A History of the World in Six Glasses: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

50,000 years ago, Standage begins, humans lived in small, nomadic tribes. They hunted to survive, using technology like bows and arrows and fishhooks. They also developed important technology like pottery, the wheel, and writing. At this time, humans drank almost nothing other than water. Water is the basis of all life on Earth: it makes up two thirds of the human body. But when the nomadic tribes began to settle and develop agriculture, they turned from water to other more complicated beverages, such as beer.

Beer was probably discovered between 10,000 BCE and 4,000 BCE. By 4,000 BCE, at least, it was popular throughout Mesopotamia (modern Iraq, more or less). It’s not clear how beer was first discovered, because the oldest writing samples to which we have access are only 5,400 years old. But it’s clear that beer was a side effect of the invention of agriculture. When farmers had access to grains, they experimented with their new food sources—beer was only one of the many inventions that followed.

Standage goes into more detail on the discovery of beer. The Fertile Crescent—the area between Egypt and Turkey—was home to the first practitioners of agriculture. Agriculturalists used techniques like planting and plowing to harvest grains. Grains weren’t an exciting form of food—they were largely flavorless—but they were extremely reliable and nutritious. One advantage of grain was that it could be stored for years as long as it was kept dry.

As a consequence of having a stable, reliable food source, agriculturalists were no longer nomadic—they built themselves permanent homes. With permanent homes, agriculturalists had more time to themselves, and more time to experiment with grains. These agriculturalists quickly discovered two other properties of grains: 1) grains could be soaked in water (a process called malting), resulting in a sweet, slightly bitter taste, and 2) wet grain would become more bitter and intoxicating. The second discovery—of the process we now know as fermentation—marked the birth of alcohol in civilization.

After agriculturalists in the Fertile Crescent discovered fermentation, they would have experimented with the process until they’d perfected it. One of the agriculturalists’ most important discoveries would have been the discovery that alcohol becomes stronger when grain is left to ferment for longer. They would have also realized that it’s possible to flavor beer by adding things like berries, fruits, or herbs.

There’s an interesting debate among archaeologists over which came first: beer or bread. It’s quite likely, Standage argues, that the earliest agriculturalists developed bread because they wanted a more elaborate “sweetener” for their beers. However, some archaeologists claim that agriculturists invented bread before they invented beer—it was only a coincidence that bread turned out to be a useful flavoring for alcohol. At any rate, bread and beer were “different sides of the same coin: bread was solid beer, and beer was liquid bread.”

Standage moves on to discuss the social applications of beer. For many early agricultural societies—the Sumerians, the Egyptians, etc.—drinking beer was an important ritual. Drinking is different from eating, in the sense that a drink can genuinely be shared (when cutting up a piece of meat, for example, some of the pieces are inevitably better then others). In this way, drinking beer became an important act of bonding and friendship. Beer was also a religious drink, since the state of intoxication it brought on was believed to bring man closer to the realm of the gods. In Egypt, for example, it was believed that beer was invented by the god Osiris. Beer was used as a religious offering throughout the ancient world, from China to the Americas.

It has been suggested that agriculture became the dominant survival mode for human beings precisely because agriculture ensured a steady supply of beer. While such a theory is interesting and tempting to believe, it’s more likely that the invention of beer was a mere side-effect of the rise of agriculture. One advantage of beer, however, was that it was highly nutritious. In the ancient world, beer often contained whole grains, along with particles of yeast, meaning that beer contained large amounts of protein and vitamins. Beer was also safer to drink than water, since it had to be boiled.

The role of beer in early civilization is still hotly debated. Some believe that beer was a crucial part of the success of agricultural societies—beer provided a nutritious, safe drink that gave agricultural societies an advantage over nomadic tribes. Others go so far as to say that agriculture was adopted by other societies largely because farming could make a large supply of beer. In any case, the prevalence of beer among ancient societies, and its place in ancient rituals and religious ceremonies, proves that beer was an important part of life thousands of years ago.