The Ultimate Beer Guide

Odds are you’ve had quite a few beers in your life — heck, you may be drinking a nice cold (but not too cold!) brew right now. But be honest with us, and yourself: How much do you really know about beer? If the answer to that question is anything but “I’m a freakin’ beer genius and have literally been brewing beer for my entire adult life,” then you’ll probably get something — hopefully a lot more than something — out of this Ultimate Beer Guide. And trust us, once you know all about beer, drinking it will become a lot more interesting.

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With the enhancement of your beer-drinking enjoyment in mind, let’s take a comprehensive, yet manageable dive into the world of beer. In this beer 101 course you’ll learn about everything from the history of beer to how beer is made to the different styles of beer to how to store and drink beer. Did that last little lesson get you all psyched? We hope so! We also hope you have a nice IPA in your hand ’cause we’re about to get started. Now crack that bad boy open, sip on some of that “learning juice” (as Homer Simpson would call it) and prepare to learn more about beer than you probably have in your entire life.

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WHAT IS BEER?

As always, we need to know exactly what kind of alcohol we’re dealing with here, so first up let’s talk about what beer is exactly. According to Wikipedia, the hive mind of planet Earth, beer is “one of the oldest and most widely consumed alcoholic drinks in the world… [and] is brewed from cereal grains—most commonly from malted barley, though wheat, maize (corn), and rice are also used.” In other words, beer is the product of taking cereal grains, creating a mash out of said grains, adding warm water to the mash in order to create the wort, adding hops to the wort, fermenting the wort/hops combination, taking the booze, CO2, and other byproducts from the fermented wort, maturing it in steel containers, and then filtering it, carbonating it, and (possibly) aging it in a cellar.

Now if you’re wondering “what is wort,” “what are hops,” or have any other “what is/are” questions about the description of the beer-making process above, don’t panic, ’cause we’re going to go into much more detail in the How Beer Is Made section below. But before we get there, let’s just knock out a few other quick little tidbits of information about beer’s background in case somebody corners you at one of your home parties or giant Oktoberfest celebrations and wants to really test your beer knowledge.

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In terms of the biggest highlights from beer’s history, the ones you’ll want to know off the top of your head in case somebody asks you what you learned about beer while taking this course, those boil down to: beer’s discovery/creation in Mesopotamia (what today is geographically Iraq, Kuwait, Norther Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey) around 7,000 years ago, the rise in beer’s popularity in Ancient Egypt, beer’s widespread production and consumption in the Middle Ages thanks to the horrid quality of water in Europe, the acceleration of the beer production process during the Industrial Revolution, and finally how beer survived the Prohibition Era in America and managed to become, as mentioned above, one of the most widely consumed alcoholic beverages in the world.

While the above historical recap is a gross overgeneralization, those are the big moments in beer’s story that most broad historical overviews tend to focus on. Obviously there are an uncountable number of caveats, but we’ll take a deeper dive into beer’s history in the A Very Brief Beer History section below. There you’ll learn that beer’s original location of discovery is actually debatable, that beer became popular in the Middle Ages thanks to the growth of monasteries just as much to the crappy quality of supposedly potable water, and that the Industrial Revolution helped to speed up and streamline the beer production process thanks to technological innovations such as the glass bottle, the steam engine, and the refrigerator.

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Finally, when it comes to where beer’s at in today’s world, things are looking extremely bright — like a crisp-ass lager bathed in tropical sunshine. What do we mean when we say that beer’s future is extremely bright? Well, the worldwide beer market is expected to be valued at close to $700 billion in 2025. Not only is the beer market likely to increase by about $100 billion compared to its 2017 valuation, it’s also undergoing rapid, far-reaching changes thanks to technological innovations and an explosion in the craft beer market. But we’ll get into all of that in the Future of Beer section below. For now, let’s take a deeper dive into beer’s history to learn more about how it went from old soggy bread juice to the glorious drink that we all know and love!

A VERY BRIEF BEER HISTORY

Alright, now that we know what beer is, let’s find out where it came from and how it evolved over the last nine millennia. We’ll start our journey as we’ve started so many other “history of alcohol” journeys — in the ancient world. This time, in the legendary land of Mesopotamia, a.k.a. “the land between two rivers.” Unfortunately those are just two rivers of water, not beer.

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THE DISCOVERY OF BEER IN MESOPOTAMIA (PROBABLY, MAYBE?)

