The History of Beer: A Reader’s Companion

I’m backdating this post, to fit alongside the original History of Beer post. Yes, I know, messing with the time stream is bad, and I might accidentally prevent my mom from falling in love with my dad, and therefore prevent my entire existence, which would then allow my mom to meet my dad, and create me — and a Donnie Darko-esque infinite time-loop/parallel universe that can only be ended with an aircraft engine in my forehead.

When we approached the assignment to chart the History of Beer, the first thing that jumped out at us was how amazingly old beer is. Much older than most of what we consider to be “human civilization” — the written language, organized religion, the rule of law, and so on. This gave us the idea of drawing multiple parallel timelines, and looking for ways that important beer events might have affected important historical events, eventually culminating in Prohibition. But the depth of what we found was amazing, and inspiring.

The modern anthropologist Alan Eames believes that “beer was the driving force that led nomadic mankind into village life…It was this appetite for beer-making material that led to crop cultivation, permanent settlement and agriculture.” — Beeripedia.com

Of course, even in a 2400-pixel graphic, we had to leave some stuff on the cutting room floor. So here’s our list of citations, resources, and favorite tidbits that we sadly couldn’t include.

Beer Facts

From Wikipedia: Beer, The History of Beer, The Beer Purity Law, Prohibition

Other Sources: “Origin and History of Beer” by John P Arnold; About.com: Early Brewing;

From the Cutting Room Floor:

Beer became vital to all the grain-growing civilizations of classical Western antiquity, including Egypt — so much so that in 1868 James Death put forward a theory in The Beer of the Bible that the manna from heaven that God gave the Israelites was a bread-based, porridge-like beer called wusa. — Beeripedia.com

Beer + Culture

Thank the Gauls for keeping beer alive

From Wikipedia: The Neolithic Revolution, Ages of Man, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Classical Antiquity, Middle Ages, Rennaissance, Industrial Revolution

Other sources: Beeripedia – Origins of the Drinking Game; Plato’s Symposium

From the Cutting Room Floor:

Socrates took his place on the couch, and supped with the rest; and then libations were offered, and after a hymn had been sung to the god, and there had been the usual ceremonies, they were about to commence drinking, when Pausanias said, And now, my friends, how can we drink with least injury to ourselves?

I can assure you that I feel severely the effect of yesterday’s potations, and must have time to recover; and I suspect that most of you are in the same predicament, for you were of the party yesterday. Consider then: How can the drinking be made easiest? — Symposium

Prohibition was a watershed event, culturally, for this country – but not for the reasons its founders intended. Prohibition led to the massive increase in organized crime, which then led to the creation of gangster movies like James Cagney’s The Public Enemy. Gangster-run speakeasies in New York also contributed mightily to the Harlem Rennaissance, which formed the artistic and cultural foundation of the modern civil rights movement.

Of course, beer culture and popular culture are inextricably intertwined, and the advent of television advertising created a whole new culture of beer drinking. Or, perhaps, it’s more appropriate to say that a generation of advertising was created that can only be understood if you’re completely blitzed.

Spuds Mackenzie

The Bud Bowl

Beer and Religion

This is a topic that I find fascinating, as it turns out that beer literally helped keep civilization and learning alive, and at the same time, is widely considered by Protestantism to be a societal evil. One of the coolest discoveries we made was the existence of “Beer Witches,” women who were alchemical masters of the various psychotropic herbs and flavorings that were brewed into beer, before the popularization of hops. Occasionally, batches of beer would go bad and cause blindness or death, and lead to the persecution of these witches.

Sources: Patron Saints of Beer, Beer Witches, The temperance movement, Carrie Nation

From the Cutting Room Floor

Up until the Middle Ages, it was women who brewed almost all beer, usually in amounts large enough for family consumption. However, when monasteries turned their attention to beer making in the Middle Ages, men entered the brewing scene. Although the monks originally only made the beer for themselves, they soon realized its potential as a moneymaker, and began selling beer to outsiders, with some monasteries even opening up pubs. — divinecaroline.com

Beer Quotes

Sources: Beer-faq.com, beerhistory.com, Brainy-quote.com
We found hundreds of awesome beer-related quotables, of which we could only use about a dozen. Here are some of the best, including some that we didn’t use.

“Give my people plenty of beer, good beer, and cheap beer, and you will have no revolution among them.”
- Queen Victoria

“Always do sober what you said you would do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.” – Ernest Hemingway

“You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline – it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.” – Frank Zappa

“Our country has deliberately undertaken a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose.” – Herbert Hoover, on signing prohibition

“I think this would be a good time for a beer” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt, on repealing Prohibition