Beer Before Bread: The Drink That Built Civilization

[00:00:00]Around 12 or 13,000 years ago, before the wheel, before writing, before cities, before farming, before almost everything we think of as civilization, a group of people gathered in a cave on a hillside in what is now northern Israel.

[00:00:17]They were not farmers. Nobody on Earth was a farmer yet. They were hunter-gatherers, foragers, living off the wild land as human beings had done for hundreds of thousands of years.

[00:00:30]But archaeologists digging in that cave found something extraordinary carved into the stone floor. Stone mortars hollowed out of the bedrock. And in the residue left behind in those ancient stone vessels, scientists found the unmistakable chemical fingerprint of fermented grain.

[00:00:49]These prehistoric foragers, thousands of years before agriculture, were brewing a kind of beer. A thick, gruel-like, mildly alcoholic drink made from wild cereals.

[00:01:02]And they seem to have been making it not as an everyday food, but for something special. For feasts, for rituals, quite possibly for honoring their dead.

[00:01:13]This is the oldest evidence of an alcoholic drink ever found anywhere on Earth.

[00:01:18]And it raises one of the most astonishing questions in all of human history.

[00:01:24]A question that sounds absurd at first, and then, the more you think about it, starts to feel genuinely profound.

[00:01:32]What if beer came before bread? What if the reason human beings first bent down, gathered wild grain, planted it, tended it, harvested it, the reason we invented agriculture and settled down and built the entire edifice of civilization was not primarily to make bread to eat?

[00:01:52]What if it was, at least in part, to make beer to drink?

[00:01:57]It's a real theory argued by serious scholars for over 70 years.

[00:02:03]It was first seriously proposed back in the 1950s when researchers asked a deceptively simple question in an academic paper.

[00:02:11]Did man once live by beer alone?

[00:02:14]And the logic behind it is genuinely compelling.

[00:02:18]For a long time the standard story was that humans domesticated wild grains to make bread. That the desire for a reliable food supply drove us to invent farming. But some archaeologists pointed out a problem with that.

[00:02:33]Early cultivated grain was actually a pretty poor and labor-intensive way to get food, especially at first. Was a slightly more reliable supply of bland porridge really enough to make people abandon the whole free-roaming way of life their species had followed for hundreds of thousands of years and chain themselves to the backbreaking labor of farming?

[00:02:56]But beer, beer is different. Beer is not just food, it's intoxicating. It's social. It brings people together. It plays a role in feasts and rituals and religion. It creates bonds and cements communities. And that hunter-gatherer cave in Israel points exactly this way.

[00:03:15]Those prehistoric people seem to have been brewing their proto-beer specifically for communal ritual feasting before they farmed anything.

[00:03:24]So the theory goes, maybe it was the powerful pull of beer. The desire to have a reliable supply of grain to brew for these important communal ritual social gatherings that gave people a strong enough motive to start the hard work of cultivating cereals.

[00:03:41]And once you're growing grain for beer, well, you might as well make bread, too, and settle down and build a granary and then a village and then a city.

[00:03:52]Beer, in this telling, wasn't a happy byproduct of agriculture.

[00:03:57]It may have been one of the sparks that lit it.

[00:04:00]And if it's true, even partly true, then the implications are staggering. It would mean that this humble, everyday, unglamorous drink, the drink of the pub and the barbecue and the six-pack in the fridge, is not just old.

[00:04:15]It would mean that beer is one of the reasons we stopped being wandering foragers and became farmers, city builders, and civilization itself.

[00:04:25]That the desire for a drink is one of the things that made us who we are.

[00:04:29]That's the claim we're going to explore.

[00:04:32]Because whether or not beer literally built civilization, one thing is absolutely certain. Beer was there at the very beginning, and it has been beside us, in the hand of the ordinary working person, through every single chapter of the human story since.

[00:04:49]This is the history of beer, the oldest, most democratic, most human drink in the world.

[00:04:56]So, let's start in that cave, 13,000 years ago, and follow it forward.

[00:05:03]First, let's understand what beer actually is, because it's cleverer than it looks.

[00:05:09]Beer is made from grain, usually barley, sometimes wheat. And grain presents the same fundamental problem. Grain is full of starch, not sugar, and yeast can only ferment sugar into alcohol. So, before you can brew, you have to unlock the sugar trapped inside the grain. The solution our ancestors discovered is called malting, and it's beautifully simple. You take the grain, and you let it start to sprout. You soak it and allow it to germinate just for a little while. Because when a seed begins to grow, it naturally produces enzymes to convert its own stored starch into sugar to feed the growing shoot.

