Beer deserves to be treated as a civilised drink; it may even have been the cause of civilisation. Although wild grapes and grain were probably both turned into drinks before either was cultivated, the latter seems to have been the beginning of farming, between 13,000 and 8,000 years ago. Humans ceased to be nomadic hunters and gatherers, and settled in organised communities to grow grain, but why?

In the Museum Magazine of Archeology and Anthropology produced by the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Solomon Katz in 1986 described as 'the world's oldest recipe' a series of tablets in the Sumerian language. These early accounts, with pictograms of what is recognisably barley, show bread being baked, then crumbled into water to make a mash, which is then made into a drink that is recorded as having made people feel 'exhilarated, wonderful and blissful'.

The baking made the barley soluble, and was employed before man knew how to turn the grain into malt. Was the bread never eaten, but always made into beer? Did a diet of bread come first or did man live by beer alone?

Katz points out that it is difficult to make appetizing bread out of bread. Perhaps the bread was never intended as anything other than an intermediate step in the production of beer, a nutritious and pleasant drink. By baking the grains into hard loaves, the ancients had created a partly processed resource that could be conveniently stored for later use, and easily transported, whereas fruits were edible only when they had been freshly picked, during their short season. The fruits could be turned into wine, but that lacks the protein value of beer.

Remnants of breweries, or relics showing or describing in detail the making of beer, sometimes listing a selection of different types, have been found in several parts of the fertile crescent that stretches around the converging valleys of the Rivers Euphrates and Tigris, between which lay ancient Mesopotamis, the region of Sumer and city-states such as Ur and Babylon. Similar relics have been found in other areas of ancient civilisation, from the Nile Valley to Mount Ararat; and from modern Egypt to Iraq and Iran.

A seal around 4,000 years old is a hymn to a goddess of brewing, called Ninkasi (translated by Miguel Civil, of the Oriental Institute of Chicago), and suggests that the Sumerians by then knew how to make malt. Much of the evidence concerns beer as a drink of the gods and priests. A collection of these items is on show at the University of Pennsylvania Museum.

Work there by Patrick McGovern and others identified as traces of beer residue found on a clay jar more than 5,000 years old. The vessel had been unearthed at a site in Iran by archeologists from the Royal Ontario Museum of Toronto. The site was a Sumerian outpost on the ancient trade route that became the Silk Road between East and West. This research was described in the British magazine Nature in 1992. Similar evidence 4,000 years old has been found on the western Scottish island of Rhum.

The hymn to Ninkasi has been used by the Anchor brewery of San Francisco for an essay into Sumerian beer-making techniques. Anchor's Ninkasi Beer, made from specially baked bread, and flavoured with dates and honey, was fermented with a modern brewing yeast. It emerged with a russet colour and a sherryish, nutty flavour, with late notes of honey. No hops were used. The ancient beer of Rhum has also been recreated experimentally, by the Glenfiddich distillery laboratory in Scotland.

The baking of bread as an intermediate material from which to brew has continued in Russia, with the production on kvass.

As the cultivation of barley spread north and west, brewing went with it. Romans such as Tacitus and Caesar, more accustomed to wine, noted that the peoples of the North drank beer. Several of today's brewing stongholds are in areas of early Celtic settlement, from central Europe to Ireland.

After the Dark Ages, Christian abbeys, as centres of agriculture, knowledge and science, refined brewing methods, initially in the making of beer for the brothers and for visiting pilgrims, later as a means of financing their communities. The modern abbeys that make beer today are all Roman Catholic. Christian, usually Protestant, disapproval of drinking is a relatively recent phenomenon.

In most of the traditional brewing countries, beer is seen as a part of the national identity. Royal courts assumed brewing rights in medieval times as a means of raising revenue, and some noble families are still in the business. Farmers and private brewers served their own taverns, then formed trade guilds. Finally, industrial capitalism gave the brewing business the shape it has today.

During this long history, wine and beer had no competition in Europe until the spread of tea from Asia and coffee from the Arab world between the 15th and 17th centuries.

The first extensive written work on brewing was produced in 1585 by the Bohemian Thaddeus Hajek, physician to the German Emperor Rudolf II. Most of the subsequent advances were in Bohemia, Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Britain and Ireland.

The last major style of beer to be introduced was Pilsner, in Bohemia (then a part of the Austrian Empire), in 1842. The greatest milestone since has been the isolation of a pure-culture yeast, in Copenhagen in 1883. As an agricultural industry, and a form of cooking, brewing remains a craft and an art, as well as a science, despite technological developments.

Excerpt taken from 'Michael Jackson's Beer Companion'