The Search for God and Guinness

by Stephen Mansfield

  To prevent a similar experience, when the Puritans sailed to New England a decade later in 1630, they made sure that beer was in plentiful supply. Just one of their five ships, the Arbella, carried 42 tuns of beer. Since a tun was 252 gallons, this meant that at least 10,000 gallons of beer refreshed the Puritans on their journey to the New World. And, again, a brewhouse proved a priority when they began building their new city called Boston.

  Now, my point in all of this is not that beer captures everything that is important in the Pilgrim adventure or in the later Puritan settlement in the New World. Of course not. But it was there, nonetheless—beloved and needed by the people of that day, and it was such a priority that it shaped many of the decisions that these forefathers made. In other words, it was often a motive force, a reason that people did what they did, and not just because it gave pleasure but also because it was a source of the health and the nourishment and the purity that our ancestors needed at the time.

  This is very much as it was all throughout human history. Beer helped to shape entire civilizations and often conditioned the critical decisions they made. In fact, if one professor is correct, beer may have been the reason man became civilized in the first place. So let’s take a moment to correct the grand omission of beer from the story of the past, and consider for a while the role beer has had to play. This bit of beer heritage will prepare us well for exploring the later glories of Guinness.

  Though you might not suspect it if you walk through the gleaming stainless steel canyons of a modern brewery, the brewing of beer can be a relatively simple affair. A grain, usually barley, is wetted to allow it to germinate or, more simply, to sprout. When it does, it is quickly dried. It has thus been malted. This malted barley is then roasted. How long it is roasted will determine the color of the beer it produces, a process that is obviously important in brewing a dark beer like Guinness. This malt is mashed, which means that it is soaked long enough in water to allow the process that converts the natural starches of the malt into the sugars that are necessary for fermentation. More water is then added to this mash, essentially to wash the sugars off of the grains and into a thick, sweet liquid called wort. This wort is boiled, and afterward the dried flowers from the hops vines are usually added for flavor, though throughout history the flavor of beer has been enhanced by nearly every kind of fruit, spice, or honey known to man.

  Roasted barley in the Guinness storehouse

  After this hopped wort is cooled, yeast is added. A brewer once told me that he thinks of yeast as a bunch of frat boys invading the party of brewing. They rush into the mix and spend their time eating, passing gas, and reproducing. What come of this is the alcohol and carbon dioxide make that sweet, hop-tasting water called wort into beer.

  This is the way beer is made and knowing this helps us to imagine how beer came about in those first uncertain ages of human history. The truth is it was probably a wonderful accident, but to understand how this might be so, we have to know a little bit about the beginnings of mankind.

  Our first ancestors, the men and women who existed at the very dawn of time, probably lived in the Fertile Crescent region of the world, an arch of land that stretches from modern Egypt up the Mediterranean coast and after touching the southeast corner of Turkey drops down again through the border between Iraq and Iran. The region is aptly named, for particularly in early history its soil was luxuriant and rich, its vast, fruitful regions teeming with game. It was an ideal environment for nearly every kind of life—and particularly for dense strands of wild wheat and barley.

  If the theories of historians are right—and God knows, they often aren’t—the region was at first home to roving bands of hunter-gatherers who would have hunted the abundant wild game and gathered the edible cereal grains that grew so profusely. Over time, these nomadic men would have learned how to bake these widely available grains into bread and this, we are told, led almost directly to the discovery of beer.

  Again, this discovery probably happened in a series of accidents. Early men would have learned not only how to harvest barley but also how to create earthen jars to store it. It is not hard to imagine that at some point someone might have left this stored barley exposed to rain. Of course, soaking barley starts the malting process. We can picture our disgusted early ancestor—let’s call her Nonna—waking up to the soaked mess that once was the proud product of her hours of backbreaking work. She would have decided to do something to rescue this valuable grain. Being boldly experimental and desperately frugal, Nonna tried to dry the grain by spreading it out under the sun. Malted barley would have been the result. Then, when Nonna baked this barley into bread, her family might have commented that the bread was much sweeter than anything she had served before.