[00:05:52]The ancient brewer hijacks that process.

[00:05:55]You let the grain sprout just enough to make the sugar, then you dry it, stopping the growth, and now you have malt, grain full of accessible sugar.

[00:06:05]Crush it, steep it in warm water to release the sugars into a sweet liquid called wort, and then let wild yeast go to work on that sweet liquid.

[00:06:16]The yeast eats the sugar and produces alcohol and carbon dioxide.

[00:06:21]That's beer. Grain, water, and yeast, plus the ingenious trick of malting.

[00:06:28]The earliest beers were nothing like the clear, golden, fizzy lager you might picture. They were thick and cloudy, porridge-like, often made by fermenting bread or grain mash, full of floating bits of grain and husk. They were closer to a boozy, sour gruel than a modern pint. In fact, ancient people often drank their beer through straws, dipping a reed down past the scummy, grainy layer floating on top to sip the liquid beneath. But crude as it was, this drink was about to become one of the most important substances in the ancient world. Because when human beings finally did settle down and start farming, beer moved from the ritual cave to the very center of daily life.

[00:07:13]And nowhere was that more true than in the world's first great civilization, in the land between two rivers.

[00:07:21]Around 6,000 years ago, in the fertile plains of Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq, humanity built its first cities. This was Sumer, the civilization that gave us writing, the wheel, the first laws, the first cities. And Sumer ran on beer.

[00:07:40]I mean that almost literally.

[00:07:44]Beer was not a treat in ancient Sumer.

[00:07:46]It was a fundamental staple of life, woven into the economy, the religion, and the daily diet of everyone from the king to the humblest laborer. It was food and drink together, thick, nutritious, calorie-rich, a kind of liquid bread that could sustain a working body.

[00:08:04]And it was drunk by absolutely everyone.

[00:08:08]Some of the very earliest examples of human writing that we have, pressed into clay tablets more than 5,000 years ago, are records of beer.

[00:08:18]Not poetry, not prayers, beer rations, accounts of who got how much beer.

[00:08:25]Among the first things human beings ever bothered to write down was the distribution of beer.

[00:08:31]Because beer in Sumer was money. It was a standard form of payment.

[00:08:36]Workers were paid in part in daily rations of beer.

[00:08:41]Temple laborers, builders, officials, a portion of their wages came in the form of a jug of beer allocated by rank. The more important people getting more and better beer.

[00:08:53]This is one of the oldest wage systems in human history, and the wage was beer.

[00:08:58]The drink was so central to Sumerian civilization that it had its own goddess, Ninkasi, the goddess of beer, the divine brewer. And brewing, notably, was largely women's work. The brewers and the tavern keepers of the ancient world were very often women, working under the patronage of a female deity.

[00:09:20]>> [music] >> This is worth pausing on, because it stayed true for thousands of years.

[00:09:25]For most of human history, right up into the medieval period, beer was made by women.

[00:09:31]It was a domestic craft, part of running a household, like baking bread. And women who brewed surplus beer to sell became the tavern keepers and alewives of the ancient and medieval world.

[00:09:44]Some historians even argue that certain enduring images of the witch, the pointed hat, the cauldron, the broom by the door, the cat, may echo the old alewives, women who brewed beer, stirred it in great cauldrons, and hung out a broom to signal their ale was ready.

[00:10:03]It was only much later, as brewing became big, profitable, and industrial, that men largely took it over.

[00:10:11]But for the first several thousand years of beer's history, it was overwhelmingly a woman's art.

[00:10:18]There survives a beautiful ancient text called the Hymn to Ninkasi. It's a song of praise to the beer goddess, written down around 3,800 years ago, though it's certainly much older than that as a spoken song. And it's famous today because, as it praises the goddess, it also seems to walk through the process of making beer. The grain, the baking, the fermentation. For this reason, it's often called the oldest beer recipe in the world. Now, I have to be honest with you here, because this channel doesn't repeat a good story without checking it. The claim that the Hymn to Ninkasi is a literal follow-along brewing recipe is disputed by scholars. Different experts have translated the ancient Sumerian in significantly different ways, disagreeing about some of the most important words. It's really a hymn, a devotional poem that reflects the brewing knowledge of its time, not necessarily a step-by-step instruction manual you could hand to a brewer today.

