Many ancient cultures had beer gods.
The Sumerians, for example, worshipped Ninkasi, who presided over every aspect of the brewing
process and personally prepared the brews quaffed by her fellow deities.
Aegir, Norse god of the sea, was famed for his golden brewing kettle and self-filling
ale horns.
The Lithuanians revered a god of beer, a goddess of beer, and an entirely distinct god of beer
fermentation.
But the Romans – like the Greeks before them – had no god of beer.
Nor did they want one.
For the Greeks and Romans, beer – or, as the Greeks sometimes called it, “barley
wine” – was uncouth, unsavory, and unsuitable for civilized lips.
Beer, in a word, was barbaric, guzzled by those who not yet tasted the fruits of civilization.
It brought out the worst in a people: the Pannonians, for example, were said to be angry
and murderous, not least because they had nothing better to drink than beer.
A few classical authors admitted that, under certain circumstances, beer could actually
taste rather good.
Xenophon, for example, observed that Armenian beer – which was customarily sipped through
long reed straws – was delicious, once you had acquired the taste.
More typical, however, was the opinion of the Roman historian Tacitus, who likened German
beer to spoiled wine.
Beer was also considered unhealthy.
Aristotle claimed that those who drank too much of it would fall on their backs stupefied.
The physician Dioscorides analyzed the medical properties of two varieties of beer.
One, he declared, induced flatulence.
The other brought on bad humors and headaches.
The attitude of the Greco-Roman elite toward beer is neatly summarized by an epigram of
the emperor Julian, which opines that wine has the fragrance of nectar, while beer smells
like a goat.
In the face of such cultural hostility, it might be assumed that the Greeks and Romans
never drank beer.
That may be true in the case of the classical Greeks.
The Romans, however, drank a lot of beer.
In parts of the empire, in fact, they drank little else.
Although wine was always prevalent in Italy, Greece, and other regions climatically suited
to viticulture, beer was the beverage of choice for millions, from the Scottish moors to the
wastes of Upper Egypt.
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Back to beer.
Most of the Roman Empire’s beer-drinkers were concentrated in two regions: Spain, Gaul,
and Britain in the northwest; and Egypt in the southeast.
To Roman eyes, Gaul – roughly modern France – was the stereotypical beer-drinking land.
Although southern Gaul had long been dotted with vineyards, Gauls continued to brew for
centuries after the Roman conquest, quaffing beer from mighty aurochs horns at feasts,
or at taverns from modest clay cups marked “fill me with beer!”
The beer-drinking culture of Egypt was equally potent and – from the Roman perspective
– equally strange.
Although wine was produced in Egypt from a very early date, beer was the favorite drink
of all classes, to the point that the hieroglyph for “beverage” was a picture of a beer
jar.
Many varieties were brewed, from the “dark beer” and “sweet beer” served in taverns
to the “beer of eternity” stockpiled in tombs.
The Roman conquest of Egypt had little effect on beer consumption: centuries later, the
great doctor Galen could still call salt fish and beer “the Alexandrian diet.”
On the other side of the empire, the arrival of Roman soldiers in northern Britain actually
boosted local beer production.
An official stationed at a fort along Hadrian’s Wall asked a colleague to order more beer
from local brewers – some of whom were likely retired soldiers.
If so, they may have honed their craft while still serving in the ranks, since Roman forts
often had their own breweries.
Roman beer tasted quite different from its modern counterparts.
Though usually made from barley, as it is now, and brewed in the familiar way, Roman
beer tended to be sour, and often had to be sweetened with honey or fruits.
It wasn’t always filtered; and even when it was, the product was much cloudier and
grainier than modern beer.
Finally, since hops were not added, it tended to spoil quickly.
To judge from Diocletian’s Prices Edict, beer was remarkably cheap, costing only a
quarter of even the least expensive unaged wine.
It was also remarkably common.
Associations of brewers are attested both in Egypt and on the German frontier, and breweries
were attached to some of the grandest Roman villas in the Rhineland.
But it never lost its bad reputation: one late Roman emperor was mocked as a “drinker
of beer.”
Thanks to its low cultural status, beer was gradually replaced by wine in many parts of
the empire.
Gallic beer was an early casualty.
Even before the coming of Rome, Gallic elites had begun to import massive quantities of
Italian wine, sold at such extravagant prices that a slave was sometimes exchanged for a
single jar of wine.
During the mid-imperial era, as grape vines enveloped the countryside, wine became the
preferred beverage in most parts of Gaul.
An even more dramatic transformation took place in Egypt, where cheap local wine virtually
replaced beer over the course of the fourth century.
In Western Europe, at least, beer was saved by the collapse of the Roman Empire.
The Germanic invaders brought with them a robust beer-drinking culture, which substantially
enhanced beer’s social standing.
A Roman physician working for one of the new barbarian kings found it within himself to
actually praise beer as both delicious and nutritious.
The empire had fallen; but beer would live on.
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