The Life of Beer

Before I begin tasting and discussing different styles of craft beer, let's take a QUICK detour and talk about what beer actually IS, when and how it came to be in the first place, and how it got to where it is now. Is beer hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of years old? Was it always consumed to "get drunk", or did it serve a more important purpose? What is it actually made of? When you stop to think about it, I'm sure most of you will realize you don't really know all that much about beer, so let's dive into the past and find out...

A Brief History of Beer...

Hunter-gatherers discovering grains

When it comes to beer and it's role throughout history, one could probably go on for days, but I'm going to keep this as short as I can. Beer's story begins at around 10,000 BCE, when our hunter-gatherer, nomadic ancestors domesticated various wild grasses into early forms of wheat and barley. They soon realized that the gluten-rich wheat seeds could be used to make bread, and - more importantly - when combined with hot water, barley seeds would produce a nutritious and pleasantly sweet liquid, which I'm sure was a welcome change from anything else they had to drink at the time. Somehow (probably by accident), they discovered that if this sweet liquid was left in an open container for a few days and then consumed, it had certain "pleasant effects" on the mind and body. This is because wild yeast from the air and surrounding environment made a home in this sugary barley broth, snacked on the sugars, and excreted ethanol (alcohol) into the liquid: thus, the discovery of the most basic form of beer! The discovery of these grains and the food and drink they could produce with them caused our ancestors to give up the nomadic lifestyle to focus on agriculture and the growing of these precious new commodities, and soon led to the birth of established settlements and cities. The idea of living together in large groups in one place was a new and probably uncomfortable experience initially for our ancestors, and maybe wouldn't have gone over so well if it hadn't been for their new-found "social lubricant" of beer.

By 3000 - 2000 BCE, the craft of brewing beer was well established, and many different civilizations had their own traditions and different styles of beers, from the Sumerians to the Babylonians, and even the Egyptians. There were weak and strong beers, light and dark beers, fresh and aged beers, and even a diet beer (known to the Sumerians as eb-la, which means "lessens the waist"). The workers who built the pyramids in Egypt were "payed" one gallon of a highly nutritious, low alcohol form of beer for a day's work, which kept them hydrated, nourished, and in good spirits to construct these gigantic architectural marvels. 

In the middle-ages, long before there was any understanding of bacteria and sanitization and their link to becoming sick, Europeans would dump all kinds of things into their water sources and completely contaminate them. People would get sick from drinking the water, and yet found that if they drank beer they were fine, so everyone - young and old - drank beer as their source of clean water. What they didn't understand then that we know now is that the boiling process of brewing the beer is what killed the bacteria in the water and made it safe to drink the beer.

Hops, the female flowers of the hop plant,
Humulus lupulus

Hops first started being used to "season" and bitter beer around the 1000s AD by the Germans, and by about the 1600s, it was common practice in most of Europe. Before the use of hops, a wide assortment of spices and herbs were used, but hops had one advantage to beer that those other herbs and spices didn't. Not only did hops provide the perfect amount of bitterness and unique flavours to balance the malty sweetness of the barley, but hops have a preservative and slightly antiseptic quality to them that would inhibit beer-spoiling bacteria. This meant a low alcohol beer could remain drinkable for a number of months instead of a couple of weeks, which was important when setting out to sea on a long voyage, especially for those early settlers of North America.

Miller's thankfully short-lived
"Clear Beer" (c. 1993), an
absolute low for beer

Around the same time in the 1600s, lagered (cold-fermented) beer was becoming popular in Bavaria and Bohemia, and when the town of Plzeň brewed their version of a pale, effervescent, crisp lager (now known as "Pilsner") in 1842, it captured the attention of beer drinkers in a big way, as it was so different from the darker, fuller-bodied and fuller flavoured ales (warm fermented beers) and lagers of the time. When German immigrants such as Adolphus Busch, Frederick Miller, and Adolph Coors came to North America in the mid to late 1800s, they brought with them the techniques of brewing these crisp lagered beers, as well as a dream to see their brands span coast to coast (a crazy dream at the time, but as technology, distribution, and commercialism advanced... well, you've been into a Beer Store before). By the early 1900s and throughout the next three-quarters of the century, this new fad of mass-produced, brand name light lagers began dominating the beer market, and as time passed, these lagers became but shadows of their former selves. Corn and rice were added as fillers in the beer to displace some of the cost of barley, and less and less hops were used, which resulted in cheap to produce beer with very little flavour, and what little flavour it did have had to be masked by the practice of drinking beer "ice cold" (a complete misconception about beer, propegated by the marketing departments of these very same brewers). Slowly but surely the small, local craft brewers that brewed authentic, varied, and flavourful styles of traditional ales and lagers were muscled out. Randy Mosher, in his book Tasting Beer: An Insider's Guide to the World's Greatest Drink (an amazing book that covers absolutely everything to do with beer) gives the statistic that the U.S. had 4,131 breweries in 1873, and by 1973 there were just barely over one hundred.

Thankfully, after an almost century-long downward spiral for beer, a resurgence of craft beer (due largely to the resurgence of home brewing) began in the late 1970s, as people finally decided they were sick of the bland, mass produced lagers of the big brand brewers, and wanted to return to the flavourful, massively-varied roots of authentic craft beer. Although the craft beer market remained fairly niche for the next two decades, its marketshare has grown exponentially over the last decade or so, and there are now hundreds - maybe thousands - of small, passionate craft brewers in North America and the world over, all making thousands of different kinds of unique, authentic, interesting and amazing craft beers to discover and taste! 

If you're still reading this, congratulations, you must truly be more interested in beer than the average person, and you're exactly the type of person I am writing this blog for! I promise this will be the longest post I ever write, and from here on out the posts should be more lively and exciting, as I begin sampling all kinds of different beer. I hope to post my next entry (which will be just a very quick post about the difference between ales and lagers) within the next day or two, and then it's into trying craft beers! Until then...

Enjoy a craft brew!

- Sid Ryzebol -

(If you were interested by what you read in this blog, I'd recommend watching the documentary "How Beer Saved The World" or the documentary "Beer Wars", as they go into a few more facets of beer history and the beer industry than I was able to in this post. If you still find yourself interested in learning more about beer and also want a good guide to drinking craft beer, read Randy Mosher's book Tasting Beer.)