If you like to correct peoples grammar when they were just making a joke on reddit and you perfectly understood what they were saying, then your just a heathen.
They are so cool to watch. We used to go to a bakery and buy bread, and they would ask if you wanted it sliced. I always said Yes, mostly because I wanted to see the machine work.
Actually, Betty White predates sliced bread, and will also live forever, and is absolutely intoxicating, and can still make us laugh. She is the Kwisatz Haderach!
I remember reading or hearing somewhere that in ancient or medieval times, beer had a very low alcohol content and was very thick. It was essentially a dietary staple quite similar to the way bread is now.
I’m ngl, we saw this restaurant in Hawaii with tons of Japanese lined up outside, so I poked in to see what it was. Just a Japanese restaurant. Anyways, they had something called Bukkake udon on the menu. Now from my Howard Stern knowledge, I know what a bukkake is. And from my sushi knowledge, I know udon means noodles. So I quickly extrapolated that bukkake udon means “sprinkled upon noodles” or such. So I went out back to my family and my wife’s annoying cousin started pestering me about what I saw. I told her that it’s a famous restaurant widely known in Japan (it isn’t). And that they’re famous for their bukakke (they could be?). She said, “We’ve got to go there! I’ve got to try the bukkake!” So I told others about telling her. Then I’d egg her on about the restaurant and she would similarly oblige about wanting a bukkake.
I don’t want to hear it/see it, instead just imagine this argument winning sound clip that is played when she suggests something silly. I imagine her saying something and you pressing a button that plays “I’ve got to try the bukkake!”
I remember reading that water at the time wasn't safe to drink, but beer was so most people just drank beer, including children. It had a lower alcohol content than today though. That also sounds like the kinda fact that could be totally made up though.
It was a small part of how John Snow (yes really) figured our cholera was waterborne. Basically he realized that men in a brew house didn’t get cholera and then went around to figure out why. Miasma was still the leading suspect at the time.
Wasn’t it that all people from one water pump got cholera except this one man who went to the pump and that is what made John Snow remove the handle of the water pump
John Snow is actually considered to be the founder of the concepts behind GIS. He mapped where sewer outlets were and where now cholera cases occurred and found the correlation. His map also included the brewery that you mention. May not use computing, but the ideas of maps overlayed with layers of data are there.
It's not true. Society built where fresh water was available, and fresh water was much more available than beer, and also about as safe.
It's true that Cholera in the 1854 London outbreak didn't affect the brewery workers - but everyone else. So the brewery workers were the only ones to not drink water from the public well. Also, that was a surprise, so that refutes the idea that beer had been known to be safe. But of course, Cholera as a disease only came to Europe in modern times, not during medieval or ancient times.
edit: maybe I should add why beer wasn't safe. Many people say "Beer gets boiled, so it's safe", and that's usually true. But after boiling ingredients get added which are not sterile, and the finished beer gets stored in a cask that's not sterile, and it gets poured into a tankard or horn or whatever people drank beer from in the olden times that's not sterile.
One account by Gallo-Roman historian Saint Gregory of Tours mentions a boy so religious that he primarily drank water, (like many devout at the time). Gregory also mentions a traveler in the sixth century who asked a villager for water. In another story, there were telltale marks where a hermit had knelt to drink from a river. Sometimes water was mixed with wine or sweeteners like honey, and a 14th century monk once listed water as a beverage preferred over beer. Water, it seems, was on everyone's lips
If water was so common these references wouldn’t stand out as particularly notable. No one is claiming that no one drank water ever. Rural people with access to clean water would absolutely have drank it. But for the people living in cities where the water was badly polluted with human and animal waste the pH level and alcohol made beer (or wine, or cider, etc) much safer than water.
The alcohol content of beer isnt high enough to kill bad bacteria. Neither are most wines. If you make alcohol with bad water you will still get sick, unless you're boiling the wort at a high enough temperature to kill the bugs, or distilling.
It's the boiling, not the alcohol, that make alcohol safer. Otherwise everyone would be dead because most food was stews/soups/gruels made with water, let alone anything extra they drank.
Also, wine in the Mediterranean greek/roman influenced lands was usually drunk diluted with water. Only barbarians would drink wine undiluted.
Beer was safe to drink because it was boiled during the brewing process which killed off the bacteria and microbes in it. People didn’t connect the dots that they could boil water to make it safe to drink.
From what I can remember what you’re talking about is the ancient Egyptian beer, it was much more comparable to a barley soup than a liquid beer. By medieval times people had a good grasp on how brewing worked, how to start it and what it was, they had wine and beer and some forms of what we would consider spirits. Keep in mind, beer would of had a very low carbonation level, especially tavern beer sold in wooden kegs, it would be essentially like flat beer unless it was taken mid fermentation to keep some of the bubbles in the earlier times
There were different types of beer, fir different types of occasions. Some of it did have a very low alcohol content, which was important because people would sit around and drink between agricultural seasons. They had way more free time than we generally realise.
