How beer is the mother of invention

Have you drunk anything through a straw recently? If so, you’ve got beer to thank. It’s believed that the Sumerians – the oldest known civilisation, 7,000 years ago – invented the device so they could drink beer straight from the pot in which it brewed. Lifting the pot would have disturbed the grain that was still there, and no one wants a mouthful of that.

Some straws found from the period are so long that they’d have allowed eight people around the same pot at the same time.

A lady enjoying a goblet of beer

If you think 7,000 years is a long time, Jonny Garrett’s highly readable history of beer has only just got started.

The drink dates back 6,000 years beyond that, first appearing in (very) ancient Israel, around the same time that bread was first baked (which fits, as both products are made with grain and water). This makes beer older than wine or spirits.

Workers on the Great Pyramid of Giza were given ten pints a day each (don’t worry – it was much weaker back then). Beer appears in the Bible, Proverbs 31 declaring: ‘Let beer be for those who are perishing.’

And the ancient poem The Epic Of Gilgamesh lists beer as one of the things that makes us human, the others being sex, food and oil rubs. Each to their own. 

Garrett’s brief takes him from social history to science, by way of copyright law. Bass’s red triangle was the first trademark registered for legal protection in the UK, in 1875. If you’ve an Irish passport, look at the cover’s harp. It faces left. It has to: Guinness trademarked the harp facing right.

For centuries beer was brewed by monks, including in Munich, where there were so many that the city’s name means ‘where the monks are’. But when large-scale industry got involved in the 19th century, technological innovations appeared. The first fridge (as in the modern type, using compressed gas) was perfected by a German brewery to keep its product cold.

As Barrett says, ‘the next time someone asks why your food fridge is full of beer, ask them why their beer fridge is full of food’. Before such wonders, companies had to dig out cellars where they could store (‘lager’ means warehouse in German) their beer at low temperatures. This is why Carlsberg built its first brewery on a hill , or ‘berg’. Carl was the founder’s five-year-old son.

The professor who helped with the fridge, Carl von Linde, was also the first man to liquefy carbon dioxide, thereby allowing Guinness to add bubbles to its drink.

This led to Linde isolating oxygen and nitrogen from the air. The many uses of the former included pain relief in hospitals and a revolution in welding, while the latter is used in fertilisers. You really do start to believe Garrett when he says that beer built the world.