1. 1
The Evolution of Beer: What Beer Has Done For Us
The discovery of beer changed the world – how humans ate, how they
worked, and how they lived. Scientists say we can even thank beer for
civilization and science.
BY KATE RISHEBARGER
“OK, now we’re going to vorloff by
running off some of the wort and returning
it back to the mash tun, recirculating
through the grain bed until it runs clear,”
my father says, leaning over the steaming
concoction. It is early January, and I am
huddled as close as I can to the utility
stove heating the large stainless steel keg
we have turned into a kettle. We are
brewing our first batch of beer for the new
year.
Vorloff, wort, and mash tun are all
commonplace words in my house. These
may sound like science fiction terms but
they are real words, all pertaining to
brewing. What started off as a fun science
experiment has turned into a major hobby
for my father, Scott Rishebarger. He is a
homebrewer, and is engaging in a tradition
that stretches back before the pyramids.
Beer: The Start of Civilization
ALTHOUGH YOU WON’T find it in
the history books, beer has been
intertwined with human life since the
beginning of civilization. “Beer is the basis
of modern static civilization. Because
before beer was discovered, people used to
wander around and follow goats from
place to place,” says Charlie Bamforth,
Professor of Brewing Sciences at the
University of California Davis. Before
civilization, people lived in nomadic
hunter-gatherer bands and followed herds
of game animals as they migrated because
the animals were their primary source of
food. Somewhere along the way people
realized that they could make bread and
beer from grains. “So gone were the days
that they followed goats around. They
stayed put while the grain grew and while
beer was brewed,” Bamforth says.
Bamforth, along with knowledgeable
scientists and professors around the world,
holds to the view that beer was the
beginning of the civilization. But how did
ancient people discover beer?
The process started around 9000 BC in
Mesopotamia. According to Dr. Solomon
Katz, bioanthropologist at University of
Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology
and Anthropology, primitive people
discovered beer by chance. One of their
sources of food as hunter-gatherers was
soaking wheat and barley in water to make
gruel (comparable to your breakfast
oatmeal or grits). A few of the grains
sprouted and made it sweet, so someone

2. 2
decided to save the mixture. Given a little
time, natural yeast in the air mixed with
the gruel, producing the first beer. This
mixture would have been high in nutrition,
second only to animal protein.
Katz sees this as the start of what
anthropologists refer to as the Agricultural
Revolution – the time period where
humans stopped gathering food and started
farming. But hunting and gathering would
have given early humans a more reliable
way to obtain food than the risky business
of attempting to cultivate plants. Would
beer really have tempted them to switch?
“The initial discovery of a stable way to
produce alcohol provided enormous
motivation for continuing to go out and
collect these seeds,” claims Katz. After
collecting the seeds, they would then plant
them and try to make them grow more
successfully than they do naturally. He
supports this argument with the fact that,
over the course of human history,
“individuals and societies appear to invest
enormous amounts of effort and even risk''
pursuing foods and beverages with feel-
good effects.
It’s even possible that beer came before
bread. This hypothesis works with an
aspect of archaeological record that has
stumped archaeologists for years: there are
very few carbonized seeds (which would
be leftover after baking bread) at the sites
of early Neolithic villages. Beer doesn’t
expose grains to fire, so it does not
produce carbonized seeds. Beer making
could have been an everyday activity
before bread was even invented. This idea
is further supported by the narrow-necked
storage vessels found at these village sites.
''Every time you have one of these narrow
necks, you know you've got something
that's keeping the air and the oxygen
outside and the carbon dioxide inside,”
says Katz. The carbon dioxide in these
vessels would have carbonated the ancient
beer, keeping it acidic and free from
toxins.
But beer has done more for the human
race than giving us cities and civilizations.
It also gave us written language. “Writing
was created to record distribution of
commodities like beer,” says Dr. Stephen
Tinney, Associate Professor of
Assyriology at the University of
Pennsylvania. Cuneiform, the first written
language has over 160 words related to
beer. For perspective, that’s more words
for beer than the Inuits have for snow. This
is an indication of just how important beer
was in ancient times.
Beerin Europe and the New World
WHEN PEOPLE STARTED gathering
in urban centers, they contaminated the
nearby rivers with their waste products,
making the water dangerous to drink. From
ancient Egypt to medieval Europe, beer
was a way to make water safe to drink. The
brewing process removed microorganisms
in the contaminated water and the alcohol
preserved it, giving people something safe
(and fun) to drink.
Beer was so important in Europe that
there were laws about how it could be
made. The Reinheitsgebot, called the
“German Beer Purity Law,” was
implemented in Bavaria in 1516 to regulate