[00:11:23]Modern brewers have used it to try to recreate an ancient Sumerian beer, sipping the results through straws from big jars, just as the Sumerians did, which is a wonderful thing to do.

[00:11:35]But, how close it really is to what the Sumerians actually drank, nobody can say for sure.

[00:11:42]What the hymn does prove beyond any doubt is that beer was so central to this civilization that they wrote love songs to it and gave it a goddess.

[00:11:51]That tells you everything.

[00:11:54]Beer was so important that it even shows up in the law.

[00:11:59]In the famous Code of Hammurabi, one of the oldest sets of written laws in the world, there are rules governing beer and the taverns that sold it.

[00:12:08]Including, reportedly, brutal punishments for tavern keepers who cheated their customers on the price or the measure.

[00:12:16]One law even prescribed drowning as the penalty for a tavern keeper who overcharged. Another required tavern keepers to report any criminals who gathered and plotted in their establishment or face death themselves.

[00:12:30]Nearly 4,000 years ago, humanity was already writing detailed laws about beer, its price, and the taverns where it was drunk.

[00:12:40]The ancient tavern, the alehouse, was already a fixture of civilization. A place where people gathered to drink, talk, do business, and occasionally to conspire.

[00:12:52]From the very dawn of civilization, this drink and the social spaces built around it were at the absolute center of human life.

[00:13:00]And just to the west, along another great river, another civilization was building wonders. And it was building them on beer, too.

[00:13:10]In ancient Egypt, beer was, if anything, even more universal than in Sumer. Every Egyptian drank it, every single day.

[00:13:19]Men, women, children, rich, poor, all of them.

[00:13:24]It was the fundamental daily beverage of the entire society. A thick, sometimes date-sweetened nutritious brew that was as much a food as a drink.

[00:13:34]The Egyptians sometimes made it by fermenting loaves of specially baked bread, so that bread and beer were almost the same substance in two different states. The bread you ate and the bread you drank.

[00:13:47]Beer was so essential it was offered to the gods, sealed into tombs to sustain the dead in the afterlife, and prescribed in hundreds of medical remedies. And here is one of the most famous facts about beer in all of history. The workers who built the pyramids were paid in beer. The laborers who hauled and set the colossal stones of the Great Pyramids at Giza received as a core part of their wages and their daily sustenance generous rations of beer along with bread.

[00:14:19]Archaeologists excavating the workers' settlement beside the pyramids have found the remains of large-scale bread and beer production, industrial-scale bakeries and breweries built specifically to feed and fuel the massive workforce.

[00:14:33]Each worker is thought to have received several jugs of beer a day. So, the next time you look at a photograph of the Great Pyramid, one of the most staggering feats of engineering in human history, a wonder of the ancient world that has stood for 4 and 1/2 thousand years, remember that it was built by men who were in large part paid in beer and who worked with beer in their bellies.

[00:14:59]Beer helped build the pyramids.

[00:15:01]Quite literally, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world runs on this humble drink.

[00:15:07]And in fact, some of the oldest large-scale breweries ever discovered are Egyptian.

[00:15:13]>> [clears throat] >> Industrial brewing operations dating back more than 5,000 years, capable of producing beer by the thousands of gallons.

[00:15:22]From the very beginning, wherever humans gathered into great civilizations, they built breweries and they organized their societies partly around the making and sharing of beer.

[00:15:34]Beer was so sacred to the Egyptians that it appears in one of their most dramatic myths.

[00:15:40]A story in which beer literally saves the human race. As the legend goes, the sun god Ra grew furious with humanity and sent the lioness goddess Sekhmet down to punish them. But Sekhmet flew into a bloodlust so terrible that she began slaughtering everyone, threatening to wipe out all of humankind. To stop her, the gods brewed an enormous quantity of beer. Thousands of jars of it and dyed it blood red and flooded a field with it.

[00:16:11]Sekhmet in her frenzy mistook the red beer for blood, drank the entire lake of it, became blissfully, harmlessly drunk and fell asleep. When she woke, her rage was gone and humanity was saved.

[00:16:26]The Egyptians told this story for thousands of years and celebrated it with festivals of drinking.

[00:16:33]In their mythology, beer was nothing less than the drink that saved the world from destruction. That [clears throat] is how deeply this humble brew was woven into the ancient imagination.

