Not many people think about the history of
the mundane things, the things that have been part of human history well ever since there
was a history, and beer is very much so one of these things. I mean many people think about beer, or come
into contact with it but not many people really think about where it came from or how it evolved
into being the most consumed alcoholic beverage in the world. Now naturally when talking about a subject
such as beer, a staple of human civilization far predating the written word, it is impossible
to talk about everything in one video. Therefore, this video will focus on just the
history and invention of ‘beer’ in the early middle ages. If you're confused on how beer could be invented
in the early middle ages when I have already pointed out that beer production occurred
far before then, well that’s because not all ‘beer’ is created equal. By that I mean the definition of the word
‘beer’ even today is varied, in fact the definition of the word changed throughout
history. Some beverages that people today may call
beer would in the past be called ales, or meads, which confusingly are also words that
have varied definitions and are sometimes used as synonyms for beer. Lets create a very over-simplified diagram. Ale, Mead*, and Beer, are the most common
alcoholic brews, as in they need to be brewed, which is a specific process of making alcohol
that separates these drinks from other historically alcoholic beverages most notably wines or
ciders. So. Mead is an alcoholic beverage that ferments
honey sometimes with various fruits, spices, grains, or hops. Mead mostly isn’t brewed but can be and
when it is it counts under the brewing category. Ale is an alcoholic beverage brewed with “malt”,
which is germinated grain, and most often mixed with gruit, which is a mixture of multiple
herbs that varied widely depending on the region it was made in, ale can also sometimes
be mixed with other things not just gruit which makes its definition even more complicated. Lastly beer is an alcoholic beverage brewed
with “malt” and mixed with hops not gruit or any kind of other herb or fruit like ale
can be. These definitions, however, aren’t complete
and today aren’t really used, for example most Pale ales which are called ales do in
fact use hops not gruit while other drinks just called ales still only use gruit, but
in the end we classify all Pale Ales or IPAs or just ales as beers. Even though beer should only be drinks that
use malt and hops, which a lot of ales don't, they sometimes use other stuff on top of the
hops but as mentioned before they also use gruit, fruits, or a mixture of various other
things. Not to mention, although rare, brewed meads
which use honey but also are sometimes mixed with fruits, hops and malt are also called
beers. It seems like today the word beer is a catch
all for any kind of alcoholic brew. However, for most of history the word beer
wasn’t used this way and therefore when you look at historical finds labeled as beer
like one of the oldest records of brewing from 7000BCE China where ‘malted’ rice
which is a grain, was found to be mixed with honey and fruits. It is hard to define if this was really beer
or if it was mead since it had honey or was it just a type of ale and not beer since it
had no hops. But then again we call brewed beverages today
that don’t have hops beers, so why couldn’t this be a beer? Anyway this entire complicated pedantic explanation
is to say that historically beer was only used to describe an ale that was mixed with
hops not gruit or fruit or anything else, even though today we may use the word beer
to describe many more beverages than just this, and today’s use of hops in beer is
a bit different than in the middle ages. With that said, technically by it’s old
definition beer was created in the early middle ages when people started brewing ales with
hops and anything before then, like Mesopotamian, Chinese, Egyption, etc. brewing was technically
just ales or brewed mead not beer, although I do agree that by modern definitions of the
word beer, those drinks could be called beers but we’ll ignore that for the sake of this
video. So who created the first beer? Well as with any firsts in history of very
common things like the wheel or tongs it is almost impossible to pinpoint a very first
instance of brewing beer. As the brewing of beer was very much a gradual
process with a lot of places like England preferring to brew ales instead of beer all
the way until the 16th century. With that said, by the time of the early middle
ages humans have been brewing mead and ale for milenia. Using mostly gruit but also many other things
like fruits or honey to mix with the malted grains like rice in the east and wheat and
barley in the west. Egyptians, Chinese, Mesopotemians, Greeks,
Romans, Celts, Slavs, Finno-Permic Tribes, Scithians, Ilirians, Germanic tribes, etc.
all brewed some sorts of ales, although, of course some people were more fond of them
than others, for example Romans viewed ale as a peasant or even barbarian drink with
the higher classes drinking solely wine. With almost every people group in Europe making
some sort of ale by mixing malt with various things it wouldn’t be far fetched that at
some point someone somewhere happened to brew malt with hops making the first beer. After all humans like to experiment with making
alcoholic beverages and hops was a known plant in ancient Europe being used for mostly medicinal
purposes but also coloring or rope making, so it wouldn’t be that weird to see brewed
beer early on, but since most people in ancient Europe didn’t know how to write we can only
tell with certainty that Romans and Greeks never actually mixed malt with hops not other
people groups. Although once writing did spread across Europe
there doesn’t seem to be any specific area that extensively already used hops for brewing
so it is fair to say that before the 8th to 10th century any potential brewing with hops
would have been very limited with the practice only growing in popularity during this time. What I find very interesting, however, is
that the first ever written mention of hop cultivation comes from Geisenfeld, Bavaria,
where in 736 a Western Slavic prisoner is mentioned to be cultivating hops for some
reason. Now this could easily be hops cultivation
by a prisoner for medicinal or other purposes but it is fun to speculate. It is also important to note that cultivation
of hops in the 8th century was quite rare, outside Geisenfeld there were only a couple
of other mentions of it happening by the 9th century mostly in France and Switzerland. This was because the way most people got their
hops for medicinal purposes was through gathering of wild hops rather than cultivation, but
it wouldn't be far fetched to assume that some cultivation of hops for medicinal and
other purposes did sprang up. Although with that said there is also no evidence
to suggest that this hops couldn’t have been used for brewing as well. In fact there are some archeological finds
that could support the brewing with hops as early as the 7th century but more research
needs to be done into that. There is also a theory that brewing with hops
comes from Eastern Europe specifically from the Balto-Finnic and Slavic tribes as their
