Hot day, cold beer, comfy chair, it doesn’t get much better than that, unless you had Cheryl Cole/Brad Pitt indulging in a cold Kronenbourg with you. The beer drinker is not a particularly modern phenomenon. After all, beer is one of the oldest drinks in the world, with evidence suggesting it has been brewed and enjoyed as far back as the 6th century BC.
It was certainly alive and kicking in around 450BC, when the Greek writer Sophocles wrote a piece about the importance of moderation when drinking beer (not much has changed, then). The Greeks saw beer, or zythos, as an important part of their daily diet, and brewed it from a barley mixture following a process they probably learned from the Egyptians. Ancient Rome also had beer by the barrel, although it’s widely believed that they preferred wine as their beverage of choice. They used the Celtic word cerevisia for their brews, which were made with rye and were extremely thick.
While beer was a popular beverage amongst ancient civilisations, it really came into its own with the rise of Christianity. Bizarrely, monasteries were one of the earliest organisations to brew beer as a business venture, and there’s a fair few Christian saints who are considered to be the patron saints of brewing (including Saint Nicholas, Saint Augustine of Hippo and Luke the Evangelist). This early beer was known as ale, and instead of being flavoured with hops was mainly flavoured with ‘gruit’, a powerful mixture of herbs that gave it an extremely distinctive taste. Oats, barley or wheat went into the ale, depending on what was readily available in the area, and the drink often provided vital calories to poor farm workers who didn’t have a great deal of food to eat.
Unfortunately, the gruit wasn’t able to preserve the alcohol for very long, meaning that the brews couldn’t be exported and often spoiled quickly. By the 9th century, brewers in Germany were perfecting the art of adding hops to the ale, with the Weithenstephan monastery cultivating acres of hop fields around their area. This monastic brew has almost certainly influenced the way beer is brewed today, and the Germans were among the first to import and export the beverage across the continent.
Soon, two distinctive types of brew were being produced: ale (no hops) and beer (hops). Indeed, in England it was illegal to manufacture both, meaning that brewers had to choose which one to work with and stick to it. Huge breweries were also being opened, increasing jobs and widening the beer market across the continent. For fans of Kronenbourg 1664 is a date you should be grateful for, it was the year the first factory was founded, in Strasbourg by Geronimous Hatt, a master brewer who was among the first to produce and export large quantities of beer around the continent.
The next big beer development came in Bavaria in the 19th century. Brewers had found that storing beer in cold cellars for months at a time produced an exceptionally mellow, light liquid, completely different to the heavier brews of the past. This new ‘lagern’ soon caught on across the continent and the range of experiments led to the creation of many different beers. The Austrians came up with an orangery Viennese beer, and the town of Plzen in the Czech Republic has the honour of the being the first to produce the golden beer, or Pilsner, thanks to their soft water and local barley crops.
Nowadays, the list of various brews is endless, from the fruity Kronenbourg Blanc to the heavier beers found across northern Europe. As techniques have been perfected and new recipes tried, this ancient beverage has been reinvented over and over again, and only time will tell what the brewers come up with next. Let’s drink to that.