Who invented ale

Even in modern times the monastic brewing tradition holds, with a number of Belgian monasteries ranking today among the greatest breweries in the world. Many styles of beer familiar to drinkers today have their roots in Britain; pale ales, porters, and stouts have been brewed in England and Ireland for hundreds of years.

Beer has been such an integral part of British life that the British army issued daily beer rations to each soldier, and, when the British Empire occupied half of the civilized world, the Royal Navy delivered beer to troops in even the furthest corners of the Empire. In fact, a very popular style of beer today, India Pale Ale, developed out of the need to ship beer from England to far-away outposts of the Empire in places like India and Burma without it going stale or sour.

Beer arrived in the New World with the first European colonists. According to the journals of the Pilgrims, the reason they landed at Plymouth Rock was that they were out of beer and needed to make more. Indeed, the first permanent structure they built was a brewery. And Americans have been brewing ever since.

Almost all early American beers were based on the English-style ales the colonists were familiar with. That began to change, though, in the mids as wave after wave of new immigrants came from Northern and Central Europe, bringing with them a taste for a new style of beer had taken hold on the Continent: Pilsner-style lagers typical of Germany and the Czech Republic. Very quickly, these pale, hoppy, clean tasting beers replaced the darker, heavier ales that had typified American beer in the previous centuries.

Increasing demand for lager beer and the influx of millions of immigrants drove American beer production to new highs in the late s and early s. As hunter-gatherer tribes settled into agrarian civilizations based around staple crops like wheat, rice, barley and maize, they may have also stumbled upon the fermentation process and started brewing beer.

The earliest known alcoholic beverage is a 9,year-old Chinese concoction made from rice, honey and fruit, but the first barley beer was most likely born in the Middle East. While people were no doubt imbibing it much earlier, hard evidence of beer production dates back about 5, years to the Sumerians of ancient Mesopotamia. Archeologists have unearthed ceramic vessels from B. These nutrient-rich suds were a cornerstone of the Sumerian diet, and were likely a safer alternative to drinking water from nearby rivers and canals, which were often contaminated by animal waste.

Beer consumption also flourished under the Babylonian Empire, but few ancient cultures loved knocking back a few as much as the Egyptians. A little more than 7, years ago, beer brewing began its development in Mesopotamia; it was women who mixed the grains of cereal with water and herbs.

They cooked them… and from that intuitive mixture driven by the need for nutrition came a brew that fermented in a spontaneous manner. They soon began to develop their skills in producing this thick and murky yet highly nutritious liquid that could also gladden the spirit. According to the British historian and beer sommelier Jane Peyton, at that time, and for several thousands of years, their great knowledge meant that they were the only ones who could produce beer and also sell it.

More info here. It was in the Middle Ages when the brewing and consumption of beer took a new twist when hops was added to the mixture. This is the flower that gives the drink its characteristic bitterness and whose preservative properties allowed it to be stored for much longer. The woman responsible for a discovery that took brewing in a radical new direction was the Abbess Hildegarda de Bingen.

Of course this good woman, who shared her role as master brewer with that of theologian, writer and botanist among others, was ultimately canonised.