Historians, geneticists, linguists, oenologists, archaeologists and viticulture experts from several countries conferred over elaborate dinners, the conversations buoyed by copious drafts of wine. Forgotten kitchen jars from a Neolithic Iranian village called Hajji Firuz revealed strange yellow stains. McGovern subjected them to his tartaric acid tests; they were positive. Residues extracted from the drinking set of King Midas—who ruled over Phrygia, an ancient district of Turkey—had languished in storage for 40 years before McGovern found them and went to work.
He has downed drinks of all descriptions, including Chinese baijiu , a distilled alcohol that tastes like bananas but contains no banana and is approximately proof, and the freshly masticated Peruvian chicha, which he is too polite to admit he despises. Partaking is important, he says, because drinking in modern societies offers insight into dead ones.
McGovern, in fact, believes that booze helped make us human. Yes, plenty of other creatures get drunk. Bingeing on fermented fruits, inebriated elephants go on trampling sprees and wasted birds plummet from their perches. Unlike distillation, which human beings actually invented in China, around the first century A.
Ripe figs laced with yeast drop from trees and ferment; honey sitting in a tree hollow packs quite a punch if mixed with the right proportion of rainwater and yeast and allowed to stand. But at some point the hunter-gatherers learned to maintain the buzz, a major breakthrough.
With a supply of mind-blowing beverages on hand, human civilization was off and running. Scientists, for instance, have measured atomic variations within the skeletal remains of New World humans; the technique, known as isotope analysis, allows researchers to determine the diets of the long-deceased. When early Americans first tamed maize around B. Many bygone cultures seem to have viewed death as a last call of sorts, and mourners provisioned the dead with beverages and receptacles—agate drinking horns, straws of lapis lazuli and, in the case of a Celtic woman buried in Burgundy around the sixth century B.
Some of the departed had festive plans for the afterlife. Euphoric or maybe just tipsy beer nerds and a few members of the press file into an auditorium adorned with faux obelisks and bistro tables, each with a bowl of nuts in the center. The words dog, fish and head in hieroglyphics are projected on the walls. Onstage beside McGovern, Calagione, swigging an auburn-colored ale, tells the flushed crowd about how he and the archaeologist joined forces.
All interested brewers should meet in his lab at 9 the next morning, he said. When he first met Dr. McGovern, buttoned into a cardigan sweater, is practically the hieroglyphic for professor.
But he won over the brewer when, a few minutes into that first morning meeting, he filled his coffee mug with Chicory Stout. All are commercially available, though only five barrels of the chicha are made per year. McGovern is paid for his consulting services. Now the inaugural pitchers of Ta Henket are being poured from kegs at the back of the room. Neither Calagione nor McGovern has yet tasted the stuff.
It emerges peach-colored and opaque, the foam as thick as whipped cream. The brew, which will be available for sale this fall, later receives mixed reviews online. As soon as he has sampled a mouthful, McGovern seizes a pitcher and begins pouring pints for the audience, giving off a shy glow. He enjoys the showmanship. The main course was a traditional lentil and barbecued lamb stew, followed by fennel tarts in pomegranate jus. In his laboratory, McGovern keeps an envelope containing Neolithic grape seeds, which he wheedled out of a viticulture professor in Georgia the country, not the state years ago.
The man had six desiccated pips in good condition, ideal for DNA analysis. The Georgian left the room for a moment to agonize, and returned to say that McGovern and science could have two of the ancient seeds. Archeologists have even found beer buried in the tombs of the Pharaohs, so they could enjoy the taste of this delicious beverage in the afterlife. Beer brewing techniques made its way from Egypt to Greece as we know from the Greek word for beer, zythos from the Egyptian zytum but was not a huge hit right away.
At this time, wine was so popular that it was the drink considered a gift from the gods. Therefore, beer was considered a barbaric drink and only fit for lower classes to imbibe. Mosaic floor with slaves serving beer at a banquet, found in Dougga 3rd century CE. Even so, the Romans were brewing beer called cerevisia quite early as evidenced by discoveries in the tomb of a beer brewer and merchant a Cerveserius in ancient Treveris modern-day Trier. Beer was one of the most common drinks on the outskirts of the empire, and the legions of Rome brought beer to Northern Europe.
Roman soldiers were able to enjoy a refreshing cup of beer on their long journeys. And then came the Middle Ages. During this period beer was mostly produced in monasteries all across Europe. Since monks liked the beverage, in some monasteries, monks could drink up to five liters of beer per day.
It was the beer production that helped the monasteries to survive the Dark Ages, as they made enough money to live from selling their beer. Around AD, people started using hops in the brewing process. This refined its taste by making it much less bitter and gave us the beer as we know it today.
In the 13th century AD, beer finally started being produced commercially in Germany, England, and Austria. You know we would get back to Germany at some point. Large quantities of beer jugs, still containing evidence of the beer, were discovered in a tomb in the Village of Kasendorf in northern Bavaria, near Kulmbach.
The German brewers soon set the standard for most beer makers in Europe. Their beer was of the highest quality, particularly because it was really cold and had a better taste. According to this German law, beer could only contain water, barley, and hops. It also guaranteed that there was a certain level of purity in German-made beer, which gave it the perception that it was safe to drink.
The Germans, like those who preceded them, also instituted a daily beer ration and considered beer a necessary staple of their diet. Breweries were emerging one after another in the colonies of North America.
Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were producing beer. George Washington himself wrote a recipe on how to brew beer. This period of modern history marks the start of the biggest changes in beer production, such as using yeast for fermentation.
In , Oktoberfest was first held in Munich. Its origins can be traced back to wedding festivities that actually featured mostly wine. That began to change, though, in the mids as wave after wave of new immigrants came from Northern and Central Europe, bringing with them a taste for a new style of beer had taken hold on the Continent: Pilsner-style lagers typical of Germany and the Czech Republic.
Very quickly, these pale, hoppy, clean tasting beers replaced the darker, heavier ales that had typified American beer in the previous centuries. Increasing demand for lager beer and the influx of millions of immigrants drove American beer production to new highs in the late s and early s. But then along came a period of great trouble-Prohibition.
From to , it was illegal to consume alcoholic beverages in the U. Small regional breweries and brewpubs lost a major source of revenue, and went out of business. Some breweries survived by making malt extracts sugar , ice cream, and soda. After Prohibition was repealed , the U. Beers that became popular from these situations were the ones that expanded during Prohibition and could thus mass-produce cheap beer Budweiser, Schlitz.
As their sales grew, so did their ability to make their beer cheaper. Before Prohibition, there were over small breweries in the U. Since then, various legal exceptions have been passed.
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