  Now, if Nonna’s crudely malted barley, wetted by the rain and dried under the sun, was exposed to the rain again, the result would have been very much like wort: the natural starches of malt being converted to sugar and dissolved in water. Then, when Nonna left her jars of this sweet grainy mixture open, natural airborne yeast would have begun its work, and in time Nonna’s jars would have been filled with a foamy, bubbly substance. She would have tasted it, shared it with her friends, and eventually all would have agreed that this tasty, lightly intoxicating liquid had to be made again. Curiosity, experimentation, and pleasure would have played a role through the centuries and this would have eventually given us some time-honored methods for brewing a primitive beer.

  There is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania named Solomon Katz who believes that not only did beer evolve in exactly this way, but that the discovery of beer may have been why early man stopped his hunter-gatherer ways and began to build cities. “My argument,” Dr. Katz has said, “is that the initial discovery of a stable way to produce alcohol provided enormous motivation for continuing to go out and collect these seeds and try to get them to do better.” He means that rather than early men relying on wild stands of barley to make brew, they would have begun growing the barley themselves in hopes of producing a better yield. And this attachment to their fields of barley would have caused them to settle in one place, to begin living in larger communities, and to eventually evolving the cities from which civilization gets its name. The word civilization literally means “living in cities.” Thus, Dr. Katz believes that beer may have been a primary reason man moved from the wild into cities and began building the great civilizations of the ancient world.

  He is not the first. The ancient Sumerians would have agreed with Dr. Katz. In Sumer, the region at the head of the Persian Gulf where human history began (largely because writing emerged there around 3400 BC), this connection between beer and civilization was not a theory but a celebrated certainty. In fact, this role of beer in the making of civilization was put into poetic form in the world’s first great literary work, known today as The Epic of Gilgamesh. Now, like me, you probably remember something about this from school, but we certainly don’t recall that it had anything to do with beer. Apparently, though, it did. It seems that Gilgamesh was a Sumerian king who ruled around 2700 BC and whose life inspired myriad myths, beloved not only by the Sumerians but also by the Akkadians and the Babylonians. The Epic is the tale of Gilgamesh’s adventures with his friend Enkidu, a wild man who, not unlike mankind itself, begins life running naked in the wilderness. In time, he is taught the ways of civilization by a young woman who takes him to a shepherds’ village so he can learn the first stages of civilized life.

  They placed food in front of him,

  they placed beer in front of him;

  Enkidu knew nothing about eating bread for food,

  and of drinking beer he had not been taught,

  The young woman spoke to Enkidu saying:

  “Eat the food, Enkidu, it is the way one lives.

  Drink the beer, as is the custom of the land.”

  Enkidu ate the food until he was sated,

  He drank the beer—seven jugs!—and became expansive

  and sang with
joy.

  He was elated and his face glowed.

  He splashed his shaggy body with water,

  and rubbed himself with oil, and turned into a human.

  Obviously, the Sumerians not only believed that beer helped make civilization but that it was also part of what made a civilized man. They probably believed this because Dr. Katz is right: beer is part of what moved men to stop their hunter-gatherer ways and to build cities, thus, again, leading to the great city-states of early human history.

  Hops Vines

  This may seem extreme, but it makes more sense when we reclaim another truth they forgot to tell us in history class: beer was regarded as sacred in the ancient world. Frankly, I don’t find this hard to imagine. The making of beer must have seemed to the ancients, much as it sometimes does today, like a miracle. To a pagan mind-set, it must have seemed a gift of the many gods. In a Jewish and later Christian worldview, it was a blessing of the one God’s creation. To all, the brewing of beer must certainly have seemed like a sacred cooperation with the mysteries of the universe. A brewer once told me that he did not think of himself as brewing beer, but rather as creating the conditions in which brewing takes place. He wets the barley and then stands back. It germinates. He dries it, roasts it, and adds water. Again he stands back as starch converts to sugar. He washes this sugar-coated grain, boils what results, adds hops and then waits while yeast makes his hoppy sugar water into beer. He told me he felt closer to God brewing beer than he did in church, because when he is brewing he feels like he is participating in the secret ways of the Creator.