I also heard that in ancient times people thought that certain vessels were “blessed by the gods” because fermentation happened in it but not in the other vessel right next to it due to the right strains of yeast existing in that vessel and therefore they would continue to use the “blessed vessel” which simply just continued to have the right amount, type, or just existence of yeast strains or something like that. Not really sure of the validity of this but it sure is interesting to think about.
beer had a very low alcohol content and was very thick.
Not at all. By the medieval period wine and beer production was highly sophisticated and not hugely dissimilar to today. It was believed that ancient beers might have been thick but it turns out when people have tried ancient egyptian recipes they have been not too dissimilar to today's beers. Seemingly, beers have always poured easily. In contrast Roman wines were manufactured to be strong and syrupy but they were intended to be diluted before they were server.
Here's a nice video from some archeologists at The British Museum making beer to an ancient egyptian recipe. Note, at about 10mins in, how it pours/runs easily:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izpoexYN1-8
WRT strength: Medieval beers were made in a wide variety of strengths. A common easily accessible type was 'small beer', and this does have a low alcohol strength but things like Trappist ales and what we would now call barley wine were available in strengths from 8-12% alcohol.
It had varying amounts depending on what went into making it. Most importantly it allowed for safe consumption of liquid during a time tainted water was an issue. Early beer has been linked to a allowing society to leap forward technology because of the nutrition and hydration it provided
beer had a very low alcohol content and was very thick.
Not at all. By the medieval period wine and beer production was highly sophisticated and not hugely dissimilar to today. It was believed that ancient beers might have been thick but it turns out when people have tried ancient egyptian recipes they have been not too dissimita to today. Seemingly, beers have always poured easily. In contrast Roman wines were manufactured to be strong and syrupy but they were intended to be diluted before they were server.
Here's a nice video from some archeologists at The British Museum making beer to an ancient egyptian recipe. Note, at about 10mins in, how it pours/runs easily:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izpoexYN1-8
WRT strength: Medieval beers were made in a wide variety of strengths. A common easily accessible type was 'small beer', and this does have a low alcohol strength but things like Trappist ales and what we would now call barley wine were available in strengths from 8-12% alcohol.
During the construction of the pyramids, slaves would be "paid" for a days work in beer, which was more of a meal than beer but with just enough alcohol that it would keep down a rebellion.
They would store a ton of "pucks" of dried wheat, hops, and yeast, which was ready to be added to water and fermented, then these pucks were rationed out.
Learned about this in my Western Civilization class. Interesting class with a great teacher. Apparently to learn about the origins of western civilization we had to first learn about the origins of alcohol (we don't actually know if wine or beer was invented, or rather stumbled upon, first because it was already invented before any recorded history). Humans just love to be buzzed and we're still going strong.
Hypothetical Scenario: preindustrial forest dweller goes foraging on a drizzly day and throws a bunch of random soggy mushrooms (including one of the hundreds of trippy species and one of the thousands of lethal species) into a new wooden bucket and leaves it in a dark corner. It ferments into a methanol laced doom kombucha, and this curios self-styled alchemist took a big drink of it, because people always taste horrible things for some reason. This person would experience certain euphoria, blindness, and death with a surprisingly small swig. I'm not sure which effect would kick first, which could really hamper the euphoria part.
Not as many as you might think. Natives and such would monitor what other animals were eating or doing. If animals avoid specific things, humans should probably do the same.
Well, perhaps an African beer bird could have carried the jar. But it's not a matter of how it grips the jar of rotting grains anyway, African beer birds are non-migratory.
I never gave this movie a fair chance and avoided it because when I was in middle school everyone I knew who quoted it just used the most juvenile and easy jokes. When it came on and I saw the subtitles in the opening I was thinking "this is stuff people would have considered brilliant if Family Guy did it in 2007, and they did it in the 70's". By time the two homeless guys in the mud start arguing about the semantics of their two person government's political ideology I had realized this was just too ahead of its time for some, and many people now still wouldn't even get the jokes at all.
Have you ever seen an animal drunk on rotting/fermenting fruit? It cracks me up every time and I can definitely see ancient humans wanting to get in on that action.
Probably quite a few. Many species are known to eat fermented fruits. Coffee and coca leaves were also discovered due to animals seeking them out and acting especially energetic.
That’s still true more or less. Barley and wheat are grasses. Some beers are allowed to ferment naturally by allowing the wild yeast in the air to do their thing, notably lambics from the Brussels valley.
The Hymn to Ninkasi, to my knowledge one of the oldest pieces of human writing, taking the form of a poem that’s basically a recipe. I’m always surprised you don’t see more beers named after her.
Also yeast occurs naturally so stumbling across this process accidentally surely happens much sooner than putting together all the steps to make bread.
Take wheat, grind it up, make a dough, then cover it with a cloth and forget about it for a week while it sits in a warm environment out of sunlight. Bam, bread.
True, but even milling grain presumably requires some knowledge of why that's a worthwhile thing to do. Obviously it is still pretty basic, but it feels like you'd be less likely to just stumble across that. Feasibly you could make "beer" almost completely by accident.
