“A Heady History of Beer”

It goes by many names - beer, ale, stout, piwo, fairy godmother and t devil's brew - but whatever you call it, next to water, it is the most popular beverage on earth. In 1970, the world drank 6.2 billion litres (almost 1.6 billion gallons) of the foaming brew, enough to float a navy. This is double the consumption of 20 years ago, but only half of what it is expected to be ten years hence. It has replaced sake, raki and pulque as the national drinks of Japan, Turkey and Mexico respectively. It is making deep inroads in the traditionally wine-drinking nations of Southern Europe.

The surging popularity of beer represents not so much a new taste as the return to an ancient one, for beer is older than recorded history. Beer pots and brewing utensils have been unearthed in excavations of neolithic campsites all over Europe. Sumerian tables dating back 5000 years accurately describe the making of four kinds of beer. Babylonian inscriptions list "clarified beer" as one of the provisions taken aboard Noah's ark. An edict of Kind Hammurabi in 1800 B.C. ordered brewers who watered their beer to be imprisoned in their own vats and barmaids who overcharged for it to be thrown into the river. Egyptian Pharaohs used beer as medicine, sacrificed it to the gods and were buried alongside great pots of it to slake their thirst during their journey into the next world. Although, curiously, there is no mention of beer in the Bible, the Jewish sage Maimonides states that it was the customary drink of the ancient Hebrews. It is referred to frequently in the Talmud and at least three of the rabbis who complied that tome were, themselves, professional brewers.

In medieval times, beer was a mainstay of the diet of northern Europe, where housewives not only baked the bread but did the brewing for their families. Saxon councils would make no important decisions until they had deliberated the" matter over beer. In Norse law, contracts made in the beer-house were as binding as those made in court, while "beerhouse testimony" had the same weight as if sworn to in a Church. Every college at Oxford and Cambridge had its own brewery; British "barons specified a standard measure for ale in the Magna Carta; German municipalities installed beer taverns or rath-skellers in the basements of their town halls. Monasteries and nunneries found beer so profitable a source of income that in some places it became a monopoly of the Church. Many excellent German brews still bear names of the religious orders that originated them.

Until the late 19^th century, beer-making was a great gamble, mysterious process that the brewers themselves did not understand. Brewers' yeast consisted of random mixtures of cultures that continuously varied. No new beer ever tasted quite like the previous batch.

It was often ruined by wild yeast and lactic acid cells floating in the air, or it turned sour in the vats when temperatures rose. To keep the beer cold during fermentation breweries installed huge ice cellars, stocked during winter with ice blocks out from nearby lakes or imported from Norway and Sweden. They brewed as long as the ice lasted, then closed down until winter.

Small wonder that brewing was linked with black magic. Secular brewers recited incantations to keep evil spirits away; monks sang hymns and prayed to Saint Gambrinus. A 16^th century brewer who discovered the trick of re-using his yeast to make his beer consistent was burned as a wizard, for conspiracy with the Devil.

Two of the men who finally killed the demons that spoil beer were German engineer Carl Linde, who improved refrigeration techniques for beer around 1874, and Louis Pasteur, whose 1876 classic work, Studies on Beer, explained the composition of yeast, and defined the fermentation process. Although Pasteur's patriotic intent was to make French beer the equal of German brews, the entire world profited from his research. The difference in taste of beers today is more likely to result from the type of yeast strain used than from any other factor. A brewer's yeast is his most prized asset, cultivated in germ-free laboratories and carefully guarded. Like a spark in a sawmill, a single wild yeast spore or lactic-acid germ can wreak havoc in a brewery, giving the beer a milky taste and appearance, rendering the entire batch worthless.  To avoid such dangers, breweries must be kept as sanitary as hospitals. Ten times more water is used for cleaning and scrubbing than in the beer itself. There are no dusty corners, waste bins nor even dirty finger-nails in a well-run brew house.

It would seem there is no end in sight to the beer boom. Breweries have proliferated from Tromo in northern Norway to Punta Arenas on the Chilean tip of South America. A national brewery is the first industry every new nation seems "to want," observed a U.N. economic adviser.