Cheers, dears! It’s beer day

BEER has been around as long as civilisation itself and it is possible that beer-like beverages were independently developed throughout the world soon after a tribe or culture had domesticated cereal.

Chemical tests of ancient pottery jars reveal that beer was produced about 7 000 years ago in what is today Iran, and is one of the first-known biological engineering tasks to utilise the process of fermentation. In Mesopotamia, the oldest evidence of beer is believed to be a 6 000-year-old Sumerian tablet depicting people drinking a beverage through reed straws from a communal bowl.

In ancient Mesopotamia, clay tablets indicate that the majority of brewers were probably women, and that brewing was a fairly well respected occupation during the time, being the only profession in Mesopotamia which derived social sanction and divine protection from goddesses.

The Ebla tablets, discovered in 1974 in Ebla, Syria, show that beer was produced in the city in 2500 BC. Early traces of beer and the brewing process have been found in ancient Babylonia as well. At the time, brewers were women as well, but also priestesses. Some types of beers were used especially in religious ceremonies. In 2100 BC, the Babylonian king Hammurabi included regulations governing tavern keepers in his law code for the kingdom. Women made the beer, but it took a man to invent licensing laws!
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