BEER SINCE FOREVER

When our distant ancestors became farmers, they created today’s cereals (millet, barley, oats, wheat, etc.) by accidentally mixing the seeds of various grasses. This enabled them to settle permanently in a particular area. They built stone houses, made ovens from compacted clay, and produced earthenware vessels. They stored cereal grains in those vessels and used them to bake flatbreads in ovens. Those flatbreads were unleavened, hard, and probably not very tasty. They also began producing beer, which they used to wash down these flatbreads to make them easier to swallow. Even today, we still call beer “liquid bread”.

FIG. 1: A clay tablet found in Mesopotamia contains an approximately 4,000-year-old receipt for a beer delivery from the Sumerian brewer Alulu.

Wherever man began to bake bread, he also began to brew beer. From ancient times to the present day, the tradition of beer as a drink of the gods and the chosen few has been preserved.

The oldest document concerning beer is a clay tablet known as the “Alulu Beer Receipt”, which is actually a beer receipt over 4,000 years old. It records the purchase of the “best” beer from a brewer in 2050 BC from the Sumerian city of Umma in ancient Iraq. It is a dated and signed invoice written by the scribe Ur-Amma for a beer delivery by the brewer Alulu.

FIG. 2: Sumerians drank beer through straws.