the first written record of making beer comes from a roughly 6,000 year old Sumerian tablet.  Subsequently, about 5,500 years ago, records show Sumerians invented a clay jar that turned indigo to let them know when their beer was chilled to an icy cold 75 degrees Fahrenheit.

And Ekur did inquire, "What thinkst thou of Enanatuma this eve?"  To which Aanepada didst reply, "Upon imbibing dot-dot-slash amount of beers, I wouldst indeed lay with her for this moon." To which Ekur did declare "I'd tap that too."

So how did those guys come up with beer anyways?  As we discussed before, the three necessary ingredients of beer are grains, water, and yeast.  With that in mind, it's generally believed somehow rain water seeped into a container of bread or grain, and naturally occurring atmospheric spores of yeast took care of the fermentation process.  As you can imagine, early beer most likely was not very palatable, but it definitely got the job done.  So much so, that our ancestors felt that the temporary ability to dance and come up with really cool ideas that are ultimately never realized when sober was a gift from god (s).  Ancient gods and goddesses of beer included Ninkasi (Sumeria), Silenus and Dionysus/Bacchus (Greece/Rome), Osiris (Egypt), Mbaba Mwana Waresa (Zulu) etc.

Shortly after the invention of beer, Ancient men (left) began to voluntarily join the Electric Slide at weddings for the first time in recorded history

Visiting on an earlier idea, in lieu of hops, early beer was often seasoned with herb mixtures called gruits.  These gruits could have included ginger, rosemary, spruce, ginger, juniper, et anything available to the brewer.  It wasn't until almost 1000 AD that hops were substituted for gruits and became associated with the brewing process.  Not only do hops provide flavor and aroma, they, along with the beer's alcohol content, also aid in preserving and disinfecting beer through their antibacterial properties.

Now that hops have been thrown in the equation, eventually in 1514 we get the German Reinheitsgebot, or beer purity law, which states all German beer must only include water, barley, and hops (since microbiology hadn't really been invented yet, they didn't know about the naturally occurring yeast that hung out on their stirring paddles). 

After about 11,500 years of beer history, ales (and they were all ales up until the early 19th Century, more about this in Part II), finally began to resemble what we're used to Today.  Now that we've learned a brief history of beer, join me in Part II to delve a bit into the science and classifications of beer.