"I feel wonderful, drinking beer in a blissful mood, with joy in my heart and a happy liver". These words were not written by someone in the corner of a pub one Friday night but by a Sumerian poet around the year 3,000 BC. For beer is as old as history. Glasses of modern ale, lager or stout have their roots deep in ancient civilisations stretching back to the dawn of time.

The words of that Sumerian poet are revealing. He knew that beer not only made him feel cheerful but was also good for his health. For most of recorded time, water was insanitary and unsafe. People could refresh themselves, however, by drinking alcohol, which contains antiseptic qualities, and in which water has been boiled. Fruit quickly perished in the ancient world, while grain could be stored for long periods. So beer, more than wine, became the drink of the people. Since it was made from a vitamin-rich porridge, beer made them content, flushed out their livers and kidneys, and kept both heart and skin diseases at bay. Along with bread, beer was a vital part of a staple diet.

Ancient Origins
Beer, according to some anthropologists, helped create civilised society. When people of the ancient world realised they could make bread and beer from grain, they stopped roaming and settled down to cultivate cereals in recognisable communities.

The American anthropologist Alan Eames says: "Ten thousand years ago... barley was domesticated and worshipped as a god in the highlands of the southern Levant. Thus was beer the driving force that led nomadic mankind into village life." At that time, the world was a warmer place than today by two to three degrees Celsius. North Africa and the Middle East enjoyed a much heavier rainfall than they do today and the warm, moist climate encouraged the growth of cereals. It has been suggested by some experts that beer came from bread, that ancient people learned to make a pleasant, relaxing drink soaked from grain. It is more likely, however, that the reverse was the case: wet dough was left to rise in the open, starches turned to sugar by natural enzymic activity, and then wild yeasts in the air turned the sugars into alcohol.

Brewing became a major industry in the ancient world. Clay tablets with cuneiform writing discovered in Ninevah in the 1840s showed that beer was paid as a form of currency to stonemasons working on the great buildings of the pharoahs. The role of the brewer was sufficiently important for him or her - many women were brewers - to have their own hieroglyph: "fty". A drawing made with a stylus on wet clay shows a person bent over a vessel straining a cereal mash through a sieve. Spices and plants were added to primitive beer as flavourings and to prolong the life of the drink. In Egypt, beer was drunk by the upper classes through reeds to prevent the husks of the grain being swallowed.

The Early Beers
The two main cereals used by ancient people in brewing were barley and a type of wheat called "emmer". The first beers were made from raw grain and would have been thin in alcohol, using the small amount of natural sugar present in the ears of wheat and barley. A giant step forward came in the second and third millenia, when brewers in Mesopotamia learned to turn barley into malt. Malting may have been accidental at first. Raw grain was left to soak and then dried in the sun. Magically, the grain had yielded up its starches and sugar caused a violent fermentation, resulting in a drink that was rich in alcohol. Malting rapidly became sophisticated and the Mesopotamians were able to produce dark, as well as light, beer by scorching the malt over the fire.

The first brewers had no understanding of yeast. They knew only that when they made beer, the deposits from previous brews left in their clay vessels spontaneously turned the liquid into alcohol. Lactid acid bacteria in the vessels would also have attacked the sugary solution, giving a sour but quenching character to the beer, while wild airborne yeasts would also have had a role to play. No hops were used, as the plant was not known at the time. A major study of brewing in Babylon and Egypt, published in Germany in 1926, described the Babylonians as using unmalted emmer wheat and malted barley. It seems that from very early in the history of brewing, brewers discovered that barley malt produced the best extract of sugars, while wheat gave a fine tart and fruity character to beer. The brewers first made "beer bread", which was baked either light or dark brown, depending on the colour of beer required. A mash was then made by pouring heated water over the bread. It was filtered and left to ferment spontaneously. When fermentation finished, the rough beer was transferred to smaller vessels which were stored in cool cellars where a secondary fermentation occurred.

Beer-making in Egypt
The Egyptians, on the other hand, used all malted grain and produced only dark-coloured beer. Plants, such as mandrake, and salt were added. The plants were used to balance the sweetness of the malt, while salt is a flavour-enhancer (it was still used in brewing until the nineteenth century AD). Brewing in the ancient world was not, like modern home-brewing, a sideline, but a major industry. The Pharoah Rameses gave 10,000 hectolitres a year of free beer to his temple administrators - and that amount was just the tip of the pyramid!