Not many people think about the history of the mundane things, the things that have been
part of human history well ever since there was a history, and beer is very much so one
of these things.
I mean many people think about beer, or come into contact with it but not many people really
think about where it came from or how it evolved into being the most consumed alcoholic beverage
in the world.
Now naturally when talking about a subject such as beer, a staple of human civilization
far predating the written word, it is impossible to talk about everything in one video.
Therefore, this video will focus on just the history and invention of ‘beer’ in the
early middle ages.
If you're confused on how beer could be invented in the early middle ages when I have already
pointed out that beer production occurred far before then, well that’s because not
all ‘beer’ is created equal.
By that I mean the definition of the word ‘beer’ even today is varied, in fact the
definition of the word changed throughout history.
Some beverages that people today may call beer would in the past be called ales, or
meads, which confusingly are also words that have varied definitions and are sometimes
used as synonyms for beer.
Lets create a very over-simplified diagram.
Ale, Mead*, and Beer, are the most common alcoholic brews, as in they need to be brewed,
which is a specific process of making alcohol that separates these drinks from other historically
alcoholic beverages most notably wines or ciders.
So.
Mead is an alcoholic beverage that ferments honey sometimes with various fruits, spices,
grains, or hops.
Mead mostly isn’t brewed but can be and when it is it counts under the brewing category.
Ale is an alcoholic beverage brewed with “malt”, which is germinated grain, and most often
mixed with gruit, which is a mixture of multiple herbs that varied widely depending on the
region it was made in, ale can also sometimes be mixed with other things not just gruit
which makes its definition even more complicated.
Lastly beer is an alcoholic beverage brewed with “malt” and mixed with hops not gruit
or any kind of other herb or fruit like ale can be.
These definitions, however, aren’t complete and today aren’t really used, for example
most Pale ales which are called ales do in fact use hops not gruit while other drinks
just called ales still only use gruit, but in the end we classify all Pale Ales or IPAs
or just ales as beers.
Even though beer should only be drinks that use malt and hops, which a lot of ales don't,
they sometimes use other stuff on top of the hops but as mentioned before they also use
gruit, fruits, or a mixture of various other things.
Not to mention, although rare, brewed meads which use honey but also are sometimes mixed
with fruits, hops and malt are also called beers.
It seems like today the word beer is a catch all for any kind of alcoholic brew.
However, for most of history the word beer wasn’t used this way and therefore when
you look at historical finds labeled as beer like one of the oldest records of brewing
from 7000BCE China where ‘malted’ rice which is a grain, was found to be mixed with
honey and fruits.
It is hard to define if this was really beer or if it was mead since it had honey or was
it just a type of ale and not beer since it had no hops.
But then again we call brewed beverages today that don’t have hops beers, so why couldn’t
this be a beer?
Anyway this entire complicated pedantic explanation is to say that historically beer was only
used to describe an ale that was mixed with hops not gruit or fruit or anything else,
even though today we may use the word beer to describe many more beverages than just
this, and today’s use of hops in beer is a bit different than in the middle ages.
With that said, technically by it’s old definition beer was created in the early middle
ages when people started brewing ales with hops and anything before then, like Mesopotamian,
Chinese, Egyption, etc. brewing was technically just ales or brewed mead not beer, although
I do agree that by modern definitions of the word beer, those drinks could be called beers
but we’ll ignore that for the sake of this video.
So who created the first beer?
Well as with any firsts in history of very common things like the wheel or tongs it is
almost impossible to pinpoint a very first instance of brewing beer.
As the brewing of beer was very much a gradual process with a lot of places like England
preferring to brew ales instead of beer all the way until the 16th century.
With that said, by the time of the early middle ages humans have been brewing mead and ale
for milenia.
Using mostly gruit but also many other things like fruits or honey to mix with the malted
grains like rice in the east and wheat and barley in the west.
Egyptians, Chinese, Mesopotemians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, Slavs, Finno-Permic Tribes,
Scithians, Ilirians, Germanic tribes, etc. all brewed some sorts of ales, although, of
course some people were more fond of them than others, for example Romans viewed ale
as a peasant or even barbarian drink with the higher classes drinking solely wine.
With almost every people group in Europe making some sort of ale by mixing malt with various
things it wouldn’t be far fetched that at some point someone somewhere happened to brew
malt with hops making the first beer.
After all humans like to experiment with making alcoholic beverages and hops was a known plant
in ancient Europe being used for mostly medicinal purposes but also coloring or rope making,
so it wouldn’t be that weird to see brewed beer early on, but since most people in ancient
Europe didn’t know how to write we can only tell with certainty that Romans and Greeks
never actually mixed malt with hops not other people groups.
Although once writing did spread across Europe there doesn’t seem to be any specific area
that extensively already used hops for brewing so it is fair to say that before the 8th to
10th century any potential brewing with hops would have been very limited with the practice
only growing in popularity during this time.
What I find very interesting, however, is that the first ever written mention of hop
cultivation comes from Geisenfeld, Bavaria, where in 736 a Western Slavic prisoner is
mentioned to be cultivating hops for some reason.
Now this could easily be hops cultivation by a prisoner for medicinal or other purposes
but it is fun to speculate.
It is also important to note that cultivation of hops in the 8th century was quite rare,
outside Geisenfeld there were only a couple of other mentions of it happening by the 9th
century mostly in France and Switzerland.
This was because the way most people got their hops for medicinal purposes was through gathering
of wild hops rather than cultivation, but it wouldn't be far fetched to assume that
some cultivation of hops for medicinal and other purposes did sprang up.
Although with that said there is also no evidence to suggest that this hops couldn’t have
been used for brewing as well.
In fact there are some archeological finds that could support the brewing with hops as
early as the 7th century but more research needs to be done into that.