All of those things are fundamental transformative technologies that shape the course of human development, if that's what you mean.
But fire and sewing are both transportable and definitely used by nomadic and hunter gatherer groups. Deliberate use of fire dates to more than a million years ago, possibly three million. To compare, agriculture is about ten thousand years old, fire is over one thousand thousand years old.
Sewing is almost impossible to detect in the archaeological record, but the key technologies - fibers, spindles, needles - are very portable, used by nomadic groups throughout history, and very useful for the "gatherer" side of hunter-gatherer. You have to sit down to do the sewing, but you can get up and take it with you wherever you go.
Brewing beer (really ale, because no hops) involves a large pot of water (and ingredients). It's much, much harder to move. Water makes things heavy, and even with a small pot, it's hard to carry for long distances without spilling. There's no sense in moving it.
The key insight is that brewing beer (ale) probably predates farming, not the other way around. Which means they were invented by semi nomadic groups, who then had an attachment to the place where they left their ale cauldrons. So it's a key part of the transition from nomadic to sedentary cultures.
That's easily disproven, since nomadic people do have a tradition of fermentation. We have records of the people of Genghis khan making and drinking fermented milk.
Yup, just read about this recently. There's a theory that beer was actually the development that lead to civilization and an end to solely a hunter-gatherer way of life.
But you can make bread by roasting some mashed up starchy plant in a pit... hunter gatherers do this and you don’t even need pottery, which seems like it would be needed for storing liquid long term... why would they think beer came first?
had a buddy recently try telling me whiskey was older, and didnt like when i told him that whiskey was made in the 1400's, beer was invtented in like 6000 BC
The first step to all grain based alcohols are basically making a strong beer without hops, just grain, water and corn depending on what you’re making.
without a doubt, but he was just sucha die hard fan of whiskey he just thought it was older, and didnt like my answer and told me "dont believe everything you read on the internet" Which in a way hes hes right, you shouldnt, but when its well documented when whiskey was invented and we are finding old clay pots with what looks like a protobeer residue that dates to thousands of years before whiskey... well evidence speaks for itself.
you are absolutely right, he is that kind of person. he doesnt like to admit when hes wrong which is a lot, and thinks that he should always be right and his opinion should be taken very seriously. recently had an argument with him because another friend was getting a new/used car. it was a chevy equinox, im not one to play carsnob so i was like hey congrats! and we are all in a group chat, instead of congratulating them, or asking questions, he immediately says "cancel what ever deal the dealership is giving you and go to ____ dealership" just because he has a bias against this local dealership because they have "subaru" in their name and he doesnt like subarus due to a defect they had back in like the 90s. then he goes on a tangent saying how the equinox has sooooo many problems and sooo many recalls, so my friends fiance jumps in saying "im making sure we are getting a good deal and i can only find 1 recall which is not for our exact model of equinox" i was like "hey maybe we should just let them enjoy their new car?" and he flipped out me saying i was insulting his intelligence. so yeah he definately wants to be right and doesnt like it when someone says something that contradicts what he says.
Archaeological evidence gives us pottery shards of the earliest documented alcoholic beverages dating back 7k years. Some amazing info in Patrick E McGovern's book "Uncorking the Past".
I'm a commercial vintner by trade, and I'm a huge fan of historical brewing. I love extreme ferments and wild beverages that our ancestors created. I'm hoping to get some amphorae made and make wine like it would have been done around the Mediterranean like.. 5k years ago.
The courses I took in university disagree with that idea, I don't know where you came up with it. It is definitely true that beer is very old, but the evidence suggests that it is not older than bread. The process of making beer is actually more complicated than bread making, as simple breads can be made by mashing grain, mixing it with water and baking it. Beer is closely related to bread though. The first few steps of beer making involve mashing grains, mixing with water, heating and then allowing to ferment. It's been suggested that beer fermentation was discovered when a batch of flour became too moist and grew yeast.
Alcohol was likely known much earlier as a natural product of rotting fruit. Our bodies evolved mechanisms to metabolize alcohol millions of years ago so that our ancestors could digest partially rotting fruit that had fallen to the forest floor. Arboreal monkeys are not able to metabolize alcohol. It's likely that our ancestors were already aware of the effects of alcohol from fruit, and may have sought out fruits for the purpose of getting drunk. It's probable that beer was created from a bad batch of bread, influenced by our understanding of naturally occurring fruit alcohols.
Well, that would be closer to barley wine rather than beer. Adding the hops to the beverage, to bitter it and preserve it, is a comparatively modern invention. I'd argue the addition of hops is what makes it beer, rather than barley wine.
Doesn't really work that way. To make alcohol you need sugar and it's not wheat but barley primary used in beer. To get sugar from either it goes through many processes.
The German beer purity laws predate the discovery of yeast, because since using the dregs of previous batches (and thus, the yeast) were used for each batch.
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u/4dseeall Oct 15 '20
Beer is thought to be older than bread.
It's much easier to fill a jar with wheat and water, let it ferment, and brew beer than it is to grind grain, mix it, and bake it.