[00:16:45]But there's a deeper reason beer became so utterly essential to daily life.

[00:16:50]A reason that has nothing to do with getting drunk and everything to do with staying alive.

[00:16:56]For most of human history, water could kill you.

[00:17:00]In the crowded settlements and cities of the ancient and medieval worlds, with no understanding of germs and no sanitation, the local water supply was frequently contaminated. A carrier of cholera, dysentery, typhoid and countless other deadly diseases.

[00:17:18]Drinking the water could be a death sentence, but beer was safe, and it was safe for reasons that people didn't fully understand, but absolutely relied upon. To make beer, you boil the water, which, though they didn't know it, killed the dangerous microbes. And the finished beer contained alcohol and was slightly acidic, which discouraged harmful bacteria from growing.

[00:17:41]So, beer, unlike water, wouldn't make you sick. This changed everything about how beer fit into daily life.

[00:17:48]People, including children, drank a weak, low-alcohol beer, often called small beer or table beer, throughout the entire day, every day, as their basic source of safe hydration. This wasn't about intoxication. The everyday beer was deliberately weak, just strong enough to keep it safe. It was simply what you drank instead of dangerous water, from breakfast onward. It was also packed with calories and nutrients from the grain. Genuinely nourishing, a real part of the daily diet.

[00:18:22]For thousands of years across much of the world, beer was not a vice or a luxury. It was a basic dietary staple, a safe drink, and a nourishing food, as ordinary and essential as bread itself.

[00:18:35]It kept whole populations alive and hydrated in a world where the water might kill you.

[00:18:41]That is the real, unglamorous, profound importance of beer in human history.

[00:18:47]It wasn't just how people got drunk.

[00:18:50]It was, for millennia, how people survived.

[00:18:54]And when the ancient world gave way to medieval Europe, the responsibility for making this life-sustaining drink fell, once again, into the hands of a familiar group. The same patient, literate, disciplined people who preserved and perfected wine, and would later perfect sake. The monks.

[00:19:14]And if you're finding the story of how a humble drink underpinned all of human civilization as fascinating as I do, take 1 second to subscribe.

[00:19:24]This channel tells a story exactly like this, one drink at a time, every single week. It genuinely helps the channel grow, and there's a lot more coming.

[00:19:36]Now, back to the story and the monasteries that turned beer into an art. In medieval Europe, as with wine, the monasteries became the great centers of brewing, and they were perfectly suited for it.

[00:19:50]Monks were literate. They could read, write, and record their recipes and methods, refining them carefully across generations in an unbroken chain of knowledge at a time when almost no one else could. They ran large, organized estates with access to good grain and clean water, and they had powerful reasons to brew. Monasteries were required to offer hospitality to the endless streams of travelers and pilgrims passing through, and beer was the safe, nourishing thing to give them.

[00:20:21]The monks also brewed for themselves, and beer became especially precious during the long religious fasts because a nourishing liquid was permitted when solid food was not.

[00:20:33]"Liquid bread does not break the fast."

[00:20:35]went the reasoning. During Lent, when the monks could not eat, they brewed especially strong, rich, calorie-dense beer to sustain themselves. A delicious loophole that survives in strong monastic beer styles to this day.

[00:20:51]There's a legend that a group of monks, worried this rich fasting beer might be sinful, sent a sample to the Pope in Rome for judgment. But by the time it had traveled all the way to Italy, the beer had spoiled into a foul, sour mess.

[00:21:06]The Pope, tasting this dreadful stuff, decided that any beer so unpleasant must surely be a fine and worthy penance for fasting monks and gave it his blessing.

[00:21:17]Whether or not that story is literally true, it captures the spirit of monastic brewing perfectly.

[00:21:24]And to this day, some of the most revered beers in the world are still brewed by monks in a handful of Trappist monasteries using recipes and traditions refined across the centuries. The monks, meticulous as ever, drove brewing forward. And they were central to the single most important change in the entire history of beer since its invention. A change so profound it essentially created beer as we know it today.

[00:21:52]The arrival of hops.

[00:21:55]For most of history, beer had a problem.

[00:21:58]It went stale and sour quickly and it didn't travel well. And for flavoring, brewers used a variable mixture of herbs and spices known as gruit.

[00:22:08]A blend that was often controlled and taxed by local authorities and the church. A nice little monopoly.

