Beer in the World - Folklore, Myths and Curious Facts

When something has been around as long as beer has, it picks up a lot of stories along the way. Here are some of the most interesting bits of beer history and trivia, with a note on what is solid history and what is closer to legend.

1. The world's biggest single beer market is China

China has been the largest single beer-consuming country every year since 2003 - more than twenty consecutive years - according to the long-running Kirin Beer Report. It is also why Snow is the world's best-selling beer despite being almost unknown outside its home market.

2. The Czechs drink the most beer per person

If you instead rank by per-capita consumption, the Czech Republic has held the top spot for more than three decades, hovering around 130-150 litres of beer per person per year - roughly double the rate in Germany, and several times that of the United States.

3. Beer (probably) helped build the Pyramids

Archaeologists working at Giza have found ration records and brewery remains showing that the workers who built the Great Pyramid were paid partly in beer - around 4-5 litres per person per day. The beer was thick, nutritious, low-alcohol and acted as both food and drink.

4. The London Beer Flood was real

On 17 October 1814, a 22-foot wooden vat at the Meux & Co. Horse Shoe Brewery on Tottenham Court Road ruptured. The chain reaction released roughly 1.3 million litres of porter into the surrounding St Giles slum. Eight people died, and the brewery was eventually let off because the courts ruled the flood an "act of God".

5. A 3,900-year-old Sumerian beer recipe

The "Hymn to Ninkasi", a Sumerian poem from around 1800 BCE, is essentially a song of praise for the Sumerian goddess of brewing - and it doubles as the oldest known beer recipe. The hymn describes mixing bappir (a kind of twice-baked barley bread) with dates and honey, fermenting it in vessels, and serving the finished drink. Modern brewers have used the hymn to recreate the recipe more than once.

6. Hops are a relatively recent ingredient

Beer has been brewed for at least 9,000 years, but for most of that time it was bittered with a mix of herbs called "gruit" (yarrow, sweet gale, mugwort, juniper, ground ivy). Hops only started to dominate European brewing from around the 11th-12th century, and the famous German Reinheitsgebot purity law of 1516 was a big part of cementing them as the standard bittering ingredient.

7. Beer for breakfast in the Middle Ages

In medieval Europe, water was often unsafe and milk was seasonal, so a low-alcohol "small beer" was an everyday drink for all ages, including children. Workers, monks and labourers would routinely have several litres of small beer over the course of a day; it provided calories, B vitamins and safer hydration than untreated water.

8. Some of the strangest beers ever brewed

The mainstream brewing world tends towards mass-market lagers, but the fringes are genuinely strange. Documented examples include Korean baby-mouse wine (yes, really - a folk medicine, not a mass-market drink), Cambodia's "Tarantula Beer" flavoured with whole tarantulas, Iceland's smoked-sheep-dung Stedji "Hvalur" brewed with hvalur whale-bone (now discontinued), and Sapporo's blue beer brewed with spirulina.

9. "Heart-healthy" beer claims need a careful reading

Multiple long-term studies, including some led by Italian researchers, have suggested that moderate beer consumption is associated with lower rates of certain heart-disease outcomes than either heavy drinkers or non-drinkers. More recent meta-analyses are more cautious and emphasise that any benefit is small, that the "non-drinker" baseline is often distorted by former heavy drinkers who quit for health reasons, and that overall alcohol intake should still be kept low. Beer is not health food.

10. Some really old breweries are still operating

Weihenstephan in Bavaria has roots going back to a Benedictine monastery brewery first documented in 1040 CE and is widely credited as the world's oldest continuously operating brewery. Belgium's Stella Artois traces its line back to the Den Hoorn brewery in Leuven, first recorded in 1366.

Most figures and historical claims above come from the Kirin Beer Report, the British Library's records on the London Beer Flood, peer-reviewed archaeology of the Giza workers' settlement, and translations of the Hymn to Ninkasi published by the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago.