The Meaning of Beer E-Book

Jonny Garrett

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 488

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

THE PRIZE-WINNING BOOK EVERY BEER-LOVER MUST READ 'Tantalising, enlightening and the best reason to raise another glass of beer' Olly Smith 'This is one of the most important books ever written about beer' Mark Dredge WINNER, BEST DRINK BOOK AT THE FORTNUM & MASON FOOD AND DRINK AWARDS 2025 What's the oldest and most consumed alcoholic beverage on earth? BEER, of course. And it might just be our most important invention. Since its creation 13,000 years ago, our love of beer has shaped everything from religious ceremonies to advertising, and architecture to bioengineering. The people who built the pyramids were paid in ale, the first fridge was built for beer not food, bacteria was discovered while investigating sour beer, Germany's beer halls hosted Hitler's rise to power, and brewer's yeast may yet be the answer to climate change. In The Meaning of Beer, award-winning beer writer Jonny Garrett tells the stories of these incredible human moments and inventions, taking readers to some of the best-known beer destinations in the world - Munich and Oktoberfest, Carlsberg Brewery's historic laboratory, St Louis and the home of Budweiser - as well as those lesser-known, from a 5,000 year old brewery in the Egyptian desert to Arctic Svalbard, home to the world's most northerly pub. Ultimately, this is not a book about how we made beer, but how beer made us.

Leseprobe

ALSO BY JONNY GARRETT

A Year in Beer

Beer School

The London Craft Beer Guide

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2024 by Allen & Unwin, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in 2025 by Allen & Unwin.

Copyright © Jonny Garrett, 2024

The moral right of Jonny Garrett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 995 1

Printed in Great Britain

Allen & Unwin

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

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For my daughter

CONTENTS

Introduction: Not how we made beer, but how beer made us

1 Civilization: Or how beer built our first cities and cultures

2 Science: Or how beer spurred us on to new technological heights

3 Politics: Or how beer has influenced the way the world is run

4 Identity: Or how beer defines who we are as individuals and nations

5 Culture: Or how beer is a key part of everything from TV to sport

6 Cuisine: Or how beer changed what and how we eat

7 Community: Or how beer brings people together

8 Entertainment: Or isn’t beer supposed to be fun?

9 The Future: Or how beer will continue to change – and even save – humanity

Glossary

Cheers to…

Further Reading

Index

INTRODUCTION

Not how we made beer, but how beer made us

Every night when my dad got home from work, he’d kiss my mum, ask what my brother and I were watching on TV (usually to little or no response), and head straight upstairs.

There he’d change out of his work uniform of branded polo and chinos, and into his home uniform of unbranded polo and chinos. He’d then thud back downstairs and hit start on the microwave to reheat whatever we’d eaten a few hours before. Finally, he’d go to the fridge, pull out a stubby bottle of lager and settle at the kitchen table. He’d only ever have one beer, but in my misty-eyed recollections he never skips it. It was the routine; his signal that the work day had ended – as vital as the meal he had it with, as the kiss for my mum, as the begrudging communication from his heirs.

For such an important moment – maybe the best moment of the day – he didn’t invest much in it. My dad is hardly a gourmand, but he knows his wine in an ‘oooh Gavi di Gavi!’ kind of way. He’s certainly never served red with fish, and likes to discuss that fact. But the opposite is true of his beer drinking. Despite having a bottle every darn day, he stuck to the bottom-shelf stubbies; lagers our family fondly came to call ‘French Piss’. I don’t know if Biere D’Or was his favourite, or if my mum simply shopped at Tesco more than any other supermarket, but the gold label, chunky bottles and flimsy cardboard crate shaped like a Robot Wars entry destined to go out in the first round are burned into my memory.

When I was young I’d sometimes be charged with loading the basket at the bottom of the fridge with more, and when I was a little older I was allowed to crack open the bottles for him, sniffing suspiciously at its strange, grainy aroma. I took my first tentative sip in my early teens. One evening my older brother had – to his and my surprise – been left in charge of the house along with some friends. Naturally, being in charge at the age of sixteen meant drinking beer and watching films with an eighteen certificate. The fact that I was only thirteen didn’t seem relevant as he handed me a bottle and said, ‘Don’t get drunk.’ That wasn’t a problem – the beer was awful, and I struggled to get through one 250ml bottle. Biere D’Or is barely introduced to hops when it’s brewed, but it was bitter enough to claw like fingernails at my Ribenaweaned palate. I sipped half-heartedly at it, feeling the bottle go warm in my clammy hands and wondering why my dad would put himself through this every weeknight.

Of course, that mystery revealed itself pretty quickly, as it does with most teenagers. My dad’s green stubbies became the lubricant for many drunken barbecues and illicit house parties as I pinballed my way through my teens, and Biere D’Or now holds a very special place in my heart. When I visit my parents these days, I insist that there’s a stack of French Piss in the fridge ready for my arrival.

I’m telling you this admittedly indulgent story for a very important reason. Civilization certainly didn’t start, or even really continue, at my kitchen table – not the way the Garretts eat. There were no great inventions or cultural moments inspired by Biere D’Or there, either. But my dad’s ritual is the bedrock upon which my love of beer was founded, and I bet you have a similar story. To me, beer has always retained the key purpose it had for my dad. It’s not just a quick drink or a way to wash down a microwave meal: it’s a full stop on the day – a moment that may seem small if you’re sitting opposite my dad, but takes on a global significance when you think that on our suburban road, tens of people were doing exactly the same thing at the same time. In pubs throughout my home town there were hundreds more sharing that moment. Around the world, as 5 p.m. hit each time zone, millions would pop caps and lean back, sharing in the collective sip and sigh of a day done that stretches back millennia.

My point is that since civilization began, beer has played a vital role in how we experience and process the world, even during childhood. My dad’s routine sparked synapses in my brain that connect beer and relaxation, beer and food, beer and work, beer and home, beer and family. My pubescent misadventures bonded beer irrevocably to adventure, to friends and to love. Most of my best memories involve it in some way – from leaving school to celebrating my Master’s, from starting my first job to painting the walls of my first house, from my first date with my wife to our wedding. And that personal significance needs to be multiplied by the billion: by everyone who has ever lived and everyone who ever will, because beer (which is to say an alcoholic drink made from fermented cereals) has been with us for at least 13,000 years – and will outlast everyone alive today.

It’s not just the personal stories that are timeless, either. Something of such cultural significance requires huge means of production. An inconceivable amount of human ingenuity and endeavour, of adventure and trade, of experimentation and research went into making the French Piss my dad unwound with every night. Some anthropologists believe that the nomadic tribes that roamed the earth 13,000 years ago only settled to grow cereals for beer and bread. There’s archaeological evidence that refining the brewing process was humanity’s first great engineering project, with epic breweries found in the ruins of ancient societies. We built the first commercial compressed-gas refrigerator exclusively to keep our beer cold, and laid railways to take it to new places as quickly as possible. The process of pasteurization was perfected to ensure beer didn’t spoil and led to the discovery of bacteria’s role in infections. The isolation of yeast, key to all bread baking and even biofuel production, was done in the name of brewing. Beer was the keystone of early civilization, then spurred humanity on its endless scientific advances. We’ll fully explore all this throughout this book, but clearly beer is one of the most important discoveries we have made as a species. In fact, there are academics who believe – like I do – that the control of fermentation is as important to human development as the discovery of fire.

Not a Real Job

You wouldn’t know that to look at how we treat it or talk about it, however. As my dad’s blasé approach shows, while the traditions of fine wine are held in the highest regard, beer’s central place in the world seems to be its undoing. Far from being an artisan endeavour, to most people it’s a daily inevitability that sits on shopping lists next to the washing-up liquid. This delicious drink, through which the entire history of humanity can be traced, has become a homogeneous corporate product, the significance of which few give a second’s thought to. It’s this fact that has spurred me on the journey I’ve taken for this book, and indeed inspired my career as a broadcaster and writer.

My job has taken me across the globe in search of exciting flavours, but like everyone else my love of good beer started in my local. I was fresh out of university and flush with my first pay cheque as a journalist. A sunny Saturday stretched out in front of me, and I wanted to try something different; something bold and exciting. Standing at the bar, I looked past the standard lager taps of my teens and saw a giant hammer at the end. It loomed out of the beer fonts in lieu of a normal tap handle. Along its shaft were written the words ‘Long Hammer IPA’. I couldn’t not order it.

The barman pulled the foot-long hammer down in a great arc. Clear amber beer and creamy white foam cascaded out of the tap, and as he passed the glass over to me the head spilled luxuriously over the side. That first sip changed my world. Citrus oils swam across my palate; pine needles pricked the back of my tongue; caramel stuck to my teeth. I was intoxicated in so many ways – by the alcohol, the heady aromas, the biting bitterness, the mystery of where it all came from. How was this beer so radically different from the faux lagers I’d grown up choking down?

That pint, as well as three more that followed it, sent me on the adventure I’ve been on for over a decade – travelling the world to discover all the flavours that malt, water, hops and yeast create when put together in the right order, at the right temperatures, and at the right time. On the surface it seems like a very simple process: warm water is mixed with malted grain to create a sugary liquid, which is then boiled with hop flowers to add flavour and bitterness, before yeast is added to eat the sugar and release alcohol. But as I’ve proven many times through my home-brewing exploits, making good beer is a lot more complicated than that. As I looked to unlock brewing’s secrets, I read every book I could afford and toured every brewery I came across. I tried every sample and asked every question I could think of. I learned of remarkable beer styles and drinking cultures – the lambics of Belgium, the farmhouse ales of Norway, the diverse lagers of Bavaria and Bohemia, the soft and bittersweet cask ales of the UK and hop-saturated IPAs of the West Coast. As I fell deeper down the rabbit hole I started blogging about it, then filming it, then finally writing my own books. The aim was to convince everyone to drink better beer – to help people have the same experience that I did with that pint of Long Hammer. Over the years, however, my motivation has shifted.

Unless you’re a politician or an arms dealer, you’ve probably never had to justify your job. But I have to every time I use the phrase ‘beer writer’. Usually I face the same stock questions – how do I make money (‘I don’t really’), do I get lots of free beer (‘yes, there’s very little room for food in my fridge’), or isn’t that just a fancy phrase for alcoholic (‘have you been talking to my mother?’). The most common one, however, is, ‘Is that really a job?’ The first hundred times I laughed it off with some variation of ‘well someone keeps paying me’. But increasingly I’m asking myself that very question. As I hit my thirties I started to wonder where my career could go from here, how many times I could tell the same stories. Most importantly, when my daughter was born, I asked myself what I was doing to improve the world she was growing up in.

There are no joke answers to those more introspective questions – so on my trips I started to ask not just about the beers, but the people. And not just the brewers either – the locals, the farmers and the families. That led me to track down and interview historians, anthropologists and politicians to piece together how certain beers, breweries and styles came to be, and what their place in the world was. Slowly I built up this picture of humanity entirely through the lens of beer, and my favourite drink took on much more significance. I began to see it not as a lovely addition to daily life, but as a central part of it.

Everywhere I looked I started to see beer’s impact on the world. I’ve explored the archaeological site of one of the world’s oldest commercial breweries, and talked to the Prince of Bavaria about his family’s ancient purity law. I’ve attended China’s Oktoberfest some 10,000 kilometres from Munich, and followed the spread of lager throughout the world. I’ve gone to one of the UK’s incredible British Indian pubs and visited the most northerly brewery in the world. I’ve toured a secular brewery in a church in Stockholm, and the devout, monastic breweries of Belgium. I’ve dug into the history of a brewery that defined Czech identity when the nation was occupied, first by the Nazis and then by the Soviet Union, as well as the epic Budweiser Brewery in St Louis, where a German brewer helped build the very idea of the American dream. I’ve toured the historic laboratory where yeast was isolated in the 1800s and spoken to scientists who, 150 years later, are using those yeasts to treat diseases and tackle climate change. These are just some of the adventures we’re headed on in this book: from how beer helped kick-start humanity, right through to how it might just save it.

Like I said, on the surface, beer is just malt, water, hops and yeast. That’s how most beer books define it, and how beer writers often structure their stories. This is not one of those books. This is not a book about how beer is made, but about how beer made us.

1

CIVILIZATION

Or how beer built our first cities and cultures

The origin of beer is much debated for the simple reason that it happened so very long ago. There’s no written record of it because it predates writing, and though humans were speaking by then, voices leave no trace in the archaeological record. Instead, as we hunt down the earliest evidence of brewing, we’re left brushing at dirt, carbon-dating dust and analysing scrapes in rock invisible to the human eye.

When we do study an era in which beer is written about, it’s mythologized. Popular scientists, historians and beer writers seize upon evidence and anecdotes that support their world view. Pretty much every beer book that has ever been written, and indeed ever will be written, contains some kind of reference to Mesopotamia, a thing called the Sumerian tablet, and a poem written about the goddess Ninkasi. Usually it will follow it up with something about how the Pharaohs paid the people who built the Pyramids in beer. You’ve possibly heard variations of all these things and, well, this book will be no different, save for the fact that I have now lived it – I have dipped my toes in the sands of Egypt, held their pottery in my hands, and met archaeologists looking to change our view of ancient brewing and civilization itself.

It’s my profound belief that without our eternal, close relationship with beer, society would have evolved to be a very different, much poorer place. Brewing ranks among music, language, religion, sport and cuisine as the things that set us apart from our closest relatives (primates that is, not your boring uncle). But until recently it was just that – a belief. And like most human beliefs, it was probably based on confirmation bias. Wanting to be right is as innate to our species as our love of beer. More than that though, when you spend your life intently studying something, it’s natural you might inflate its importance.

Which is why even my closest friends, who are used to me indulging in pint-swinging generalizations, tend to roll their eyes when I get on my soap box/beer crate. I’ve waved my brewing bibles at them, sent links to obscure Wikipedia pages, and got in round after round to buy myself more time, but it always gets the same response. Apparently, second-hand information presented by a ‘glorified beer PR person’ (that one hurt a bit) doesn’t constitute a valid revisionist history of our entire species.

That’s because my friends are well-adjusted, well-educated people with practical jobs: broadcast engineers, academics, teachers, social workers, programmers. When their parents explain what their kids do, they say it with pride, safe in the knowledge there will be no awkward follow-up questions or looks of pity. It was these faces, along with the rolling eyes of my dearest friends, that I thought of as I booked my tickets to Cairo.

From Grave to Cradle

Egypt does not contain the oldest evidence of brewing. By the time you read this there might be a new one, but currently the title belongs to Israel, and a place called the Raqefet Cave near Nazareth.

This cave was once inhabited by a prehistoric group of people called the Natufians. The Natufians were mostly hunters, but at Raqefet they foraged wild grains such as barley and wheat, then brewed beer using techniques so advanced that it’s almost inconceivable it couldn’t have been developed even earlier: their ancient brewery takes the form of several divots dug into the floors and boulders of the cave, in which archaeologists found not just traces of grains but of enzymes that implied those grains were malted and broken down in water – the first step in the beer brewing process, known as ‘mashing’. From the lacerations on the stone, it’s presumed they malted the grain in the floor basins and stored it in the boulder ones. On the brew day, they mashed the grain in the floor divots, then fermented them (covered with a slab) for a few days until ready. Archaeologists have even found strands of tightly wound wicker baskets in the boulder basins that would have contained the ingredients or even the finished beer.

Now for the big reveal: carbon dating puts the residue at Raqefet at a monumental 13,000 years old. When these people were brewing, woolly mammoths roamed the earth and we were still in the last Ice Age (it seems the beer jacket is a very old invention indeed). This time period is remarkable for more than just the number of zeros, though. It means that beer was likely the first example of humans intentionally making alcohol: wine was first made about 5,000 years later, and we didn’t start distilling spirits for nearly 12,000 years. Even more importantly, if beer was made this early, it potentially predates two incredibly important things: bread and civilization itself.

Let’s start with the former. Archaeologists, anthropologists, food writers and beer writers all disagree about which was invented first – beer or bread. Without getting into it too much, the earliest records of each come within 1,000 years of each other and in neighbouring countries (Israel and Jordan). The reason for the debate is that whichever came first likely inspired the other, because their ingredients are almost identical – grain and water, with one being baked and the other being stored. Telling the two apart 13,000 years later is pretty tough, and it’s important to say that some academics believe only bread was made at Raqefet, with any alcohol being a by-product.

There are two compelling arguments against this, however. The first is that there’s clear evidence the grain was germinated – a process that releases lots of fermentable sugar that’s vital to making beer but superfluous to bread baking. Given that malting took days to do and was tricky to get right, you’d only do it if you really needed to. Secondly, whatever was going on in the basins seems to have played a ritualistic role as well as a production one: the cave also features flower-lined graves and animal bones that suggest funeral-related feasting and drinking. This spiritual or religious side to beer is a connection we’ll see throughout human history, and to me it confirms the divots at Raqefet held a lot more than just dough.

I suspect that as we find earlier evidence of brewing and baking, the methods for each will get simpler and simpler until beer is pretty much unbaked bread and bread is pretty much just baked beer. Working out which came first might be beyond our technology. There’s a very strong argument, however, that brewers may have invented leavened (risen) bread. In Nicholas P. Money’s excellent book, The Rise of Yeast, he suggests that the most likely cause of the first bread rise was an accidental splash of yeasty beer or frothy yeast from a ferment. To my mind it could just as likely have been the intentional use of beer as the water for the dough.

It’s not unreasonable, though, to ask why beer was even being made so long ago. If you got your hands on some grain, bread would have been much quicker to make and arguably more filling. The reality is that humans need liquid more than they need food: you can go a few weeks without eating, but more than three days without water and you’ll be on the brink of death. So beer killed two birds with one stone – it was filling and nutritious but also staved off thirst. A little kicker for our ancestors (and incredibly around 700 million people today) was that the available water wasn’t always safe to drink – stagnant water can get infected with nasty bacteria and viruses that might kill you nearly as quickly as not drinking at all. Alcohol, however, is an antiseptic, so beer was very likely to be sanitary, making it the ancient world’s safest source of liquid. This is why beer was so pervasive, but its cultural significance likely comes from another reason… a reason we consider even more important today: it gets you drunk.

Now, being a little buzzed wouldn’t have been entirely new to humans trying beer for the first time. Fallen fruit is rotted by a combination of bacteria and fungi including yeast, so it’s very likely our ancestors would have gathered and eaten semi-rotten ‘floor treats’ that were a good few per cent ABV. If that sounds gross, beer 13,000 years ago wouldn’t have tasted particularly great either – probably sour thanks to the other microbes that would have got in with the yeast. It would, however, have been predictable, safe and even storable. If it was a strong enough batch, it might have made our prehistoric brewers feel rather good about themselves. Their cheeks would have flushed, their pupils dilated, their inhibitions been suppressed. They might have found the sudden courage to grunt at their crush, or try that new dance move around the campfire. After telling all their friends about this amazing discovery, I assume the tribe experienced their first ‘Big Night Out’ and immediately started planning next weekend’s.

I’m being a little trite there, but there’s overwhelming evidence from disparate ancient societies that beer was a central part of all kinds of social, religious and ritualistic occasions. All over the world we find evidence of beer at the centre of feasts, of brewing and beer offerings to the dead near prehistoric grave sites, and remarkably diverse recipes and processes to turn grain into alcohol. For example, before Raqefet’s brewing process was explored around 2018, we thought that Jiahu in China, where people combined broomcorn millet with mouldy grains and herbs, might have been the origin of beer about 8,500 years ago. In most of these locations, however, we only have the implication of beer: the warm, morning dregs of the party. The earliest recorded example of humans talking about brewing beer comes from a fertile part of Iraq once called Mesopotamia – a wide band of fertile land that follows the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. It’s just a few thousand miles from Raqefet and is often referred to as the cradle of civilization.

Try to Be Civil

Before Beer – a bit like Before Christ but more important – the earth’s population mostly consisted of sporadic tribes of nomads or semi-sedentary people like the Natufians. There was the odd permanent settlement, but a life of foraging, herding and running away from dangerous animals kept most people moving. In ancient Mesopotamia, people hunted and gathered across the land, foraging food where they found it and rarely staying in one place for long. But then, around 5000 BC, something changes and a group we know as the Sumerians settle. We’re not talking natural caves like Raqefet, here. We’re talking about permanent buildings in organized towns with social hierarchies, religious customs and even forms of governance. We’re talking civilization.

Until a few decades ago, the earliest evidence we had for brewing came from these Sumerians, and so many academics pondered if the advent of beer and civilization were intertwined; if the discovery of beer compelled people to settle in one place. The theory went something like this: the ancients loved this new drink – how it filled their stomach and gave them inner peace that must have been hard to find in their wild, dangerous world – but to make it they needed a lot of grain, more than they could forage. So when they found fertile soil already growing cereal, they cultivated it and built a life there.

There are multiple issues with this idea. Most significantly, we now know that beer had been intentionally made for at least 7,000 years by the time the Sumerians rested their weary legs, yet the Natufians did not build a civilization anything like the Sumerians did. A more likely explanation is that humans had learned a huge amount about building shelters and preserving food, while rapidly increasing in number as they imposed themselves on the landscape with their increasingly sharp arsenal of weapons. It’s also worth noting that as the Ice Age receded, winters were getting less harsh and people had to travel less to stay warm and find food.

So while beer instigating civilization itself would be a very romantic and convenient story for this book, it’s more likely that civilization instigated the need for lots more beer. It was already as important as any solid foodstuff in terms of sustenance and culture, but in a world without currency, beer had also become a key way of paying for labour and other products. As such, historians now believe that while brewing might not have founded civilization, it was almost certainly one of the first concerns of those who did. Not only that, but it’s considered a key reason we domesticated grain – so perhaps we’ll settle for beer inventing arable farming.

Early evidence for this comes from a series of Sumerian tablets found in what’s now Iraq, but carved between 5000 and 1500 BC. Sumerian is the oldest known language, and its speakers were pretty rigorous record keepers – perhaps because they learned that alcohol tends to make you forget things. Among these amazing tablets is essentially the world’s first payslip, resembling a cartoon strip in which symbols for beer (a jug with a pointed bottom) and food (a head eating from a bowl) are totalled up by what look like thumbnail marks. Many of these tablets were forms of accountancy, and the Sumerian system – based on twelves and sixties (sexagesimal) instead of tens like our (decimal) system – even set the precedent for the sixty seconds we count in a minute. So you could argue that the trading of beer 6,000 years ago is responsible for our very sense of time.

Beer was far more than just currency and food to the Sumerians though – they had a saying that went ‘He who does not know beer, does not know what is good.’ In the Sumerian poem ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’, about a Sumerian king trying to achieve immortality, beer is listed as one of the things that make us human, alongside sex, food and oil rubs (the latter is a little unexpected, but it all sounds like a nice afternoon anyway). From this and many other sources we know that drinking beer was both a daily routine and a religious ritual. During feasts to honour the gods, statues of Sumerian deities would have been ‘fed’ beer – indeed the Sumerian word for ‘banquet’ is kas-dé-a which translates as ‘the pouring of beer’. Into another tablet is carved a poem to their goddess of brewing, fertility and harvest, Ninkasi. It takes the form of a literal recipe for Sumerian beer, describing how it starts with the making of bread, before the fermenting of the spent grains with honey and water in tall clay vats that also filtered beer.

Perhaps filtered is a strong word, because another tablet depicts Sumerians drinking the beer from giant pots with long straws. Presumably they did so to reduce the amount of grain you swallowed, allowing them to drink straight from the fermenter, which every beer geek will tell you is the best way to consume beer. It all sounds a little ‘goldfish bowl cocktails in All Bar One’ for me, but the upshot is that we can probably credit brewers with the invention of the straw, which came in all kinds of forms, from simple bamboo to solid gold. The oldest ones found (this time in Maikop, Russia, from around 3500 BC) were so long that they were originally thought to be tent poles, but after tests of the residue inside we can only presume they were ornate drinking tubes. They were long enough that they’d allow up to eight people to drink from the same pot, which was handy because at some point the populations of our early civilizations would have grown so large that feeding people became a major problem.

Initially it would have been everyone’s job to provide food through farming, hunting and gathering, but as cities sprang up, new careers were created that had nothing to do with food production: labourers, builders, messengers, warriors, teachers, priests, politicians. They all needed to be fed and paid – even the politicians – and according to John W. Arthur, an archaeologist and professor of anthropology at the University of South Florida, beer was fuelling all of this as food and currency. Without beer, you couldn’t have persuaded or supported the people building the cities, upholding its traditions, expanding its territory and making scientific advances.

In his remarkable book Beer: a Global Journey through the Past and Present, Arthur claims that brewing marks some of the first great advances in engineering, particularly biological. Brewers were learning that certain vessel shapes and sizes yielded better beer, and even that specific fermenters were better than others. They would have put this down to a deity like Ninkasi blessing select ones, but by choosing to reuse the ‘blessed’ vessels, they were in effect selecting healthy yeasts from healthy fermentations. Doing so would have improved the quality and consistency of the beer, as well as having a long-term effect on the evolution of yeasts in the area. It’s a technique humans have used for millennia in food production and farming: selecting the best examples of grains, fruits and vegetables to grow from seed the next year.

By 1800 BC, which is when the ‘Hymn to Ninkasi’ was written, there were breweries in Sumerian outposts all along what would become the Silk Road trade route that linked Asia and the far eastern parts of Europe. But barely 1,600 kilometres to the west, at the far end of that route, stood one of the most remarkable ancient buildings ever discovered: a brewery that would dwarf not only all Sumerian ones, but most modern ones too. It was a founding feature of a civilization destined to become the most advanced and fascinating in the ancient world. It was built around 3000 BC, and in 2024 I stood above its ruins.

I say above them because when I visited Egypt’s Abydos brewery, about 160 kilometres north of Luxor, it was under several metres of sand. This is how the brewery spends most of the year in a bid to protect its structures, artwork and pottery from the outside world. I’d been attempting to visit the brewery for nearly two years, and just weeks before I was intending to head out I got the dispiriting news that the site would not be dug up in 2024. After downing a few beers and smashing some of my own pottery, I decided that it didn’t really matter. After all, this is not a book about how beer is made. It’s about how beer made us, and much of what this brewery laid the groundwork for is still out in the open. Including the Pyramids.

Call to Prayer

I’m not sure how anyone sleeps in Luxor. It’s a bustling, sandy city that snakes alongside the Nile, nearly 700 kilometres south of Cairo. Tourists might take a once-in-a-lifetime river cruise to get there, but I was on a tight schedule and took a late-night flight. I arrived tired and hot, and despite downing two bottles of Sakara lager was kept wide awake by the blaring of car horns, blowing of the air-con and at 2.30 a.m. an almighty ship’s horn from the Nile. That seemed to silence the cars (or perhaps put them in perspective) and I slept until the call to prayer at 5.15 a.m., which served as the alarm for my 6 a.m. departure for Abydos.

The city was still buzzing when I came out of the hotel to meet my guide Ghada. She motioned me into a white Toyota Corolla where my driver Gerges said, slightly cryptically, ‘Welcome back’, and immediately pulled out into oncoming traffic.

That’s not a criticism, that’s life on the roads in Egypt: lanes are a guide, horns a conversation, indicators mere flirtation. The laws got looser as we left Luxor behind and reached the wide-open roads of the rural Nile valley. Most of them are still under construction, so we weaved our way down them, reversing up unpaved slip roads and braking hard for the more obvious bumps and potholes. Every few miles we’d slow down to snake through roadside settlements, some no more than farmsteads built on the rubble dug for the road and others just corridors of shanty-like shops slinging pottery, flatbreads, drinks and vapes. Mopeds, tuk-tuks and donkey carts were the preferred modes of transport – all worked harder than they were designed to be with their drivers unapologetic about taking up the whole street.

As the dusty dawn lifted, the silhouettes of the desert plateau became visible in the distance, showing how deep and sudden the Nile valley is. Up to the cliffs are palm trees, sugar cane, banana groves and housing; but above them is nothing but rock and sand stretching out to Libya in the west or the Red Sea in the east. They say that Egypt is the gift of the Nile – that it could not exist without it – and that’s abundantly clear. Nearly the entire population lives within a few kilometres of its banks, and it’s been that way since at least 3000 BC.