As mentioned above, the exact date and location of where beer was discovered is highly debatable. When you look up the origin of beer’s birth, most sources pinpoint the location of Mesopotamia, so that’s a fairly safe bet — although it really could’ve happened in tons of other places around the world, with China being another likely spot. But in terms of when beer was discovered, estimates seem to range between about 10,000 B.C. and 5,000 B.C. In regards to how exactly beer was discovered, that’s also up for debate.

The problem with pinpointing beer’s birth is that it almost certainly happened before any kind of record keeping was the norm. So while there was a 8,000-year-old clay tablet unearthed from the region that was formerly Mesopotamia outlining one of the oldest known beer recipes, there’s also speculation that even hunter-gatherers had tasted beer on their prehistoric tongues thousands of years earlier. This is because beer, or at least what could be considered a boozy predecessor to beer, can be made accidentally just by leaving a bunch of fruit out in a basket to grow old and self-ferment. Spontaneous fermentation can also happen with cereal grains thanks to wild yeasts in the air. (Mama Nature really likes making it easy to discover booze, right?)

An image of a dated and signed beer receipt from Sumeria (2050 BC). Image: Wikimedia / Dr Tom L. Lee

But because one of the earliest known records of beer was that recipe tablet written 8,000 years ago in Mesopotamia (specifically the northern region of Mesopotamia known as Sumer), we’ll go ahead and go with that as the true birthplace of beer. Plus, Sumerians were using beer as a form of currency during that time as well, so you know they knew how good that ish was. On top of that beer recipe tablet, the Code of Hammurabi, one of the oldest known written law “documents” from Mesopotamia, also lays out specific regulations for beer and taverns that served beer. Although the Code of Hammurabi is much younger than that first beer recipe clay tablet, dating back to about 1754 B.C.

Regardless of exactly when and where beer was first discovered/created, one thing is certain: Beer is deeply and inexorably linked to human history since we’ve had settled agricultural societies (at least). But you know who undoubtedly really really loved beer? The ancient Egyptians.

BEER IN ANCIENT EGYPT

Next up on our history of beer world tour, we arrive in ancient Egypt (around 3,000 B.C.), where ancient Egyptians really started to go goo-goo for that brew brew. It was here that beer became so intertwined with culture that it was carved into wood and stone inside of tombs, used for medicines and in religious ceremonies, and supplied as a daily ration for the slaves building the Great Pyramids at Giza. Even Ramses III, one of Egypt’s most well-known pharaohs, enjoyed beer so much that he and his cohort would drink it from gold cups.

Egyptian model of beer making in Ancient Egypt. Image: Wikimedia / E. Michael Smith Chiefio

Egypt was also the civilization that introduced ancient Rome to beer, although they preferred wine to beer and actually thought the latter was only for barbarians. Also, ancient Rome eventually conquered ancient Egypt and after that, beer was basically supplanted by wine.

BEER IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Our next big stop on our tour isn’t really a place, it’s a time: the Middle Ages. It was during this period that beer began to be consumed daily by all social classes, especially in areas where it was difficult to make wine due to poor grape cultivation opportunities. Beer became so popular because it wasn’t only relatively cheap to make, it was also often safer to drink than water. Although according to some historians it’s a myth that beer was a more common drink than water. It was still definitely safer though because water used for beer had to be boiled, which killed off bad bacteria.

The Middle Ages also saw the spread of Christianity, which was important for the spread of beer because monks in monasteries began to mass produce it. (Side note: It was women producing all the beer before, especially in Egypt.) Monasteries were producing so much beer, in fact, that in some ways they could be considered the first commercial breweries. Monks were allowed to sell their beer, which they referred to as “church ales” in what were called “monastery pubs,” and also offered free beer to the lower classes (peasants…) during feasts and celebrations. Oh, and they also pounded down plenty of the stuff themselves.

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Although monasteries helped to spread beer-drinking culture all throughout Europe, it wasn’t until the mid-fourteenth century that beer became truly ubiquitous. It was during this period (from the mid-fourteenth century until the early seventeenth century) that major commercial beer breweries came online, and consumption amongst the masses grew enormously thanks to broad increases in income. Traveling merchants became more and more popular, which resulted in more and more taverns and inns, which, in turn, resulted in more and more beer!

SIDE NOTE: HOW HOPS ENTERED THE PICTURE:

It’s important to note when hops — which you’ll learn much more about in the How Beer Is Made section — started to become a common ingredient in beer recipes because it certainly wasn’t always essential. But once it was added, it significantly and permanently changed beer’s flavor profile and the way it was consumed.