3. 3
standards for beer. The law stated that the
only ingredients brewers could use in
making beer were water, barley, and hops.
There are many theories as to why this law
was made. One obvious reason was the
problems that came from using other
ingredients. Before the Reinheitsgebot,
brewers used soot, mushrooms, nettles, or
other questionable items in place of hops
as a preservative, but these items made
inferior beer. Another reason for the law
was economic – to prevent brewers from
competing with bakers for wheat and rye.
Implementing this law ensured that these
grains would be reserved for bread and that
bread would become more abundant and
affordable. The Reinheitsgebot was
eventually replaced by the Provisional
German Beer Law, which now allows
other ingredients to be used in beer.
When Europeans got off the Mayflower
to settle the untainted New World, they
refused to drink the water from fear that it
was adulterated like the water in England.
There were no crops of wheat or barley
growing wild there, so they made beer
from acorns in one of the first buildings
they constructed for the settlement – a
brewery.
America was settled with breweries, and
was populated with them as well. The
brewing industry was active in America
long before the influx of German
immigrants hastened the arrival of lager
beer (now popularly commercialized by
Miller and Coors, to name a few) in the
1840’s. In colonial times, homebrewing
was a common household practice,
typically performed by women. "Beer
would have been something that a common
person could have had in the house and
made whenever they wanted," says Linda
Bisson, a microbiologist at the Department
of Viticulture and Enology at the
University of California, Davis. Benjamin
Franklin was also a brewer, as we are
reminded by many T-shirts and beer
glasses plastered with his saying: “Beer is
proof that God loves us and wants us to be
happy.”
“I see it as my patriotic duty to
homebrew,” says my father with a wry
smile. “Our founding fathers were brewers
– Washington, Jefferson, Adams – all of
those guys brewed their own beer. The
revolution was even started in a tavern
while the Sons of Liberty enjoyed a beer
and railed against taxation without
representation.”
According to the official website of
Thomas Jefferson’s plantation, beer was
frequently served with dinner at
Monticello. Martha, Jefferson’s wife,
brewed 15-gallon batches of small beer
(“small” refers to the beer’s low alcohol
content) every 2 weeks. Jefferson himself
did brew beer there, starting in the spring
of 1812, in rooms he set aside for brewing
in his earliest plans of the plantation.
Although Jefferson brewed beer on his
personal plantation, the Obamas are the
first presidential couple to order beer to be
made in the White House. For the annual
White House Super Bowl party, the White
House chefs made a batch of beer using
about a pound of honey from the First
Lady’s honey hive. Called the “White

4. 4
House Honey Ale,” it is also the first beer
made from White House honey. The batch
was made for 200 guests and must have
turned out well, considering there were no
leftovers. “It is very safe to assume that
there will be more White House beer in the
future,” spokesman for the East Wing,
Semonti Stevens, said.
Brewing Up Science
IN ADDITION TO its impact on human
history, beer has also had a major influence
in science. “So much of fundamental
science that we do today, as it applies to
health and disease and so on, came out of
the brew industry,” states Bamforth. He is
not only a professor of brewing, but also a
published author on the science behind
beer. “Beer was the basis for modern
medicine.”
Louis Pasteur is known for creating the
first vaccines and pasteurizing milk, but
these ideas were sparked while he was
studying why beer spoiled. “Beer was the
first beverage to be pasteurized,” says Dr.
David Ryder, Vice President of Brewing &
Research at MillerCoors. Pasteur
discovered that in bad beer, bacteria
attacked the yeast cells. If bacteria could
make beer “sick, then could it do the same
thing to humans? This discovery started
Pasteur’s study of bacteria, which caused
his invention of vaccinations.
Beer brewing itself is a scientific
endeavor. “It's definitely hard science and
technology—there's no question about that.
Brewing is one of the original, longest
standing uses of biotechnology. It's only by
understanding the science that you can
make sure that you brew a product well,”
says Bamforth. “A skilled brewer's art is to
apply the science and technology in
crafting the brew.”
“Trying to understand it is scientific,”
my father says. There is some basic
science you must understand but you don’t
have to be well versed in chemistry to
make it work, he reminds me. “You try to
do it right and let it take care of itself. The
yeast does all the work.”
The yeast may do the chemical work,
but the brewer has a process to go through
to get to the finished product. The basic
process is this:
 Sanitizing: Make sure the
equipment is clean so that no
bacteria can spoil the beer.
 Mashing: Steep the grains in hot
water to make the wort (liquid that
has been sweetened by the grains).
 Boiling: Boil the wort and add the
hops for flavor.
 Fermentation: Chill the wort, pour
it into a fermenter, and add yeast.
Store it away from sunlight for a
couple of weeks.
 Bottling: Add fermentable sugars
and bottle the beer. The yeast will
take the sugars and turn them into
alcohol and carbon dioxide. Leave
the beer to carbonate for at least
two weeks.
 Drinking: Pour it into a glass or
enjoy it out of the bottle, the beer is
finished.
Although beer first started with barley,
wheat, and water, homebrewing allows the

5. 5
brewer to get creative. According the
website of the American Homebrewer’s
Association, the primary reason to
homebrew is for the creative and artistic
aspects, comparable to cooking a gourmet
meal for fun. “We’re taking it to extremes
and putting all kinds of stuff in beer, just
from a sense of experimentation,” my dad
says, as he shows me the extra ingredients
for the batch of Saison, a French
farmhouse ale. In addition to yeast and the
grains in the mash, he uses fruit extracts,
nuts, and various other ingredients to give
his brews different flavors. This time, it’s
Habenero peppers and blackberry extract.
Of course they’re supposed to be added
separately at the bottling stage, but we
accidentally put the peppers and
blackberry in one beer. Brewing is like art,
the mix up adds to the experimentation.
It all starts with enjoying good beer and
being interested in what you’re drinking.
“That’s how it works -- you already have
an interest because you like the taste good
beer, and you have a friend who
homebrews and you go help them one
time,” my father says. “The next thing you
know, you’re hooked on brewing your own
beer.”
Kate Rishebarger is a sophomore at
Winthrop University studying Science
Communication. She writes for Winthrop
University’s The Johnsonian and has been
published in The News and Reporter of
Chester, South Carolina.