Back then there was probably more of a system, though. The floodplain was wider on the eastern shore, so that’s where most people settled. Because the sun also rose on that side, it became lore that it was the side of the living, while the tombs of Ancient Egypt are all found on the west bank, where the sun sets. Abydos is on the west.

It’s very possible you’ve never heard of the place. Abydos lacks the wow factor of the Pyramids of Giza and the density of temples and tombs that makes Luxor essentially an open-air museum. It’s also in the absolute dust dune of nowhere. Its biggest draw is the temple of Seti I, commissioned by Seti himself around 1280 BC and completed by his son, Ramesses II – both among the greatest kings Egypt ever saw (Ramesses lived to over ninety, reigned for sixty-six years and had at least eighty-eight children). The temple has two of the most incredible hieroglyphics ever found – one in the roof that looks a lot like a helicopter (and has been the source of much wildly inaccurate time-travel-based speculation); and the Abydos King List, a corridor upon which ancient scribes painstakingly carved out the unique emblems of all the Egyptian kings Ramesses considered legitimate (despite the role of pharaoh being God-given, it seems the priests and royal families had plenty of say too). It’s a dizzying work of art, and its epic span is too big to take in even with your back against the opposite wall. The list stretches two millennia, right back to the man who united Egypt and laid the ground for everything that came after.

His name was Narmer. Or maybe Menes. Probably both. Egyptian kings get a little hazy towards the start because they had both royal names and civilian names: Menes appears on the King List, but Narmer is credited with the military conquest of the south over the north. The fact they seem to be contemporary suggests they were one and the same. Whatever his name, this man was more than an accomplished warrior. He was a visionary who innately understood what was needed to unite and rule such a huge swathe of land: an understanding he passed on to his descendants. Ancient Egypt was the first nation state in humanity’s history, and one that – save for some pretty violent wobbles – lasted more than 3,000 years. Narmer’s approach was based on three things that the pharaohs (and indeed all dictators) have relied upon since: authority, awe and propaganda. The brewery at Abydos accomplished all three.

At Gunpoint

Ghada and I had just finished touring the Temple of Seti, and were blinking in the sunlight wondering what to do next. I’d spent two years chasing down the field director at Abydos, Dr Matthew Adams of New York University, sending so many emails I risked a restraining order. Every time he replied he was as excitable and interested in this book as anyone I’ve met, but as a world-leading archaeologist, replies were few and far between. We’d managed a Zoom call, but what I really wanted was to visit the site – to see and hear everything first-hand. At the end of our call he said it was perfectly possible, but then went radio silent again.

And so I threw caution to the wind, estimating when he’d be back in Egypt and booking some eye-wateringly expensive flights. Just days later, he emailed to say the brewery would not be dug up that season due to the proximity of the war in Gaza. Perhaps I should have given up at that point, but I had a very expensive air ticket and very cheap hotel booked. When I explained this to his colleague Dr Wendy Doyon (who also must have considered legal action after all the Instagram messages I sent her), she was adamant we should still meet if I got on the plane.

Quite where we would meet was the mystery Ghada and I were trying to solve, standing out the back of Seti’s temple. Abydos is not a small archaeological site, and with phone signals letting me down she approached a heavily armed guard to see if any American archaeologists happened to be around the corner. Incredibly, he nodded and said he’d take me. Ghada decided to go for a coffee at the site cafe and leave me to it, so I trotted off with my new machine-gun-toting friend directly and unabashedly into the desert.

As we walked, newspaper reports of my demise started writing themselves in my head: ‘YouTuber lost in desert: parents in de-Nile’. After five minutes of dusty hiking and faltering conversation we reached an impressive-looking dig. Every face looked up in surprise save one, who was clearly the manager. Unfortunately that man was not Dr Matthew Adams. He explained that Matthew was, in fact, about 2 kilometres further into the desert. I looked hopefully (but nervously) at the policeman, who mimed driving a car.

Back we trudged to the Temple of Seti, and having tipped him for the effort I headed back inside to find Ghada. On my way I noticed a carving of a man offering wheat and grapes to a god and, as anyone would, stopped to take copious photos and videos for social. While doing so I became aware I was being watched.

‘Hello,’ the man said.

My brain went into overdrive. What rule had I broken, what convention had I forgotten – was it because I was filming? In classic British fashion, I pretended I hadn’t heard.

‘You are looking for Mr Adams?’

My poker face faltered.

‘He called me. My colleague Ahmed can take you to him now.’

I cast my eyes about for Ghada. Had word got around that there was a bearded white guy you could walk into the desert for five minutes, turn around and get a tip?

‘I am the director for the archaeological site of Abydos,’ he added, holding out a hand for me to shake. I felt a little shame creep up my neck as I took his hand and introduced myself.

We met Ahmed outside, and flanked by another machine-gun-laden policeman headed to the cafe, where a surprised-looking Ghada must have wondered what on earth I’d done. Soon we were back in Gerges’s car, thudding and squeezing our way through modern Abydos to the northern part of the site.

On the edge of town, the desert dunes started suddenly and Gerges was unable to go any further. Ahmed, the policeman and I climbed out of the car and started walking towards the horizon again. While we hiked, Ahmed explained what he did at Abydos, most recently helping the American team identify the various bones left at the temples. As he did so he pointed at a white protrusion in the ground.

‘There’s one,’ he said, brushing the sand away. ‘Human.’ The policeman gave a start.

I clocked another one, clearly the ball of a hip joint, and picked it up.

‘Yes!’ he cried, taking it, and placing it at his hip and then in his pocket. The policeman was wide-eyed, on the verge of saying something.

