Why is beer important?
This is a question that's easy to dismiss as foolish. After all, isn't beer just the domain of keg-chugging frat boys and mustachioed hipsters?
But, go back, to the dawn of civilization when nomadic tribes stopped following the migration of animals, and began to establish self-sustaining communities, and there you will find beer.
Now, this is not to say it was anything close to what we recognize as beer today; it was more akin to a thin porridge or gruel, but beer it was. Some speculate, with good evidence to back it up, that beer was the pre-cursor to bread. This, amazingly, makes it our first engineered food, and not just something we tossed on the fire. While we didn’t understand exactly how we made it (it would only take us around 10,000 years), the fact is we were able to make it.
With this reliable source of nutrition, we were able to focus on creating the humble things we take for granted today, but were so key in our evolution: the wheel, writing, medicine, sailing, glass, and on, and on, and on.
Beer was one of the first mass-produced goods, with the brewery of Hierakonpolis in Ancient Egypt churning out 300 gallons of beer a day to help drive the expansion of one of the world’s great civilizations of antiquity.
Beer was one of the first luxury goods, with the taverns of Babylonia offering twenty different kinds of beer, even some to “lessen the waist.”
Beer was prescribed as form of payment, as mentioned in the Code of Urukagina, an edict from the 24th Century BC, often cited as our first example of legal code in recorded history.
Its humble, workmanlike contributions to our constant climb to the modern day show up again and again throughout history as it took on different shapes and incarnations, giving us the plethora of options that we have today, each one with its own story to tell.
So why is beer important?
Well, you’re here, aren’t you?