[00:22:16]But then brewers discovered something remarkable about the flower of a particular climbing plant.

[00:22:22]The hop.

[00:22:24]Hops did two things at once. They added a clean, pleasant bitterness that balanced the sweetness of the malt. The bitter aromatic character we now think of as the very taste of beer.

[00:22:36]And crucially, hops are a natural preservative and antibacterial.

[00:22:42]Adding hops to beer made it last far longer and resist spoiling.

[00:22:47]This was revolutionary.

[00:22:49]Hopped beer could be stored. It could be shipped. It could travel across seas and be traded over long distances without turning to vinegar.

[00:22:59]Beginning around the 9th century and accelerating through the medieval period, hops spread across Europe, and hopped beer from the great brewing cities of Germany came to dominate the beer trade, displacing the old gruit ales wherever it went.

[00:23:15]There were even conflicts, you could call them hop wars, between the regions that grew hops and the authorities that profited from the old gruit monopoly.

[00:23:25]But hops won, completely and permanently. The change was so total that it effectively created a new beverage.

[00:23:34]When you taste the bitterness in a modern beer, you are tasting a medieval revolution. The moment beer became stable, shippable, and recognizably the drink we know today.

[00:23:47]And it was in the German lands, the heartland of hopped beer, that beer received its most famous law.

[00:23:54]In the year 1516, in the German Duchy of Bavaria, Duke Wilhelm the Fourth issued a decree that would become the most famous piece of beer legislation in the world. It's called the Reinheitsgebot, the German beer purity law.

[00:24:10]And it declared, quite simply, that beer could be made from only three ingredients: water, barley, and hops.

[00:24:18]Yeast would be added to the permitted list later, once people actually understood what yeast was, and that it was doing the fermenting. For now, its role was a complete mystery.

[00:24:30]The Reinheitsgebot is often celebrated as a noble commitment to quality and purity, a proud guarantee that German beer would always be made properly, from only the finest natural ingredients.

[00:24:44]And it did help build the world-famous reputation of German beer, and it's one of the oldest food regulations still influencing us today, more than 500 years later.

[00:24:55]But I want to give you the honest picture, because the law wasn't purely high-minded idealism. It had hard-nosed practical and economic motives, too.

[00:25:06]By restricting beer to barley, it stopped brewers from using wheat and rye, grains that the authorities wanted reserved for making bread, to keep bread affordable, and prevent brewers from driving up the price of the grain people needed to eat. And it let the authorities regulate the beer trade and its prices. So, the Reinheitsgebot was part genuine quality standard, part economic protectionism, and part price control. It's a more interesting law when you see all of what it was actually doing. But, whatever the motives, it enshrined an ideal that still shapes beer today. That this drink should be pure, simple, and honest. Grain, water, hops, and yeast, and nothing else.

[00:25:52]For centuries, beer continued much as it always had, brewed locally in monasteries and taverns and homes, warm and cloudy, and consumed close to where it was made.

[00:26:03]And distinct national styles began to emerge, shaped by local grain, water, and taste.

[00:26:10]In England, brewers developed rich, dark, robust beers. And in the 18th century, in the booming city of London, a dark, hearty beer became wildly popular among the market porters and laborers who carried goods through the city streets.

[00:26:25]It took its name from them, porter. And the strongest versions of porter were called stout. The very beer that, as we saw in our episode on Guinness, a Dublin brewer would ride to global fame. Meanwhile, English brewers using paler malts created pale ale, and a stronger, hoppier version built to survive the long sea voyage to British colonies in India, became the India pale Ale, the IPA.

[00:26:54]Beer was diversifying into a rich family of regional styles, each with its own story.

[00:27:00]But two great forces were about to transform beer more dramatically than anything since the invention of hops, a new kind of yeast and the machines of the industrial age, and together they would give the world the beer that most of the planet now drinks.

[00:27:16]For all of its history up to this point, beer had mostly been what we would call ale.

[00:27:22]Beer made with a yeast that ferments warm at the top of the vessel relatively quickly.

[00:27:28]Ale is the ancient default and it tends to be fuller, fruitier, more robust, but somewhere in the cold cellars and caves of Central Europe brewers stumbled onto a different kind of yeast, one that worked slowly down at the bottom of the vessel in cold conditions.

[00:27:45]Beer made this way and then stored cold for a long maturation came to be called lager from the German word meaning to store.

