How Beer Started - A Short History of Brewing

Beer is one of humankind's oldest manufactured products. Long before our ancestors built cities, kept written records or domesticated horses, they were already fermenting grain. The closer archaeologists look, the further back beer's timeline gets pushed.

Around 7000 BCE - Jiahu, China

The earliest chemical evidence of a fermented grain-and-fruit drink comes from pottery shards excavated at Jiahu, in Henan, China, dated to roughly 7000-6600 BCE. The residue contained traces of rice, honey, hawthorn fruit and grape - a beer-and-wine hybrid that predates almost everything else in the historical record.

~3500 BCE - Sumer and the Hymn to Ninkasi

Mesopotamia gives us the first written records of brewing. The "Hymn to Ninkasi" - a song of praise to the Sumerian goddess of beer - dates from around 1800 BCE and essentially preserves a beer recipe in verse. The ancient Egyptians built on Sumerian brewing techniques and incorporated beer into daily life, religious rituals and even wage payments: the workers who built the Pyramids at Giza were partly paid in a thick, nutritious beer.

Roman, Celtic and early European brewing

Wine dominated the Mediterranean world, but the Romans documented (with a certain amount of snobbery) the beer they encountered in Celtic Britain, Gaul and Germania. Tacitus, writing in the late first century CE, described the Germanic tribes drinking a "liquor for drinking, made out of barley or wheat, and fermented into a certain resemblance to wine".

The monasteries

From around the 7th century onwards, European monasteries became hubs of brewing technology. Monks brewed for themselves (a low-alcohol "small beer" was a permitted source of calories during fasts) and for sale. Belgian Trappist breweries and the German monastery of Weihenstephan - first documented in 1040 CE and still operating - are the most famous survivors of that tradition.

1516 - the Reinheitsgebot

In 1516, Bavaria's ruling Duke Wilhelm IV proclaimed the Reinheitsgebot or "purity law", restricting the ingredients of beer to barley, hops and water (yeast was added to the list later, once it was understood). The law was as much economic protectionism as anything else, but it standardised brewing in central Europe and is still cited by German brewers today.

Lager takes over

Most of the world's best-selling beer today is pale lager - a relatively young style. The first pale lager, Pilsner Urquell, was brewed in Plzen, Bohemia in 1842, when Bavarian brewer Josef Groll combined Bavarian lager yeast with Bohemia's soft water and pale malts. Within a generation pale lager had spread across Europe and the Americas; by the late 1800s, the recipes that would become Budweiser, Heineken and Tsingtao were all in place.

The 20th-century industrialisation

Refrigeration, glass bottling, pasteurisation and large-scale steel fermentation tanks turned beer into a true mass-market product in the 20th century. American brewers added rice and corn as adjunct grains, partly for cost and partly to suit local tastes; Mexican and Brazilian brewers followed suit. By the late 20th century, mega-mergers were under way, and by 2008 a single beer company - AB InBev - controlled roughly a quarter of global production.

Today

Beer is a roughly US$700-billion global industry, with annual production in the region of 185-190 billion litres. Volumes are no longer growing in most developed markets, but the categories that are growing - premium imports, no-alcohol and low-alcohol beers, and craft - are interesting precisely because they push against the long industrial trend towards a single, light, cold pale lager.

Whichever style you reach for, there's nine thousand years of fermentation behind it.