Gavin Smith

Beer is the most popular alcoholic drink in the world, with a history stretching back perhaps as far as 10,000 BC, and with almost every country boasting some sort of brewing heritage.

While other forms of alcohol tended traditionally to be limited in their spread and influence by climatic and geographical factors – you can only make wine if you are able to grow grapes – beer is ubiquitous and its essential ingredients, in one form or another, can be found almost everywhere.

The popularity of beer throughout the ages has been due to a number of factors. First is the aforementioned fact that it could be made, and second its comparative affordability, making it a drink for the everyman.

Remarkable though it may seem from a modern perspective, from 1687 to 1860 patients at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London were each allocated three pints of beer per day, made in the hospital’s own brewery.

Beer also had significant nutritional value – not for nothing has it been been referred to as ‘liquid bread’ – but perhaps its ultimate attraction has always been its intoxicating nature, imparting a feeling of relaxation and well-being, provided consumption is kept within sensible limits.

Like so many ancient crafts, the origins of brewing are somewhat lost in the mists of time.

A persuasive case can be made for the first brewers being Neolithic people in what we know today as Kurdistan – within the modern countries of Turkey, Iraq and Iran.

These people were cultivating crops from around 10,000 BC and are thought to have developed the ability to make beer after accidentally discovering the malting process.

Perhaps they dried grain which had become damp and started to sprout in order to preserve it, only to find that it released the enzymes essential to convert the grain’s starch into fermentable sugars.

Inevitably, qualifications such as ‘maybe’ and ‘perhaps’ occur frequently in any discussion about what happened so very long ago.