  This is what the ancient Sumerians felt too—a religious awe of beer. They were so captured by the holiness of brewing that they decided the sacred craft should be practiced only in temples. This decision in turn shaped many of their myths and their understanding of the gods, most of which had some connection to beer. For example, the oldest recipe for beer known to man is found in the poem “The Hymn to Ninkasi,” an ode to the Sumerian goddess who lived on mythical Mount Sabu—“the mountain of the tavern keeper.”

  The Babylonians, always willing to copy from other cultures, absorbed this Sumerian theology of beer. Their word for beer, kassi, was taken directly from the name of the Sumerian goddess Ninkasi, though they took this convergence of beer and religion beyond anything the Sumerians ever imagined. For the Babylonians, beer was the chief offering to the gods. Each god expected its own special brew, and an army of priests made sure that every ounce of sacrificial beer was brewed in the proper way. The Babylonians were so concerned with correct brewing for fear of their gods that they gave human history its first laws governing the production of beer—some of which sentenced clumsy brewers to death.

  At about the same time that Sumerian and Babylonian cultures were elevating beer to religious heights, the Nubians just south of Egypt were engaged in a flourishing beer culture as well. This is important not only because it proves that beer was probably discovered in a number of places simultaneously, but because it also confirms that Africans had an early and native skill for brewing beer—a skill that is certainly in evidence in the region to this day.

  The Nubians were exceptionally skilled at brewing beer and it is likely that their word for beer, bousa, is where we get our modern word booze. They not only brewed a standard beer (called hktsty), but also a spiced beer called hes or hek that was among the first of its kind.

  Of all the ancient peoples, though, it was the Egyptians who most put beer at the heart of their religious worldview. We can see this clearly in the myth they used to explain the origins of beer. Apparently Osiris, the god of agriculture and lord of the afterlife, made a mixture of water and sprouted grain but then forgot about it and left it in the sun. He returned to find that his gruel had fermented. He drank it and was so pleased that he made it one of his blessings to mankind. Now, we read this story and realize that it parallels the human discovery of beer almost exactly. But this is very much what ancient myths were—human experience writ large—and they give us insight into how the ancient world thought about life and beer.

  No culture wove beer into religion like the Egyptians. Beer was consumed as part of temple rituals and offered to the gods as sacrifice. There were gods for every stage of the brewing process and sometimes it is difficult to keep these gods apart. Though Osiris is said to have discovered beer, the Egyptians believed that Isis, the deity of nature, first gave beer to mankind. And, Hathor, the goddess of joy, is supposed to have invented all the processes of brewing. Then there is Menqet, whose inscription at the temple of Dendra proclaims her as “the goddess who makes beer.”

  There simply is no end to it all. Beer was so revered as a holy substance that a god was necessary for every human act connected to it, from the growing of grain to the final ceremonial act of consumption.

  In fact, one Egyptian myth actually credits beer with saving all mankind—and this gives us some insight into how important beer was in the Egyptian world. It seems Ra, the sun god, came to believe mankind was plotting against him. He dispatched the goddess Hathor to punish his human enemies, but later Ra remembered how fierce Hathor’s wrath could be and took pity on mankind. He decided to brew a huge amount of beer—some seven thousand jars of it—and then he dyed it red and spread it over vast fields, where it reflected like a mirror. Hathor passed by on her bloody mission, stopped to admire her reflection, and then stooped down to drink some of the beer. The goddess became so intoxicated that she forgot about her assignment and mankind was spared.

  Their mythology aside, the Egyptians also made one of the most important early contributions to beer history: they are the first culture to have explored the health benefits of brewed drink. In what amounts to the Physicians’ Desk Reference of ancient Egypt, there are over seven hundred different prescriptions that mention beer as a medicine in the Ebers Papyrus. So essential was the drink to health and well-being in the Egyptian view that barley brew is mentioned as early as 3000 BC in the Book of the Dead as a necessity for the journey into the afterlife. This explains why archaeologists almost always discover beer vats in the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs.

