A History of Beer

Amanda Bensen of the Smithsonian blog Food & Think attended a program at that institution on the history of beer. Her post summarizes the long history of the beverage, from prehistoric soggy bread to modern microbrewing.

But while beer’s popularity waned in the Middle East, it was gaining ground in northern Europe. People there somehow figured out brewing (perhaps via another soggy-bread epiphany) by at least 800 B.C., based on beer residues in a Celtic amphora found in modern Bavaria. Dornbusch says the Romans were the first to invent the modern brewing process—involving malting and mashing—based on the ruins of a 179 A.D. brewery discovered in a Roman settlement near what is now Regensburg, Germany.

Link | Image: US National Archives