‘Very old,’ Ahmed said reassuringly, in English so I got the joke.

We crested a dune and finally something I recognized came into view: a huge mud brick ruin with gently sloping walls. The Shunet El Zebib is a funerary temple – essentially a place people could visit to worship and mourn a dead king (the tombs themselves were only for the dead). It was built during the king’s reign and, once complete, offerings would be made during epic rituals, with all the gifts going on to the next life to await the king.

‘I’m at the temple!’ I messaged Wendy excitedly, hoping for signal.

‘Which temple?!’ came the exasperated reply, and I realized what a shockingly stupid thing this is to write in a place like Egypt.

After some back and forth Wendy told us to stay put, which we did next to a car-sized pile of grey pottery shards. I’d barely registered them when two people came over the brow of a dune.

‘In real life, at last!’ said Matthew, grasping my hand and launching straight into his favourite topic: how beer built Ancient Egypt.

Beer and Brick

Shunet El Zebib is the only ancient funerary temple left standing (and it’s had a lot of help), but it’s far from the only one at Abydos. In fact, where we were standing is arguably the most sacred and important funerary site in the ancient world. While the tombs in the nearby cliffs are nothing compared to those at the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, nowhere else are the funerary temples so close together or so old. Somewhere underneath our feet was Narmer’s, perhaps the first of its kind. His was built around 3100 BC, and similar ones were built here for centuries – Shunet El Zebib was built for King Khasekhemwy and might be the youngest, around 2700 BC.

Clearly, a funerary temple built and used for rituals long before the death of a monarch has more of a role to play than simple mourning. It was part of Narmer’s plan to amaze his subjects; to convince them that he was not only king but a demi-deity capable of feats (and worthy of worship) equivalent to that of the gods. The rituals held here would have shocked the common person with their opulence, decadence, scale and – in modern terms – wastefulness. The bones of hundreds of courtiers sacrificed to go with their rulers to the afterlife have been found around the site, alongside enormous boats that were buried here (despite the site being 10 kilometres from the Nile). If that seems incredible, it’s nothing compared to the amount of beer that would have passed through.

Just like in Mesopotamia and many other parts of the world by Narmer’s time, beer was a staple food in Egypt. Pretty much every Egyptian king’s tomb or temple references beer and bread being taken to the afterlife, and even common people were often buried with a supply of booze for the great house party in the sky. But the scale at which it was offered here, at the start of civilization and the heart of Egypt’s funerary tradition, is so epic as to be inconceivable.

‘It really is beyond belief, but the archaeology is what it is and we need to make sense of it,’ says Matthew. ‘I never expected to be a beer guy, but as part of my work to understand these early kings I knew we needed to look at this site.’

The archaeology he’s referring to is the thing buried a few hundred metres away: a brewery so vast that it leaves all but the biggest modern breweries in the shade. It takes the form of eight huge, hollow structures, each over 30 metres long. Between the walls of each are wedged the remains of forty clay vats that each contained a total of 6,000 or 7,000 litres – meaning a batch capacity across all eight structures of around 50,000 litres (about 88,000 pints). These vats would have been filled with Nile water and emmer wheat, a local variety that grew in the fertile valley. Wood was fed through holes in the outer walls, then lit before a roof was fitted and the fire was left to go out over many hours. The heat killed bacteria and caused the chemical reaction that releases the sugars, then the yeast (wild or placed by a brewer, we don’t know yet) would get to work in the warmth of the afterglow. Once fermented, the beer was put into large pots with pointed ends that could stand up in the sand, and be stoppered with mud. It was the shards of these dark pots that I stood next to while waiting for Matthew and Wendy. Thousands upon thousands of shards, found pretty much in that spot, 5,000 years after they were tossed out.

Despite what it sounds like, most Egyptian beer was made at home by the common people: industrial-scale brewing was rare this early in human history. There are a few Egyptian breweries that predate Abydos, but none are even close to its scale, and its size isn’t even the most remarkable thing about it. While several mounds of serving pottery were dug up, just one single drinking cup has been discovered so far. It was found by Matthew himself in one of the brewing vats, and must have been dropped by a brewer who was sampling the beer.

‘It was a wonderful moment,’ says Matthew. ‘I held that cup in my hand and thought about the person who dropped it 5,000 years ago, holding it the same way to see if the beer met his expectations.’

What this implies is that, unless people were necking it straight from the pots, no one was actually drinking this beer. So what was happening to it? Matthew’s theory is one of elimination: the beer must have been an offering in the temples. He believes it was poured onto the ground where it would await the king in the afterlife, as part of the epic funerary rituals.

If that sounds like a waste, it’s worth remembering how devout the Ancient Egyptians were: for them the afterlife was a certainty, which is partly why archaeologists found no obvious evidence of struggle in the remains of the sacrificed courtiers. But these rituals had a second purpose – one for this life. That purpose was shock and awe. Consider how the tiny pots of beer made by Egyptian commoners at home would have compared to this giant brewery making 88,000 pints at a time. The smoke must have been visible for miles when it was lit, and the beer must have flooded the temple when it was poured out. Then remember the supply chain – the tonnes of wheat that would have been required as well as the thousands of workers and acres of land to produce it; the water that would have been carried from the Nile or a canal dug specifically to reach the brewery; and finally the epic fires fuelled by wood, which was in very short supply in this fledgling desert nation. Tests of the residues in the beer jars show that the beer was flavoured with anise and pomegranate – expensive and heady ingredients. There’s no doubt that this brewery, and the tales of it that would have spread up and down the Nile, was created to impress upon Narmer’s disparate people how powerful their leader was.

