One 4,000 year old seal bears a a Sumerian “Hymn to Ninkasi,” the goddess of brewing. The hymn is a recipe for making beer and it is the earliest account of (1) combining barley, baking bread, (2) crumbling it into water to form a mash, and then (3) making it into a drink. It is recorded as having made people feel “exhilarated, wonderful and blissful.”
