The Hip and Hop of Civilisation

Before beer, we were nomads. There was hardly a reason to sit tight, and every reason to pack up and move on. But beer needs crops, and crops need time to grow and someone to stay put and harvest.

It’s very likely that humankind settled for beer.

So it’s only fair to sing its praises.

Beer is one of the world’s great civilisers. Maybe the first, too, long before The Wheel. The first alcoholic drink resembling a beer was brewed some 12,000 years ago, in the Middle East, somewhere between the Tigris and the Euphrates. The Sumerians, the first true civilisers of our world, and clever at business too, needed a beer accounting system, so they invented maths. They also came up with the first alphabet and wrote (in the Hammurabi Code) about beer. The hero of Gilgamesh, “wild man” Enkidu, became human by drinking beer: all it took was seven jugs.

The first breweries were temples. No beer, no religion. The Sumerians had a beer goddess, Ninkasi, “the lady who fills the…