The History of Beer

This post is an answer to a question posed by Steve Vaughn in the Comments section of the previous blog post, Typewriters????. His question was “What is this beer you speak of???” Since Steve and I conducted extensive joint field-testing of beer during a two-year period that lasted roughly from 1967 to 1969, I know that he did not ask this question for his own education. Steve is a scientist, adept fly fisherman, and humanitarian concerned with the education of younger humans (and most humans are younger than the two of us). I have no doubt that Steve referred the question to me because I am a professional ‘Splainer, as in “How do you ‘splain this Lucy?”, a phrase that was frequently uttered in the iconic prototypical TV sitcom of the 1950s, I Love Lucy. ‘Splainers are also known variously as writers, scribblers, beer drinkers, hippies, nose-pickers, lunatics, and infidels, depending on one’s social circle and/or cultural viewpoint.

Sumeria The Sumerians were the first human society to develop Stage 2A writing technology. They were also the first society to discover, develop, and refine the brewing of beer. Beer, as we now know, is the very engine that has driven the progressive advancement of human civilization during the past 10,000 years. The Sumerians were no mental slouches. They were very aware of the importance of beer to humankind, and even had a god, Ninkasi, who was the goddess of brewing and beer, and brewed the beer that the gods themselves drank. An illustration of Sumerian clay tablets inscribed with the “Hymn to Ninkasi” is shown below. Within the verses, the hymn contains a recipe for brewing beer.

As I previously stated, the Sumerians were no mental slouches. Not coincidentally, since they both discovered beer and developed the first permanent writing technology, they have handed down to us the first written and illustrated records of alien visitations. They didn’t have words for aliens and spacecraft. They called the aliens “gods”, and their conveyances “chariots”. Alien visitations led to a couple side effects of drinking beer; writing things down, and the unbounded speculations which led to organized religion.

Egypt Ancient Egyptians were beer drinkers. Not surprisingly, they also developed Stage 3 writing technology to record their beer recipes. Like the Sumerian Ninkasi, the Egyptian god Osiris was said to have taught humans how to brew beer. It was used as the common mealtime beverage and in religious ceremonies. Ancient Egyptian beer was most commonly brewed from malted barley and emmer, a type of wheat. Hops were not used in the brewing process at that time. Using variants of their Stage 3 writing process, the Egyptians also recorded numerous instances of alien visitations.

India Indian beer was brewed from rice meal and wheat. Sugar cane and various kinds of fruit were added as sweeteners. Beer was brewed in this manner starting approximately 5,000 years ago. Indian writers of this period gave the world a rich, full bibliography of accounts of alien visitations and sightings of spacecraft. Those ancient accounts include very detailed records of “wars in the heavens” between aliens.

Rome Beer was a common Roman drink for a few hundred years, but they were not particularly good brewers and it did not have the generally pleasant taste of the brews produced in Sumeria, India, and Egypt. Romans later began experimenting with the production of wine and it became the drink of choice for the majority of citizens because they were apparently incapable of brewing a decent jar of beer. The Romans did not leave to history much in the way of literature about alien visitations. After wine drinking became widespread, Roman civilization entered a protracted period of cultural decay, then eventually succumbed to the invasions of robust beer-drinking groups like the Huns, Goths, and Visigoths. The Huns, Goths, and Visigoths left few written records of alien visitations because when they overran the Roman heartland they picked up the nasty habit of drinking the wine they found stored in the cities and farmlands.

Medieval Europe After the fall of Roman civilization, tax collectors in togas and their pernicious propaganda about wine no longer plagued Europeans. Left to their own devices, they began to slowly rebuild and advance human knowledge by returning to the tried-and-true method of brewing beer. In the year 1500, the German Hieronymus Braunschweig published Liber De Arte Destillandi, The Book of the Art of Distillation. This was shortly followed by the passage of the first Reinheitsgebot (German Beer Purity Law) in the city of Ingolstadt, Bavaria on April 23, 1516. The standardization of beer purity via the Reinheitsgebot was the catalyst that accelerated the Renaissance, and allowed the Europeans to colonize and dominate the continents of Australia, North and South America, and the tip of South Africa within a couple hundred years. Although few medieval Europeans were able to read or write, there was a surplus of beer-drinking painters, sketch artists, doodlers, and other illustrators who indulged in the widespread incorporation of illustrations of alien spacecraft in the religious art of the period.

Non-Beer Drinking Societies Due to the enduring influence of Rome, Italians were (and are) wine drinkers. One of the effects of this was the long-term fragmentation of Italy. Italy was a mishmash of small, disorganized city-states for a much longer period than the other nations of Europe. Italy’s attempts at overseas empire building in Albania and North Africa were dismal and complete failures by the 1940s. If only Italy had been able to produce a decent quality beer, things might have been different for Italians. Similarly, France is and was a nation of wine drinkers. France’s attempts to develop overseas colonies all failed. As far as conquest or colonization goes, the only bright spot in France’s history was short lived and largely the result of the efforts of a single man, Napoleon Bonaparte, who was a Corsican, and thus not really either French or Italian. France’s dreams of empire largely died at the same time as Napoleon. Now in the 21st Century, as it has been for over two thousand years, France contains very few beer drinkers, and produces nearly zero documented alien spacecraft sightings. Russia was and is a culture of vodka drinkers. Because they didn’t have the requisite beer drinking population, Russia lost its only overseas colony, Alaska. However, Russia did become an empire, because even without much beer, Russians could walk to places like Irkutsk and Siberia, places no other nation coveted and due to the vast size of the Russian empire, it produced a large amount of documentation of alien visitations and phenomena, including the Tunguska explosion of 1908.

Modern Beer-Drinking Societies The failure of the Beer Hall Putsch eventually, and indirectly led Germany’s National Socialist Party to dominate the country in the early 20th century, then nearly conquer all of Europe. Despite a substantial beer drinking population and a large library of documentation of alien visitations, Germany was defeated in its attempt to dominate Europe. Germany was defeated in 1945 due to the efforts of a coalition of other beer drinking nations; Australia, Canada, The United Kingdom, and the United States. All of the coalition nations possess records of thousands of alien visitations.

Summary Beer, in many forms, styles, and flavors is now readily available to all humans on this planet called Earth. This is a reflection of, and was the cause of the heights of technological innovation humankind has achieved and now enjoys. A photograph of a modern beer reefer, or refrigerator is shown below. A reefer is a device that keeps beer at the constant optimal temperature for the enjoyment of beer drinkers.

The cultures of beer drinkers and brewers have dominated the history of mankind, and in turn, driven civilization and technology to its present high state. Beer drinkers and brewers were also responsible for the accumulation of 10,000 years of documentation of alien visitations, spacecraft, and phenomena, which led to the invention of thousands of religions by the members of primitive cultures. Author’s Note: It is ironic, at the very least, that the collective compulsive obsession of beer drinkers who observed alien spacecraft in the ancient skies, then invented religions to explain the phenomena, will have their religions utterly destroyed by the eventual and inevitable contact with the non-earthling beings who piloted the spacecraft and apparently introduced humankind to the knowledge of brewing.