Hops, which are flowers used for flavoring beer (most often making it more bitter) as well as stabilizing it, were first mentioned in written documents in relation to beer in the 11th century. They were likely used in beer recipes earlier however, as there’s archaeological evidence that shows they were actually being used in beer at least 100 years earlier. They were also originally used far more as a stabilizing agent rather than a flavoring additive. In fact, they were frequently added to beer casks as a way of keeping beer fresh during transportation, a decision that directly led to India Pale Ales (IPAs). This was because British brewers put tons of hops in their beer casks to preserve it for the long boat trip to India — hence the beer style’s signature bitter flavor profile.

A handful of California hops. Image: Flickr / srdryja

Before being used in beer, hops were used as a medicine to help people calm down, or go to the bathroom thanks to its laxative properties. But once it was discovered that hops could help to balance out the flavors of the sweet, malt beer being produced during the period, as well as help beer to last longer as it was moved around, it soon became a staple ingredient of beer recipes across Europe.

And if you’re wondering how exactly hops went from some random flowers people used to help them calm down or poop to being a key ingredient in beer, we’re sorry to tell you that historians don’t really know. Maybe somebody who loved beer was really “backed up” and decided to add some hops to their favorite drink?

BEER DURING THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Now we leap from the Middle Ages to another period in history, the Industrial Revolution, a much shorter span of time that saw a lot more growth for beer thanks to innovations like the steam engine and the refrigerator. These types of innovations allowed for the industrialization of the beer industry (that Industrial Revolution doing it’s thing), which led to a sharp increase in beer production and consumption toward the end of the 19th century. By the early 20th century, beer markets in Germany, the UK, and the U.S. had ballooned to about 2 billion gallons produced and consumed in each market.

Here’s a quick rundown of the major Industrial Revolution innovations that affected the world of beer:

The steam engine — The steam engine massively improved the efficiency and output of breweries by mechanically pumping water, wort, and beer, by stirring the mash and grinding the malt, and by raising casks out of cellars. The steam engine also obviously helped with tons of other aspects of the beer industry, like transportation, for example.

A diagram of one of the first-ever steam engine. Image: Wikimedia / Leupold, Jacob

The mechanical refrigerator — The mechanical refrigerator helped to revolutionize the beer industry for a bunch of reasons, which makes sense as it was actually first invented with the intention of aiding the brewing industry. (In 1873 Carl von Linde invented mechanical refrigeration while working for the Spaten Brewery in Munich.) The new refrigeration technology allowed brewers to brew their beer year-round rather than in just the winter months; this was the case because yeast requires certain temperatures to work, and without refrigeration, it would’ve just died off. Fermentation is an exothermic process, which means it releases a lot of heat; without refrigeration that heat would kill off the bacteria.

Because breweries no longer needed cold caves or fresh ice carved from chilly rivers, they were suddenly allowed to pop up pretty much wherever they wanted to. Mechanical refrigeration also allowed for lagers, which require colder temperatures for proper fermentation, to become just as produceable as ales.

One of the first railroad refrigerator cars; this one operated by Anheuser-Busch. Image: Wikimedia / Creative Commons

Mechanized assembly of glass bottles — Before glass bottles and beer cans, beer was commonly stored in and served from oh-so-sophisticated containers like buckets and leather sacks. This obviously wasn’t the best way to store beer for about a million reasons, but glass mechanized glass bottle assembly lines changed all that during the Industrial Revolution. This new way of making beer bottles brought the cost of production down enormously, allowing beer bottles — and all of the beautiful utility of beer bottles — to finally become ubiquitous.

Light, sturdy beer cans — Ever try transporting beer in bottles in rickety trains, cars, or even worse, horse carriages? Yeah, you’re going to get a lot of bottle breakage and a lot of lost profits. Not with beer cans though, hence the invention of beer cans and the “keg-lined” steel container. These inventions changed the way breweries would transport much of their beer.

Advanced yeast knowledge — Even though yeast had been used to make beer since making beer was a thing, it wasn’t until the 19th century that scientists and brewers began to understand that these single celled organisms were responsible for fermenting malted barley water. Until then, it was just kind of beer working its magic. The specific game-changing breakthrough in yeast understanding took place thanks to Louis Pasteur demonstrating that yeast was actually made up of single-celled organisms that were turning fermentable sugars into ethanol and a bunch of other byproducts.

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