VI.

History

Beer is believed to be over 10,000 years old. Although no one knows its exact origins, some agricultural historians believe that the first beer may have been produced accidentally when a stash of grain was soaked by rain and then warmed by the sun. If this mixture were spontaneously fermented by wild, airborne yeast—which thrives in just these warm, moist conditions—beer would have been produced.

Early beer makers used a very simplistic brewing process and fermented beer for only a brief period, one to two days at most. By around 1100 ad, brewing techniques had become more sophisticated. In Europe brewers banded together to form guilds—societies that protected their trade while setting standards for beer making. Hops were introduced to the brewing process around 1300. While many European brewers embraced the use of hops in making beer, English beer makers refused to add the bitter tasting plant to their brews until the 16th century. The first beer brewed with hops in England was bitter ale.

For centuries brewers heated grain over open fires, resulting in dark, smoky malt that produced equally dark beer. With the advent of the industrial revolution in the mid-1800s, brewers invented a way to dry malt in large rotating heated drums that left the grain light in color and produced a pale, golden beer. The next major technological development occurred in the late 19th century with the invention of compressed gas refrigeration. Brewers no longer had to schedule the various heating and cooling phases of the brewing process according to seasonal outdoor temperatures. Refrigeration also meant that beer could be shipped greater distances without spoiling. This innovation paved the way for the proliferation of today’s large brand beers.

With technological developments, some breweries turned to mass production, employing large-scale, state-of-the-art brewing equipment to produce large quantities of beer. During the late 1970s and early 1980s the American brewing industry consolidated rapidly and by 1983 six breweries accounted for almost 90 percent of the beer sold in the United States. By the early 1990s, the largest American breweries, such as Anheuser-Busch and the Miller Brewing Company, were producing nearly 60 million barrels per year.

More recently, brewers have returned to some of the older ways of making beer, such as brewing in smaller batches and forgoing filtration and pasteurization to produce beers that retain more of the flavor and character imparted by the yeast during fermentation. Microbreweries and brewpubs (small breweries that produce handcrafted, high-quality beer in smaller quantities—less than 15,000 barrels a year) are returning to regions recently dominated by large, industrial breweries, particularly in the United States.