[00:27:56]Lager was cleaner, crisper, smoother, and more stable than ale, but it had a catch. It needed cold. You could only really make good lager where it was cold or in cold cellars at cold times of year.

[00:28:11]And there's a genuine scientific mystery buried in this lager yeast, one that scientists only cracked recently, and it's wonderfully strange.

[00:28:20]Modern lager yeast turns out to be a hybrid, a cross between the ordinary ale yeast humans had always used and a second wild cold-loving yeast species.

[00:28:31]And when scientists went looking for where that mysterious cold-loving parent yeast came from, the trail led somewhere astonishing.

[00:28:40]The forests of Patagonia at the southern tip of South America.

[00:28:45]Somehow at some point around the age of exploration, this wild, cold-tolerant yeast crossed the entire Atlantic Ocean.

[00:28:54]Nobody knows exactly how, perhaps as a stowaway on ships or timber, arrived in Europe and hybridized with the local brewing yeast in the cold cellars of Bavaria, giving birth to the lager yeast that would go on to make the most popular style of beer on Earth.

[00:29:11]The golden lager in your glass owes its existence in part to a wild yeast from the forests of South America that made an accidental transatlantic voyage.

[00:29:22]Beer's history is full of these hidden accidents. And then, in 1842, in the town of Pilsen, in what's now the Czech Republic, everything came together in a single, world-changing glass of beer.

[00:29:37]The townspeople, frustrated with the quality of their local beer, brought in a Bavarian brewer and the new lager techniques, and using exceptionally soft local water, pale malt, and that cold-fermenting lager yeast, they produced something the world had never really seen before. A beer that was clear, brilliant, and a beautiful, sparkling, golden color, crisp and clean and refreshing. They called it Pilsner, after the town. And thanks to the recent spread of cheap, clear glassware, which meant people could now see their beer instead of drinking it from opaque mugs, that gorgeous golden color became a sensation.

[00:30:17]Pilsner-style golden lager swept the world, and it remains to this day the template for the vast majority of the beer drunk on planet Earth.

[00:30:27]That mass-market golden lager in your hand is the direct descendant of that 1842 breakthrough in a Bohemian town.

[00:30:36]And then, the Industrial Revolution supercharged everything. Steam power allowed brewing on a massive scale. The railways let beer be shipped far and wide, and the invention of artificial refrigeration was the killer breakthrough because now you could brew cold fermenting lager anywhere, anytime of year, and keep it cold all the way to the customer.

[00:31:00]Beer broke free of its old geographic and seasonal limits, and crucially, science finally caught up with the ancient craft. The great French scientist Louis Pasteur, in his studies of fermentation, finally revealed the secret that had eluded brewers for 10,000 years, that fermentation is caused by living yeast, microorganisms eating the sugar.

[00:31:23]For the first time in history, brewers understood what was actually happening in their vats and could control it, selecting pure yeast strains, preventing spoilage, and producing consistent, reliable beer at enormous scale.

[00:31:38]Beer transformed from a local craft into a global industry. The little breweries and monastery brewhouses gave way to vast industrial breweries shipping millions of gallons of consistent golden lager across entire continents.

[00:31:53]Beer had conquered the world, but its most turbulent century was still to come, a century in which beer would be banned outright in the most powerful nation on Earth, nearly homogenized into bland oblivion, and then, at the very end, spectacularly reborn.

[00:32:11]In the 19th century, waves of German immigrants carried their lager brewing traditions across the Atlantic to the United States, and light, golden, German-style lager became the dominant beer of America.

[00:32:25]Great brewing dynasties rose in cities like Milwaukee and St. Louis, and American lager boomed. And then, in 1920, America did something extraordinary.

[00:32:37]It banned alcohol entirely.

[00:32:40]Prohibition.

[00:32:42]For 13 years, it was illegal to make or sell beer in the United States.

[00:32:47]And the effect on American brewing was catastrophic.

[00:32:50]Before prohibition, America had thousands of breweries, well over a thousand, many of them small, local, regional operations, each with its own character and styles.

[00:33:02]Prohibition wiped them out.

[00:33:05]When it was finally repealed in 1933, only a small fraction had survived. A couple of hundred at most. And the ones that survived, and the industry that regrew afterward, consolidated relentlessly over the following decades into a handful of giant national corporations, all making very similar, very light, very inoffensive golden lager.

