We don't know for sure when humans first got the idea to drink fermented grain beverages, but according to the Los Angeles Times, our primate ancestors were consuming alcohol in the form of fermented fruits about 10 million years ago.
It wasn't happy hour, it was survival: When food was otherwise scarce, fallen fruit that had started to rot and ferment was the only thing on the menu. The human practice of intentionally producing fermented beverages emerged alongside the earliest civilizations, according to Science Direct. As soon as humans started hanging out in larger groups, they decided to get some drinks together.
But grain-based alcoholic beverages came a bit later, after humans settled down and shifted from foraging to agriculture. The earliest known beer was brewed in China around 9,000 years ago, but it's impossible to know for sure where it developed first. New evidence uncovered in Israel suggests that people in the Levant region may have been crushing and processing grains to brew beer as early as 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. We also don't know exactly when barley entered the mix. The earliest confirmed evidence of barley beer dates back to about 3,400 to 3,000 BC, from residue on a wide-mouthed jug found in Iran's Zagros Mountains.
To the modern palate, ancient beers might be unfamiliar or even downright unpleasant. According to World History Encyclopedia, Mesopotamian beer had a gruel-like consistency and had to be consumed through a straw to avoid the floating malt. Ancient Egyptian beer had a more liquid consistency, but the flavor profiles — spiced and sweetened with no hops — would be unrecognizable to modern beer drinkers. And while people have always enjoyed getting tipsy, ancient people didn't just think of beer as an intoxicant — it was a dietary essential that supplied valuable calories.
Beer that we would recognize as beer came about during the Middle Ages, when Catholic monks were likely the first brewers to experiment with hops, according to Mental Floss. Like most things in Europe at that time, beer brewed with hops became a flashpoint during the 16th century Reformation, with Protestants claiming hopped beer as their preferred drink while Catholics ditched the hops and embraced traditional aromatics instead. But hops won because of one decisive advantage: It was also a preservative that delayed spoilage.
So the next time you open a beer, whether you choose a plain-Jane can of Budweiser or a fancy craft beer, just think: This could be gruel instead.