  It is an interesting side note that most of the beer drinking I have described so far was done not from a glass but rather from a big vat and through a reed, a primitive version of the straw. Cups and glasses were developed later in history than you might think, and so when men drank beer in early centuries they usually pushed a reed down into a communal vat of beer. This was necessary in part because brewing was not as refined as it later became and beer always had a thick layer of grain mash floating on the top. To drink the good brew from below this unsightly and smelly mess, the ancients used reeds. This is confirmed by the fact that one of the first depictions of beer drinking we have is from a seal found at Tepe Gawra in Mesopotamia that dates from around 4000 BC. It shows two figures drinking with very long reeds from a vat that rises approximately to their shoulders. The vat is so tall that the two figures have to stand to drink. This seems to have been the Egyptian custom for quite some time. As late as 434 BC, Xenophon, the Greek historian, wrote of this way of drinking beer in his Anabasis: “For drink, there was beer which was very strong when not mingled with water, but was agreeable to those who were used to it. They drank this with a reed, out of the vessel that held the beer, upon which they saw the barley swim.”

  This Egyptian fascination with beer is important to us now because it came to shape the whole course of western brewing history. The Roman historian Pliny the Younger, who lived from AD 61 to 112, wrote extensively of how the Egyptians taught brewing to the Greeks, and how they in turn gave this knowledge to the Roman world. Greeks are usually associated in history with wine, but they had an interest in beer as an expression of culture, as a source of health, and, of course, for the pure enjoyment. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote a detailed treatise on beer in 460 BC and Sophocles, the father of theater, lectured widely on the value of daily beer as part of a healthy life. This love of beer and the skills of
brewing that the Greeks captured from the Egyptians took root in the eager soil of the Roman Empire and was thus passed on as a gift to the ongoing course of western civilization. Pliny estimated that by the first century there were more than two hundred types of beer being brewed in Europe. Part of this passion for brew came from the Roman belief that beer gave strength and energy. Soldiers drank it before battle and athletes consumed it by the gallon. This may explain why the Latin word for beer is cerevisium, which means “strength.”

  Since our story is going to eventually take us to the Ireland of Arthur Guinness, it is important for us to know that the brewing of beer existed in the British Isles long before Roman times. It may have been discovered there much as it was in the other regions we’ve surveyed, in the same instantaneous and independent manner. In the first century, Pedanius Dioscorides, a Greek pharmacologist, traveled extensively throughout the Roman Empire searching for new substances with medicinal qualities. As he traveled among the Britons and the Hiberni—the Roman name for the Irish—he recorded that they produced an ale made from barley. It was called variously cuirim, courm, or courmi, and it is even mentioned in the first-century Irish saga The Cattle Raid of Cooley, the central tale in the Irish mythology known as the Ulster Cycle. One of the great Irish legends, it describes the Irish king Conchobar mac Nessa drinking this cuirim “until he falls asleep therefrom.”

  I find it interesting, given the controversies over alcohol that would eventually erupt in the history of the Christian church, that the arrival of Christianity in the world and its eventual sway over the empire did not diminish the Roman love of beer. For the early Christians, drunkenness was the sin—as their apostles had repeatedly taught—and not the consumption of alcohol. After all, their Lord had miraculously created wine at a wedding feast, the fledgling church drank wine at its sacred meals, and Christian leaders even instructed their disciples to take wine as a cure for ailments. Clearly, beer and wine used in moderation were welcomed by the early Christians and were taken as a matter of course. It was excess and drunkenness and the immorality that came from both that the Christians opposed. Many historians have noted that this positive Christian perspective on alcohol probably even encouraged brewing, because it both sanctioned a temperate love of beer and welcomed beer as an alternative to more high-alcohol drinks. This theory is supported by the fact that beer is so intertwined with the history of the Christian faith that it is tempting to believe that Christians discovered it. Perhaps in its holy and moderate use, they did.