[00:33:29]The rich diversity of American beer, all those regional styles and local flavors, had been largely destroyed. For much of the 20th century, American beer became a byword for blandness. A few massive brands making light lager that was cold, fizzy, and almost interchangeable. Beer, the drink that had once come in Sumer in 20 varieties and in medieval Europe in countless local styles, had been flattened into near uniformity. But you cannot keep a 10,000-year-old drink down. And at the very end of the 20th century, beer staged one of the great comebacks in the history of food and drink. It's called the craft beer revolution, and it was, at heart, a rebellion. A rebellion against blandness. A grassroots movement of people who were tired of identical, mass-produced lager, and wanted flavor, variety, character, and craft back in their glass.

[00:34:27]In the United States, a pivotal moment came in 1978, when home brewing was finally legalized at the federal level, unleashing a generation of passionate amateur brewers who began experimenting in their kitchens and garages.

[00:34:42]Many of them turned professional, opening small microbreweries dedicated to making flavorful, distinctive, characterful beer. And they reached back into beer's own deep history for inspiration, reviving old, half-forgotten styles, rediscovering rich ales and stouts and porters and wheat beers, and above all, rediscovering hops.

[00:35:06]American brewers using bold new aromatic varieties of hops with intense citrus and pine flavors created hop-forward beers of a punchy intensity the world had never quite tasted before, giving new life to old styles like the India Pale Ale, the IPA, a strong, heavily hopped beer originally brewed centuries earlier precisely because all those preserving hops helped it survive the long sea voyage from Britain to India.

[00:35:35]The craft movement exploded, first across America and then around the entire world.

[00:35:41]Today, there are thousands upon thousands of craft breweries, and beer is more diverse, more experimental, and more celebrated than at any point in its entire 10,000 year history.

[00:35:54]The drink of the ancient Sumerian laborer is now the subject of connoisseurship, festivals, and endless loving craft.

[00:36:03]Beer has come full circle from the astonishing variety of the ancient world through the bland uniformity of the industrial age and back to a golden age of diversity and flavor.

[00:36:16]Think about the full staggering journey of that glass of beer.

[00:36:21]It may have been there at the very birth of civilization, the drink that possibly helped coax our wandering ancestors to settle down and plant the first grain, to build the first villages, and from there everything else. It was money and food and medicine in humanity's first cities, praised in hymns and paid out as wages. It built the pyramids in the bellies of the workers who hauled the stones. For thousands of years, it kept whole populations alive, a safe drink and a nourishing food in a world where the water could kill you.

[00:36:55]Monks perfected it in their monasteries.

[00:36:58]A medieval flower called the hop transformed it forever. A German duke laid down its famous law. A Bohemian town made it golden. And the industrial age carried it to every corner of the earth. It was banned and flattened and then gloriously reborn. And here is the thing that makes beer different from every other drink we've explored on this channel.

[00:37:22]Wine was the drink of the gods and the aristocracy.

[00:37:26]Whiskey was the drink of the rebel and the outlaw.

[00:37:29]Absinthe was the drink of the bohemian artist.

[00:37:33]But beer, beer was always, from the very first cave to the modern craft taproom, the drink of the ordinary person. The laborer, the farmer, the pyramid builder, the pilgrim, the factory worker, the everyday man and woman.

[00:37:50]It has never been about exclusivity or refinement or status. It has been about sustenance and community and the simple universal human pleasure of sharing a drink with other people at the end of a hard day.

[00:38:04]Beer is the most democratic drink in the history of the world. It belongs to everyone and it always has.

[00:38:12]The next time you hold a cold glass of beer, that most humble, everyday, unpretentious of drinks, take a A to remember what you're really holding.

[00:38:22]13,000 years of human history.

[00:38:25]Possibly one of the reasons civilization exists at all. The wages of the pyramid builders, the safe water of a hundred generations, the liquid bread of the monks, the drink of ordinary working people through every single age of the human story. There is nothing humble about it, really. Not bad for some grain, some water, and a little wild yeast. If you found that as fascinating as I did, subscribe. Because on this channel, we tell the true sweeping story behind one drink like this every single week. And beer is only the beginning.

[00:39:00]And do me a favor. Drop a comment and tell me which part of beer's history surprised you the most. That beer may have come before bread and helped launch civilization. That the pyramid builders were paid in it. Or that people drank weak beer instead of dangerous water for thousands of years.

[00:39:19]I read everyone.