This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode, Do We Really Have Beer to Thank for the First Writing and Cities?, first released on April 22, 2025. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

THE CLANCY BROTHERS: [SINGING] One, two, three—beer, beer, beer; tiddly beer, beer, beer! …A long time ago, way back in history; when all there was to drink was nothing but cups of tea. Along came a man by the name of Charlie Mops, and he invented a wonderful drink, and he made it out of hops…

NICOLA TWILLEY: Charlie Mops! We love you, because we love beer! Thank you sir, for inventing this fabulous beverage.

CYNTHIA GRABER: Well, as it happens, the Clancy Brothers aren’t exactly getting the history just right here—I’m not making any comments about when tea was invented, but I can say that beer has been around for a lot longer than guys named Charlie Mops.

TWILLEY: Indeed, sadly, Charlie Mops turns out to be a totally fictional character with a name that was made up to rhyme with two key beer ingredients: barley and hops.

GRABER: But this episode we are going to get to the bottom of who *really* invented beer. We of course are Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history, I’m Cynthia Graber.

TWILLEY: And I’m Nicola Twilley, and this episode is a detective story. We’re gathering the clues and tasting the evidence, trying to figure out where beer comes from and what those very first beers would have been like.

GRABER: It’s a story that involves the construction of the very earliest cities and the invention of the written word. Was it all in service of beer? Stay tuned.

TWILLEY: This episode was supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the public understanding of science technology and economics. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, in partnership with Eater.

[MUSIC]

GRABER: The first thing we want to know is when beer was invented, and so since the Clancy Brothers are obviously not the experts here, we went to a source who should know the answer:

TATE PAULETTE: Well, we definitely don’t really know.

TWILLEY: This is Tate Paulette, and he is indeed an ancient beer expert. Not only is he an archaeologist and a professor at North Carolina State, he is also the author of a new book called In the Land of Ninkasi: A History of Beer in Ancient Mesopotamia.

GRABER: Even though his book is about ancient Mesopotamia, Tate says beer probably wasn’t first invented there.

PAULETTE: It didn’t just emerge in one spot like Mesopotamia and then spread out. But we’re generally in the realm of kind of speculation when it comes to how it was first invented.

TWILLEY: One thing we can say is that beer probably wasn’t the first adult beverage to show up behind humanity’s bar.

PAULETTE: I think almost certainly wine probably came first. Because there’s basically an extra step required if you’re going to ferment grains.

GRABER: For wine, all that has to happen really is that the sugary fruit kind of has to start to rot. The microbes that turn sugar into alcohol just need access to sugar, and sugar in fruit is readily available. Fruit is sweet.

TWILLEY: There is plenty of sugar in grains, too, but it’s in the form of starch, and the yeasts that do the magic trick of turning sugar into booze—they can’t really work with starch.

PAULETTE: You have to take these starches that are bound up in the grains, and convert them to fermentable sugars first. And so it could have happened first, but it seems more likely that it took a little bit longer to discover that part of the process.

GRABER: Tates says there are basically three ways people discovered that could break down the starches in grain and convert them into sugars.

PAULETTE:There is malting, which is what most of our beers are based on today. There is the use of saliva, which has the right kind of enzymes in it. So it means chewing up grains. And the other is different kinds of molds that also have the right kinds of enzymes.

TWILLEY: The mold method was, and is, more popular in Asia. Because the mold in question is actually koji. We have made a whole episode about this all-star fungus, which you definitely should listen to if you haven’t already. Koji is still used today to make miso and soy sauce, and also sake—which, stay with me folks, is actually beer.

GRABER: Sake is also known as rice wine, but wine is usually a fruit beverage, and sake is made of rice. So Tate calls it beer. He says anything made of grain is a beer.

PAULETTE: That doesn’t include things that are distilled. But it also allows for things that, where you have the main component as a grain, but you’re also adding some other fermentables like some fruits or syrups or something like that. So, that’s how I define it

GRABER: That’s one of the lessons from ancient history: beer is a way wider category than we think of today.

TWILLEY: But coming back to the three options for making beer—or, for breaking down the starches in grains into sugars so that other microbes can make them into alcohol. With the koji mold method, it’s pretty easy to imagine how it was invented. You’d just have to be lucky enough to have your stored rice infected with a little mold.

GRABER: Another method Tate mentioned sounds a little odd, and it’s using saliva. The theory of how this was discovered is that people were chewing on the stalks of, say, corn’s ancestor, before it had kernels, because the stalks had starch and calories. But then they’d spit the hard part out into a container of some sort, and their saliva would go to work on the starches left and convert them into something sugary, and then yeast could ferment it—and maybe someone thought the resulting liquidy mush smelled good, and they tasted it.

TWILLEY: Historically, this method was pretty popular. It seems as though there were lots of beers made from saliva and millet or sorghum in Africa, and you can still get a traditional corn/spit brew known as chicha in South America. Although of course these days it’s mostly not made with saliva anymore. Once again, health and safety ruins all the fun.

GRABER: And then finally, method three, which is the only one you’ve probably heard of if you’ve ever heard anything about the process of making beer, because nearly all of what we’d call beer today is made this way. It’s known as malting.

PAULETTE: Which is basically making use of the grains natural growth cycle, because it also has to break those starches down. And so you are wetting it for a little bit of time, which basically is a message to it saying, aha, it’s time to start growing, essentially.

GRABER: And so the plant then releases its own enzymes—

PAULETTE: Breaking down those starches to feed itself. And you stop the process. and so then we’ve got these enzymes and sugars to brew with.

