A History of the World in 6 Glasses

by Tom Standage

50,000 years ago

Hunters and gatherers migrated out of africa

12,000 years ago,

farming

Africa around 150,000 years ago, water had been humankind's basic drink.

new beverage derived from barley and wheat, the cereal grains

Farmers

no beer before 10,000 BCE,

widespread in the Near East by

4000...

I...

(Ancient beer had grains, chaff, and other debris floating on its surface, so a straw was necessary to avoid swallowing them.)

Cool dude

Such grains provided an unexciting but reliable source of food. Although unsuitable for consumption when raw, they

can be made edible by roughly pounding or crushing them and then soaking them in water. Initially, they were probably just mixed into soup.

Cereal grains, it was soon discovered, had another unusual property: Unlike other foodstuffs, they could be stored

for consumption months or even years later, if kept dry and safe.

Fertile Crescent there is archaeological evidence from around 10,000 BCE of flint-bladed sickles for harvesting cereal grains,

hunter-gatherers had previously led semisettled rather than entirely nomadic lives,

the ability to store cereal grains began to encourage people to stay in one place.

In one hour he gathered more than two pounds of grain, which suggested that a family that worked eight-hour

days for three weeks would have been able to gather enough to provide each family member with a pound of grain a day for a year.

the first permanent settlements,

Mediterranean from around 10,000 BCE.

A typical village consisted of around fifty huts, supporting a community of two hundred or three hundred people.

The first was that grain soaked in water, so that it starts to sprout, tastes sweet.

Grain discovery

The cause of this sweetness is now understood: Moistened grain produces diastase enzymes, which convert starch within the grain into maltose sugar, or malt.

Gruel that was left sitting around for a couple of days underwent a mysterious transformation, particularly if it had been made with malted grain: It became slightly fizzy and pleasantly intoxicating, as the action of wild yeasts from the air fermented the sugar in the gruel into alcohol.

What does this mean

beer was not necessarily the first form of alcohol

fermentation of fruit juice (to make wine) or water and honey (to make mead) would have occurred naturally

First form of alcohol

The more malted grain there is in the original gruel, for example, and the longer it is left to ferment, the stronger the beer. More malt means more sugar, and a longer fermentation means

more of the sugar is turned into alcohol. Thoroughly cooking the gruel also contributes to the beer's strength.

more sugar for the yeast to transform into alcohol.

brewers always carried their own "mash tubs" around with them,

For best results

at least seventeen kinds of beer, some of them referred to in poetic terms that sound, to modern ears, almost like advertising slogans:

Beers used in religious ceremonies also had special names. Similarly, early written references to beer from Mesopotamia, in the third millennium BCE, list over twenty different kinds,

It seems most likely, however, that both bread and beer were derived from gruel. A thick gruel could be baked in the sun or on a hot stone to make flatbread; a thin gruel could be left to ferment into beer. The two were different sides of the same coin: Bread was solid beer, and beer was liquid bread.

Since writing had not been invented at the time, there are no written records to attest to the social and ritual importance of beer in the Fertile Crescent

Neolithic period, between 9000 BCE and 4000 BCE.

From the start, it seems that beer had an important function as a social drink.

using straws suggests that it was a ritual that persisted even when straws were no longer necessary.

When several people drink beer from the same vessel, they are all consuming the same liquid;

sharing a drink with someone is a universal symbol of hospitality and friendship. It signals that the person offering the drink can be trusted, by demonstrating that it is not poisoned or otherwise unsuitable for consumption.

And when drinking alcohol in a social setting, the clinking of glasses symbolically reunites the glasses into a single vessel of shared liquid. These are traditions with very ancient origins.

To Neolithic drinkers, beer's ability to intoxicate and induce a state of altered consciousness seemed magical.

beer was a gift from the gods;

beer was accidentally discovered by Osiris, the god of agriculture and king of the afterlife.

The practice of raising a glass to wish someone good health, a happy marriage, or a safe passage into the afterlife, or to celebrate the successful completion of a project, is the modern echo of the ancient idea that alcohol has the power to invoke supernatural forces.

beer might have played a central role in the adoption of agriculture,

Farming was, according to this view, adopted partly in order to maintain the supply of beer.

most likely that beer drinking was just one of many factors that helped to tip the balance away from hunting and gathering and toward farming and a sedentary lifestyle based on small settlements.

beer was

safer to drink than water,