word for hops “hmelj” “chmel” and “humal” are from the same origin meaning
there must be some explicit reason why the Slavic and Balto-Finnic tribes share the same
word for this specific unassuming plant. This is further supported by the fact that
an old Finnish oral myth that could possibly be dated as far back as 3000 years ago mentions
brewing ale specifically with hops. However, this tale was only written down in
the 19th century when brewing with hops has existed for about a 1000 years so it is very
plausible that this tale which was passed down orally just changed the brewing section
of the tale from gruit to hops in the last 1000 years. With all that said, the first mention of hops
directly associated with brewing was written by Adalard of Corbie most likely in association
with the establishment of the new monastery of Corvey in 822. In it hops was mentioned to be collected along
with firewood for the brewing process. The entire writing was meant to be a sort
of guide on what jobs monks in monasteries in the frankish kingdom should be doing. This means that this first mention of hops
in brewing in the 9th century only tells us that brewing beer was already an established
practice in northern Frankish monasteries. Also from this mention and various similar
ones after it, it becomes clear that hops wasn’t really cultivated for brewing during
this time, in fact it was gathered from the wild just like when it was used for only medicinal
purposes. It wasn’t until the 10th and 11th century
that more written records started to mention hops being cultivated instead of just gathered
from the surrounding area. This cultivation of hops coincides with the
appearance of many more written records of brewing ale with hops over gruit. However, as mentioned before our first written
record of brewing beer suggests it was already an established practice and this is supported
by archeological records which show evidence for brewing beer in the 8th or possibly as
already mentioned 7th century, with the practice becoming more popular by the 9th and 10th
century and being quite widespread across the entire HRE and northern France by the
11th century. And yes despite some early written mentions
of beer brewing coming from northern France, early beer seems to have been mostly just
a Holy Roman empire thing and actually within the HRE it seems to have three main areas
of activity. Bavaria, Bohemia and the Low Countries. These three areas seem to have constantly
the most early archeological records about beer brewing before the 10th century. However, the caveat here is that the low countries
don’t seem to have as many early written records about beer brewing as Bavaria or Bohemia. Also the main varieties of hops all the way
until the 1970s were either from Bohemia or Bavaria. On top of that we see a large push back against
beer brewing instead of ale brewing in the low countries around the 13th and 14th century
which doesn’t make sense if that area really had beer brewing as early on as Bavaria and
Bohemia. What is most likely is that beer brewing probably
established itself in Bavaria, which has one of the oldest written records about brewing
beer and Bohemia, which has one of the oldest archeological records about brewing beer,
and from there the technology spread into the Low countries where it was embraced much
more quickly than in the other areas of the HRE therefore leaving a strong early archeological
mark despite the lack of written records. However, with that said I do admit more research
needs to be done into this area. So looking at Bavaria and Bohemia, and trying
to figure out which area did in fact start brewing beer the first in around probably
the 8th century is impossible to tell. I personally like to believe that the Western
Slavs have discovered the superiority of beer over ale and then showed it to the Bavarians
which where on the forefront of the Frankish Slavic interactions, I mean remember our first
written record about cultivation of hops, but this is purely a bias point on my part
and it’s just as likely that it was a Bavarian invention picked up by the Western Slavs exactly
due to the fact that the Bavarians where on the forefront of the Frankish Slavic interactions. Nonetheless, the brewing of beer once it was
established in Bohemia and Bavaria did seem to spread quickly across the Holy Roman Empire,
most enthusiastically being embraced as mentioned before by the Dutch and then northern German
trading cities. This was mainly because hops preserved beer
for much longer. Before hops ale with gruit had to be consumed
quite quickly or it would go bad, meaning the brewing and consumption of ale usually
happened locally, but now with hops, beer could be traded over long distances as it
would survive the voyage. This explains why the trade oriented dutch
would be so keen on embracing beer so quickly and thanks to them and the northern German
trading cities by the 14th century beer was pretty much known all around Europe. However, this change from ale to beer didn’t
come without problems and there's truly far too many to mention here but the most notable
one that I already alluded to was the reluctance of many local rulers to accept beer. This was mainly because all across medieval
Europe there was a well established tax on gruit which was used to brew ales before beer
was introduced and this tax was quite a sizable part of the income to the upper class estates
and sometimes even the church. But now that people started to use hops, a
plant readily available in the wild, this tax income started to disappear. This meant that many rulers like for example
William the 3rd of Holland outright banned the use of hops in brewing in 1321 but he
repealed this law just 2 years later presumably due to public pressure. Similar events of beer vs ale happened all
across Europe most notably in England in the 15th and 16th century. Lastly no early beer history would be complete
without mentioning monasteries. Contrary to popular belief monasteries actually
accounted for little over all beer production in history as most beer was brewed by independent
households themselves, or in urban areas in some kind of a city established brewery. Why we hear and talk so much about monasteries
when it comes to brewing is because they’re the only ones who actually wrote about it
early on and they also represent a far more stable and continues production of beer in
history which cannot be said about city breweries let alone home brewing. This is why all the early written records
about beer brewing come from monasteries, and also why these written records can’t
really be used as dating markers for brewing ale with hops as these monasteries most likely
just picked up the practice of brewing with hops from the local people. However, other than leaving us with written
records, monasteries were also very valuable because it was probably through them that
the practice of brewing beer spread across the Frankish Kingdoms. I’ll conclude with a quote which I think
is quite apt during these times, it is from an anthropologist M. Dougles who wrote about
alcohol including beer saying “They make [and create] an intelligible, bearable world
which is much more how an ideal world should be than the painful chaos threatening all
the time”
