Читать книгу Self-Sufficiency: Home Brewing - John Parkes - Страница 9

Beer is quite possibly the world’s oldest alcoholic beverage, dating back to at least the 6th millennium bc, and recorded in the written history of Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Historians believe that beer was discovered by accident by the peoples of these regions. Barley was one of the staple grains of these parts, and it was soon discovered that if grain was allowed to get wet, germinate and then quickly dried off (a process known as malting), it would become sweeter and more suited for making breads and cakes.

It was a short leap from the discovery of malting to the discovery of beer. Probably quite by accident, someone allowed their malted barley to get wet and remain exposed to the elements. Naturally-occurring wild yeasts then contaminated this exposed liquid. Because malted barley contains sugars that are the perfect nutrition for yeast, the yeast took hold and multiplied, creating a bubbly soup of alcohol and malted barley by-products that eventually became the first beer. Once this process was discovered and refined, it became quite easy for the brewer to separate the beer from the spent yeast, which could then be cultured into the next batch of beer.

Chemical tests of ancient pottery jars reveal that beer was produced about 7000 years ago in what is today Iraq, making it one of the first ever recorded biological engineering tasks using the process of fermentation. In Mesopotamia, the oldest evidence of beer is believed to be in the form of a 4000-year-old Sumerian tablet depicting people drinking a beverage through reed straws from a communal bowl.

Beer became vital to all the grain-growing civilizations of Eurasian and North African antiquity, including Egypt. Knowledge of brewing was passed down to the Greeks, who in turn taught the Romans to brew. The Romans called their brew ‘cerevisia’, from Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture, and Latin for ‘strength’.

Beer was very important to early Romans, but during the Roman Republic wine displaced beer as the preferred alcoholic beverage, and beer became a beverage considered fit only for barbarians. Tacitus, a senator of the Roman Empire, wrote disparagingly of the beer brewed by the Germanic peoples of his day. Thracians were also known to consume beer made from rye, ever since the 5th century bc, as the Greek historian Hellanicus of Lesbos records in his works.