A pint of your best, please

• Published date: 23 September 2023
• Author: Bonnie Berkowitz, Tim Meko, Manuel Canales and Leslie Shapiro
• Publication title: Independent on Saturday

But ancient cave dwellers weren’t sitting around the fire quaffing crisp lagers. Archaeological evidence shows that beer took thousands of years to evolve into what we drink today

Here’s a sampler of brews that represent important milestones and innovations.

Paleolithic mystery beer

Possible ingredients: Millet, fruit, spices, herbs and grasses – and who knows what else.

Possible flavour profile: Sour, tart, sweet, fruity, spicy, herbal.

The first beer probably came from Africa, because that’s where the first people were, said Patrick McGovern, a biomolecular archaeologist at the Penn Museum and a long-time authority on ancient fermented beverages.

Beer is basically fermented grain. First, moisture makes the grain sprout, priming its enzymes to transform starch into sugar. Yeast then converts the sugar into alcohol.

Humans would have discovered the process by happy accident, probably in many places across the world at various times: a pile of grain left in the rain and sun, some wild yeast latched onto its sugar, and a few days later, whoa! They learnt to replicate the process, creating beer traditions nearly everywhere.

Although no evidence has been found of a Paleolithic African brew – “the holy grail of fermented beverages,” according to McGovern – he suspects it would have been made from wild millet or sorghum, grains long cultivated and used for beer in Africa, and flavoured with whatever grew nearby.

Drinking vessel: The first beer mugs may have been made of animal skins or tightly woven grasses, McGovern said.

Colour and clarity: Colour? Who knows. But it would’ve been cloudy, like all ancient beers, because filtration was tens of thousands of years in the future.

Stone Age gruel with a kick

Possible ingredients: Wheat, barley, dates.

Possible flavour profile: Sour, sweet, bready.

A waypoint between bread and beer is a kind of spiked porridge that would stretch any modern beer connoisseur’s definition of “chewy”.

A team of Stanford researchers found something like that in Israel in 2015 when they came across what may have been a 13 000-year-old beer-making operation in a burial cave near Haifa. It was used by the Natufian people, who were known to harvest and process wild grain.

In stone mortars carved into the cave’s bedrock floor, the team found traces of starch consistent with a thick wheat-and-barley-based alcohol. Some scholars would like more evidence that beer and not bread was being made in that specific cave, because the tools and processes are similar.

But it made sense that the Natufians would’ve been brewers, said Kirk French, who teaches Anthropology of Alcohol at Pennsylvania State University and was not involved in the Stanford study.

“They had grain for a long time,” French said. “If they weren’t making beer, it would be different than every other place in the world that has staple crops. If they had grain, they had alcohol.”

Drinking vessel: Li Liu, the Stanford professor whose team made the discovery, said Natufians may have drunk from wooden bowls.

Colour and clarity: The beer probably would have been “light yellowish”, Liu said, with a texture like gruel.

Neolithic grog mash-up

Possible ingredients: Rice, grapes or hawthorn fruit, honey.

Possible flavour profile: Sour, tart, sweet, fruity, herbal.

The first chemically confirmed evidence of a fermented beverage came from pottery found at the Neolithic...