Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

The only problem with this is wine sucks. BEER RULES!!!

Yes I agree.  I think beer is a relatively late development.  I think beer came about as a substitute for mead.  I think mead developed from the accidental fermentation of a hop, or other herb flavored tea sweetened with honey.  As the mead drinkers--like Beowulf--became more settled and agricultural, they learned to make a substitute--and more plentiful--honey by boiling down malted barley.  From whence--beer.  There were some grain-based drinks used in Egypt and Sumer, they were actually made from fermented bread.  They wouldn’t count as beer today.  In Africa today, tribal people make a beer-like drink by chewing up sorghum and spiting it in a fermentation pot.  I wouldn’t call it beer.

Well the wine-beer drinking areas seem to vary by more than just soil and climate.  You can have both rice wine and rice beer for instance.  In the Sourhtern Part of Africa, Sorghum Beer is the drink.  While grapes are available around the Med and suprisingly far North into Europe grain seemed to be the easiest aquired fermentation base.  Wine for Mi’lord and a short beer for Jaque. The discovery of the Irish brewing pits explains while they were civilized they were civilized in a very strange way. 
I don’t know what the problem with Germany was, the beer has been good but apparently they didn’t produce enough of the Rhine whines and etc.

Wherever else wine prevailed, ancient Egypt was all about beer, and that’s pretty ancient. Ancient Egyptian beer was rich in tetracycline, and though the chemistry of that was of course was not known to ancient Egyptian doctors, the benefits of their beer (which was the same thick mix consumed by the Nubians) were. (link)

Beer featured prominently and positively in Egyptian writing and religion, including in the worship of Min (the ithyphallic fertility god whose festivals were so much fun) and Sekhmet / Hathor. Hathor was a benevolent goddess of love, beauty and strangers / foreigners. Her other side was Sekhmet, the raging lioness-headed plague goddess. The theological significance of drunkenness was that she was tamed and turned into Hathor, and thus mankind was saved from her wrath, by plying her with beer.

Yeah right, tell it to the Sumerians… ‘Cuz ancient Mesopotamia was such a great place to grow grapes as opposed to, say, grains…

I think the debate over the which came first time line is irrelevant here. First, I would suggest that alcoholic beverages in general were helpful in civilization’s development, but not from a health standpoint. Booze helped create civilization because if you want booze on hand year-round (and who doesn’t?), you need the trappings of early civilization to accomplish that feat.
Yes, Wine likely predates Beer in our diet, but I think the difference is that Wine has never been a morning, noon, and night beverage, year round. Watered wine perhaps, to a very small extent, but watered wine probably does not provide the prophylactic health benefits that beer, ale, and especially (for the purposes of this argument) small beer do.
So, we may have developed civilization to help us make wine, but Beer is what allowed us to survive the epidemiological consequences of living in that nascent civilization.

ken in sc
In Africa today, tribal people make a beer-like drink by chewing up sorghum and spiting it in a fermentation pot.  I wouldn’t call it beer.
That pretty much describes Chicha, the corn-based cider in the Andes.

Beer is a very early concoction and I believe roughly 10,000 yo samples have been found in Iraq archeological exploration. 

I would point out, anything with sugar will ferment.  The Mongolians drink fermented mares milk.

I am sure in times of food crises many fermented items were tried.

As a homebrewer of beer and (occasional) maker of mead, I can attest that beer’s harder to make, which would certainly suggest that it came later than wine. To make beer, you have to mash grain (crush the grains, steep them like herb tea [but not boil them] to change their starches to sugars, trickle more hot water over them to draw out those sugars), boil the resulting liquid down for a good while, add hops (if making modern beer) at intervals, cool the whole shebang, add yeast (if making modern beer - wild yeast will make beer, but you can’t guarantee it’s going to taste good, unlike with “domesticated” yeast), and ferment until most sugars are consumed, then add back a little sugar (if making modern beer) for carbonation purposes, then age it. Mead you make by pasteurizing honey (heating to not-quite-boiling), adding yeast (unless you want to rely on wild yeast, with same uncertain results as with beer), fermenting for a LOOOONG time, and bottling.

Luckily for me there’s the significant shortcut to beermaking of using pre-made malt extract plus as much crushed grain as I want to handle.

But the POINT is, maybe wine did come first because it could happen by chance more easily, but beer certainly must have had a large role in bringing about the domestication of grains and, hence, of men to work the fields. And the OTHER point is, beer and wine are both delicious, so bully for early humans!

Many beer historians believe that beer was ‘discovered’ almost as soon as bread was being made.  All it would take for fermentation would be for some dry bread to become wet, and ferment naturally from wild yeasts.  It’s true that in most modern beer production that yeasts are introduced, but that was not the case long ago.  Belgian lambics are still produced by placing the wort (unfermented beer) in shallow troughs out in the open, allowing the wild yeasts to do their work.  While wine may predate beer (simply because grapes predate bread), there is more historical evidence that beer fueled the growth of civilization.  There is even cuneform evidence that the ancient Mesopotamian workers who built their grand civilization were paid with beer.  I’m sticking with Will on this argument (although I have nothing against a good Merlot!)

Yes me too, the only problem is beer is better than wine. Oh thats was a good explanation about the beer that you have given above, Ken in sc. But as far as i know, people in my area prefer drinking beer with the rice and not that much wine.