Ancient Sumerians—who left written beer recipes dating back five thousand years—worshipped a goddess of fermentation, Ninkasi. In The Egyptian Book of the Dead, prayers are addressed to “givers of bread and beer.” Among the Ch’orti’ people in South America, the onset of fermentation was understood as “the birth of the good spirit.” The ancient Greeks had Dionysus—the god of wine, winemaking, madness, drunkenness, and domesticated fruit in general—a personification of the power of alcohol both to forge and corrode human cultural categories.