‘They are using beer to define the nature of kingship,’ says Matthew, his voice breaking a little as he hammers the point home. ‘To demonstrate materially that the king operates at a superhuman level; to say, “This is what I am capable of. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”’

We see similar tactics in all kinds of ancient and modern dictatorships, and we’ll discuss a few in this book (particularly the Wittelsbachs of Bavaria), but the Egyptians were the early masters of it, and Narmer its originator. The importance of the brewery in terms of creating authority should not be understated. It was one of the first publicly funded buildings in Egypt, and the incredible amount of administration, labour and resource required is seen by some academics – most notably Matthew – as a direct inspiration for all the nation’s great architectural works.

‘You can draw a direct line from the brewery through to the Pyramids of Giza,’ says Matthew. ‘Exactly the same skill set made the Pyramids possible just a few generations later: logistics, labour mobilization, marshalling of resources and administrative capacity.’

Those at Giza were not the first, of course. It started with the step pyramid of the Pharaoh Djoser, which was built around 300 years after the brewery at Abydos and bears a striking resemblance to the Shunet El Zebib. Djoser’s is only 62 metres tall and layered like a wedding cake, but the straight-sided pyramid slowly came to be as techniques improved – culminating in the Great Pyramid of Giza around 2570 BC. This one, built as a tomb for Pharaoh Khufu, reached 146.6 metres and was among the tallest buildings on earth until the Eiffel Tower was finished in 1889. In The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, historian Toby Wilkinson estimates that if construction began on the day Khufu took the throne, a stone would have been laid, on average, every two minutes for it to be finished by his death. The scale – and cost – of this logistical and human endeavour is hard to comprehend. As we tried to do so, stood looking at the comparatively simple Shunet El Zebib, Matt reminded me: ‘It was the need for beer that created that skill and infrastructure.’

It paid for it too. You see, Egyptian brewing didn’t just serve as a model for big projects or historic inspiration – like in Mesopotamia it literally fuelled the labour force of these great public works. There was no currency in Ancient Egypt until the Greeks came along in the third century BC, so until then wages were paid in what those workers needed – namely clothing, bread and beer. The labourers working on the Great Pyramid were given roughly ten pints of weak beer a day to slake their extreme thirst and give them the calories to keep working. We know this because the Egyptians kept records of the costs, and because the tombs of some workers who died during construction were recently discovered, and all of them had beer for the afterlife.

‘In all Egyptian history there are two needs that are universal: bread and beer,’ explains Matthew. ‘They are named again and again and again in Egyptian texts, but also in religious terms: what the gods need, what your king needs, what your dead relatives need in the next life.’

Without brewing as an engineering project and architectural challenge, and without beer as currency and part of the daily diet, it’s possible the Pyramids may have never been built. Barely a century after the Great Pyramid was completed, it was decided that tombs were safer and easier if built underground, and incredible burial systems such as the Valley of the Kings were created. At these later sites the Abydos brewery’s impact feels less significant, but it can still be seen in both the hieroglyphics on the sarcophagi and the monumental effort and administration involved. Abydos may be one of the oldest archaeological sites of Ancient Egypt, but it is at the cutting edge of academic research on the topic thanks to the brewery and its associated temples. It is the place where what we know as Ancient Egyptian culture began. If you want to understand how the most advanced and famous ancient civilization came together, you now have to consider that beer was at the heart of it – both practically and philosophically.

‘It had this workaday aspect but it also had this deep, deep cultural value that it doesn’t have in the modern world, where people don’t give it that respect,’ says Matthew.

After we parted in the dusty desert and I headed back to find a presumably half-baked Gerges, I reflected on how beer’s place in the world today compares with that of Ancient Egypt. Many indigenous people in Eastern Africa and South America still rely on beer as a foodstuff, but in the developed world it’s purely for pleasure. I don’t think that diminishes its importance, and hopefully you’ll agree by the end of this book, but Matthew’s on the money in at least one respect: the religious element of beer is all but gone.

There is, however, one small religious sect that still understands the fundamental importance of beer, and indeed relies on it as much as the Ancient Egyptians. Oh, and while most of their breweries would be dwarfed by the one in Abydos, they happen to make some of the best beer in the world.

Blessed Beer

Throughout history, science has slowly eroded the idea of religious intervention or significance in what humans experience. The Ancient Egyptians believed the sun was a god called Ra, who was responsible for all life. We now know it’s an 864,000-mile-wide hydrogen and helium fireball, formed as a solar nebula collapsed on itself around 4.6 billion years ago. It’s still responsible for all life on earth, but its spiritual element is somewhat diminished by the hard facts we’ve discovered.

The same has proven true for the things humans make, and beer is no different. Over several thousand years we came to realize that we had a lot more control over brewing than we’d given ourselves credit for.

If we head north from Egypt, or west from Israel, and into Europe, we see beer and brewing blossom and develop faster than ever – whichever god was presiding over it. When we picture Ancient Greece we are more likely to think of wine, but we know they were germinating then kiln-drying wheat and barley to brew beer as early as 2100 BC thanks to discoveries at Argissa, about an hour south of Mount Olympus. Images from pottery and the presence of several stone tools implies that the process had come a long way even from Narmer’s time.

The Romans weren’t famous for brewing either, but Pliny the Elder (AD 23–AD 79) describes it happening in Britain, France and Spain, while Tacitus calls beer ‘horrible’ somewhere between AD 56 and AD 120. When they retreated from northern Europe a few hundred years later, brewing proliferated in homes across Britain, Belgium and Germany. In Anglo-Saxon England, ale wives – that is women making beer in the kitchen alongside cooking food – made most of the beer. Those that were most adept at it would even tie a branch to a pole outside their home to let friends and potential buyers know good beer was available. This is the origin of the British public house, and would have had everything to do with the skill and equipment of the brewer and little to do with rituals, blessings and faith.

But while the gods’ responsibility for making it faded, the practical link between beer and religion took longer to break – particularly in Christian regions. This was because