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FROM THE SUMERIANS TO THE PRESENT DAY
IN THE WORLD
Long ago, in the fertile valley between the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Sumerian people established themselves and developed their great civilization. It is from this period, 7000 years before Christ, that we have the oldest reference to a cereal-based fermented drink: the ancestor of our modern beer.
The Babylonians, who followed them, left many testimonies to a flourishing beer industry. The same happened in Egypt, where beer became a national drink, enjoyed by commoners and kings alike, offered to gods and found amongst the treasures of the richest sarcophagi.
In Ethiopia, in North Africa, between the Greeks and the Persians, beer was the drink of the day. But it was the Roman Empire that spread it around Europe, particularly when Domitian, in an attempt to overcome a cereal crisis, prohibited the growing of vines on land that could be used for the cultivation of cereals. From Gaul it arrived in Great Britain, Scandinavia and the Iberian Peninsula, and rapidly became the favourite beverage of the peoples of the North.
The Portuguese word for beer (cerveja) comes from the Latin "cervesia", a specific name for fermented drink. The Gauls called it "cerevisia", probably evoked from Ceres, the Roman goddess of the harvest. The use of the verbal expression "cervesiam bibere" probably gave rise to the words that other European languages use for beer ("bière", "bier", "beer"). Indeed, the expression "bibere" (to drink) was frequently used by the Roman legionaries of Julius Caesar in Central Europe.
Beer naturally took on different characteristics at different periods of time. However, what all these drinks had in common was the fact that they were all cereal-based fermented drinks. Only at the beginning of the 16th century did the precise meaning of "beer" become established as a drink made by cooking or infusing germinated barley and raw grains of other cereals, flavoured with hops and fermented with yeasts.
It was, however, in the 19th century that beer production was given its greatest boost with two important advances: firstly, the yeasts responsible for fermentation were isolated, thanks to Prof. Emil Chr. Hansen of the Carlsberg Laboratory; and secondly, it became possible to keep fermentation tanks and storage cellars at suitably low temperatures throughout the whole year (indeed, it was forbidden to make beer during the summer in Bavaria between 1550 and 1850).
Beer production began as a family activity, like baking bread or spinning flax. Gradually, as towns developed in size and the serfs gained their freedom, between the 7th and 9th centuries, artisan beer makers started to appear, working mostly for the great lords and for abbeys and monasteries. When beer manufacture started to be controlled by the bourgeoisie, after the 12th century, small factories started to spring up around Central Europe.
Infected by the spirit of the age, brewers started to join together to form guilds that soon became rich and powerful, as we can see from the statutes of the Paris brewers' guild (1468) and by the beautiful building owned by the Belgian guild, in the famous Grand-Place in Brussels (1968). |
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