Ancient Brewing
Beer, bread, planting, baking, and fermenting grain to nourish early man.
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You are the one who bakes the bappir in the big oven
Puts in order the piles of hulled grains,
Ninkasi, you are the one who bakes the bappir in the big oven,
Puts in order the piles of hulled grains.
from The Hymn to Ninkasi (tr. by Miguel Civil)
By season's end my deciduous vine will have grown more than 20 feet and be full of yellow-green beer enhancing strobiles. In England, Henry VI forbade its planting because he believed it caused melancholy. He preferred wormwood -- principle ingredient of the currently illegal (in America) beverage, Absinthe. But tastes change and today it's not even considered beer if it doesn't have the flavor of hops.
Many ancient Romans thought of beer as a beverage fit only for barbarians. They preferred veritas enhancing wine. Even they had use for hops, though, as a spring vegetable that looks (but, sadly, doesn't taste) like asparagus. The Sumerians and Egyptians, however, weren't such snobs, but they still didn't use hops in their brewing.
In Ancient Egypt, the staples were bread, onion or other vegetables, and beer. There is some controversy over the ingredients of Egyptian beer; whether it used emmer wheat or barley, whether loaves of bread were prepared for beer making (and then soaked and fermented), and whether dates were the principle flavoring agent in lieu of medieval gruit herbs or modern hops. The Newcastle Brown Ale company, after running experiments, concluded that what is translated as "date" is really a word for any sweet and that there was no residue of what we call date in their samples [www.broonale.co.uk/ancient.html]. They also concluded there was no need to prepare bread before brewing because sprouted barley or wheat grains work just as well.
Our oldest records of beer are Sumerian, from near the region of the world's earliest domestication of cereal. Both sexes and all classes drank beer. It was so important that in the Code of Hammurabi (18th century B.C.) owners of beer parlors who overcharged customers were to be put to death by drowning. On the ancient clay tablets we also read about "bappir" a bread that was used in brewing, but only eaten during food shortages. Bappir conveniently kept the grain from spoiling.
From such observations comes another controversy. Did the earliest agriculturists turn to grain production as a way to produce booze or bread? Fermentation of grains would have happened by chance. Bread making was laborious for a product fit only for starvation. Arguments against the idea that the quest for beer started man's path to farming, cite the lessened nutritional value of alcohol compared with bread, but sprouted seeds are nutritional and, according to a study (beer.tcm.hut.fi/Misc/SumerianBeer.html Accessed 07/08/97) by Solomon Katz and Fritz Maytag, produce a mildly intoxicating level of alcohol.
In the twentieth century's closing decade, Americans wage war on drugs, sue tobacco companies, and talk about New Age style Prohibition. In light of the fact that the quest for mood-altering substances appears to be one of the oldest, most entrenched human traits I wonder if our neo-puritan efforts aren't doomed to inevitable failure.
Reader's Irreverence
Too little beer over Passover prompted this irreverent vision.