There is also a theory that brewing with hops comes from Eastern Europe specifically from
the Balto-Finnic and Slavic tribes as their word for hops “hmelj” “chmel” and
“humal” are from the same origin meaning there must be some explicit reason why the
Slavic and Balto-Finnic tribes share the same word for this specific unassuming plant.
This is further supported by the fact that an old Finnish oral myth that could possibly
be dated as far back as 3000 years ago mentions brewing ale specifically with hops.
However, this tale was only written down in the 19th century when brewing with hops has
existed for about a 1000 years so it is very plausible that this tale which was passed
down orally just changed the brewing section of the tale from gruit to hops in the last
1000 years.
With all that said, the first mention of hops directly associated with brewing was written
by Adalard of Corbie most likely in association with the establishment of the new monastery
of Corvey in 822.
In it hops was mentioned to be collected along with firewood for the brewing process.
The entire writing was meant to be a sort of guide on what jobs monks in monasteries
in the frankish kingdom should be doing.
This means that this first mention of hops in brewing in the 9th century only tells us
that brewing beer was already an established practice in northern Frankish monasteries.
Also from this mention and various similar ones after it, it becomes clear that hops
wasn’t really cultivated for brewing during this time, in fact it was gathered from the
wild just like when it was used for only medicinal purposes.
It wasn’t until the 10th and 11th century that more written records started to mention
hops being cultivated instead of just gathered from the surrounding area.
This cultivation of hops coincides with the appearance of many more written records of
brewing ale with hops over gruit.
However, as mentioned before our first written record of brewing beer suggests it was already
an established practice and this is supported by archeological records which show evidence
for brewing beer in the 8th or possibly as already mentioned 7th century, with the practice
becoming more popular by the 9th and 10th century and being quite widespread across
the entire HRE and northern France by the 11th century.
And yes despite some early written mentions of beer brewing coming from northern France,
early beer seems to have been mostly just a Holy Roman empire thing and actually within
the HRE it seems to have three main areas of activity.
Bavaria, Bohemia and the Low Countries.
These three areas seem to have constantly the most early archeological records about
beer brewing before the 10th century.
However, the caveat here is that the low countries don’t seem to have as many early written
records about beer brewing as Bavaria or Bohemia.
Also the main varieties of hops all the way until the 1970s were either from Bohemia or
Bavaria.
On top of that we see a large push back against beer brewing instead of ale brewing in the
low countries around the 13th and 14th century which doesn’t make sense if that area really
had beer brewing as early on as Bavaria and Bohemia.
What is most likely is that beer brewing probably established itself in Bavaria, which has one
of the oldest written records about brewing beer and Bohemia, which has one of the oldest
archeological records about brewing beer, and from there the technology spread into
the Low countries where it was embraced much more quickly than in the other areas of the
HRE therefore leaving a strong early archeological mark despite the lack of written records.
However, with that said I do admit more research needs to be done into this area.
So looking at Bavaria and Bohemia, and trying to figure out which area did in fact start
brewing beer the first in around probably the 8th century is impossible to tell.
I personally like to believe that the Western Slavs have discovered the superiority of beer
over ale and then showed it to the Bavarians which where on the forefront of the Frankish
Slavic interactions, I mean remember our first written record about cultivation of hops,
but this is purely a bias point on my part and it’s just as likely that it was a Bavarian
invention picked up by the Western Slavs exactly due to the fact that the Bavarians where on
the forefront of the Frankish Slavic interactions.
Nonetheless, the brewing of beer once it was established in Bohemia and Bavaria did seem
to spread quickly across the Holy Roman Empire, most enthusiastically being embraced as mentioned
before by the Dutch and then northern German trading cities.
This was mainly because hops preserved beer for much longer.
Before hops ale with gruit had to be consumed quite quickly or it would go bad, meaning
the brewing and consumption of ale usually happened locally, but now with hops, beer
could be traded over long distances as it would survive the voyage.
This explains why the trade oriented dutch would be so keen on embracing beer so quickly
and thanks to them and the northern German trading cities by the 14th century beer was
pretty much known all around Europe.
However, this change from ale to beer didn’t come without problems and there's truly far
too many to mention here but the most notable one that I already alluded to was the reluctance
of many local rulers to accept beer.
This was mainly because all across medieval Europe there was a well established tax on
gruit which was used to brew ales before beer was introduced and this tax was quite a sizable
part of the income to the upper class estates and sometimes even the church.
But now that people started to use hops, a plant readily available in the wild, this
tax income started to disappear.
This meant that many rulers like for example William the 3rd of Holland outright banned
the use of hops in brewing in 1321 but he repealed this law just 2 years later presumably
due to public pressure.
Similar events of beer vs ale happened all across Europe most notably in England in the
15th and 16th century.
Lastly no early beer history would be complete without mentioning monasteries.
Contrary to popular belief monasteries actually accounted for little over all beer production
in history as most beer was brewed by independent households themselves, or in urban areas in
some kind of a city established brewery.
Why we hear and talk so much about monasteries when it comes to brewing is because they’re
the only ones who actually wrote about it early on and they also represent a far more
stable and continues production of beer in history which cannot be said about city breweries
let alone home brewing.
This is why all the early written records about beer brewing come from monasteries,
and also why these written records can’t really be used as dating markers for brewing
ale with hops as these monasteries most likely just picked up the practice of brewing with
hops from the local people.
However, other than leaving us with written records, monasteries were also very valuable
because it was probably through them that the practice of brewing beer spread across
the Frankish Kingdoms.
I’ll conclude with a quote which I think is quite apt during these times, it is from
an anthropologist M. Dougles who wrote about alcohol including beer saying “They make
[and create] an intelligible, bearable world which is much more how an ideal world should
be than the painful chaos threatening all the time”