TWILLEY: This is another technique where it’s not super hard to imagine how someone would invent it.

PAULETTE: It was certainly common to take these kinds of grains, like barley, and produce porridges of different kinds. And also was probably common to soak the grains ahead of time, maybe overnight. So by doing that, you’re already, in a sense, starting the malting process. So if you just sort of forget about it for a couple of extra days or something, it could start growing. Someone tastes it and says, oh, this tastes a little different. It’s kind of sweet. Essentially you can accidentally end up fermenting it. So it doesn’t it doesn’t actually take that much to discover the process.

TWILLEY: Given that all of these beer production methods are relatively likely to have been stumbled upon repeatedly, almost by accident, beer was probably invented in lots of places, lots of times.

GRABER: The earliest evidence of beer production that’s been found is in the Middle East from about 11 to 13,000 years ago, and it comes from a site called the Rakefet Cave in what’s now Israel. The cave had been used as a cemetery for thousands of years.

PAULETTE: And as part of that, into the bedrock, there’s a bunch of little, sort of bowls and divots and things carved. And they’ve also taken boulders and used those kind of, like, mortar and pestle. And so some recent analysis there, they’ve argued that basically some of those boulder bowl kind of things were being used to store grains and possibly malted grains. And then some of those little bowls cut in the bedrock. were actually used for mashing and fermentation.

GRABER: This all was going on at a time before archaeologists believe that domestication first began, so people were still hunting and gathering and moving around a lot. Which leads to the question: did they start domesticating grain and settling down to grow it so they could make their beloved beer? Because domesticated grains produced a lot more raw product than wild grains, so you could then grow it in huge amounts, dry it, store it, and make booze whenever you wanted.

TWILLEY: This is an ongoing topic of conversation among archaeologists. It’s called the Beer vs Bread debate. Did people become farmers in order to make booze, or to make buns? Tate told us about an ancient hilltop archaeological site in what’s now Turkey called Gobekli Tepe. It’s been described as the world’s first temple—no one seems to have lived there, but people clearly gathered there for some purpose. And there’s some evidence that beer was likely consumed at those gatherings.

GRABER: The people who met up at Gobekli Tepe were definitely groups of hunter gatherers. All the plant remains are wild plants, not domesticated ones, and they were definitely gathering for feasting. It seems like it was communal and probably ritualistic.

TWILLEY: Which Tate says, favors the idea that grains were important for both food and booze—beer and bread, not beer versus bread. But the interesting thing is that these grains were gathered and then ultimately domesticated not so much for survival, as for feasting purposes. In other words, we became farmers to have big parties. Or as the archeologists would probably put it, commune with the spirits and build social bonds.

GRABER: It’s just a theory at this point, but it is a compelling one. People certainly had a lot of huge parties and did a lot of communing with the spirits in ancient Mesopotamia. This is the place Tate focuses on in his book, because Mesopotamia is one of the world’s first great beer cultures.

PAULETTE: That’s when we start getting really wonderful evidence, where the quantity and diversity of evidence just kind of explodes. It’s at about that point when we can really start painting a really full picture of a particular beer culture. Before that, we just get little bits of evidence.

GRABER: So while beer was, as we said, likely invented everywhere, all around the world, Mesopotamia is ground zero for beer archaeology nerds—along with ancient Egypt.

PAULETTE: Both of these places at around that same time could claim that title of world’s first great beer culture.

TWILLEY: Ancient Egyptian food and drinks are a story for another day, today we are all about Mesopotamia. But before we go there, where exactly are we headed? There’s no country called Mesopotamia on the map today.

PAULETTE:Yeah, so we’re basically talking about modern-day Iraq, northeastern Syria, and essentially the region defined by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

GRABER: Nobody called it Mesopotamia, at the time it was split largely between Akkadians in the north and Sumerians in the south. The word Mesopotamia comes from what Alexander the Great called it when he conquered it, it comes from Greek meaning “the land between the two rivers.”

TWILLEY: And the time period in which Mesopotamia had a solid claim to being one of the world’s great beer cultures was from about 5,000 years ago all the way up to ‘round about when Alexander the Great took over, roughly 2,000 years ago.

GRABER: So what types of archaeological evidence did this world’s first great beer culture leave behind? Were there like kegs and taps everywhere, glass beer steins, or signs strewn around archaeological sites saying “Pub! Get your beer here!”

TWILLEY: Not exactly. Tate told us there are three major types of clues for an archaeologist wanting to understand the beer scene in ancient Mesopotamia. First, there’s… stuff, obviously.

PAULETTE: Lots of architectural remains, lots of artifactual remains, where especially in this, for beer, ceramics. Pottery is very important, and we have huge amounts of pottery. And then of course we have artistic works.

GRABER: That’s drawings, and paintings—and then the big one is the written word.

PAULETTE: I feel like many people are not really aware of exactly how much written evidence we have from ancient Mesopotamia. Hundreds of thousands of documents in this writing system, cuneiform. And all different sorts.

TWILLEY: And while we may not know exactly where beer was invented, we do know where writing first made its mark.

PAULETTE: So writing was invented in Mesopotamia. This is basically the first writing that we have in world history.

GRABER: The first writing appears about 5,000 years ago, it has a very catchy name proto-cuneiform.

PAULETTE: So they are incising images into clay tablets with basically a pointed stylus, where they’re drawing images. So many of them are recognizable.

TWILLEY: At this point in history, no one was penning epic poetry or writing novels.

PAULETTE: At that time, we have a pretty restricted set of things that they’re actually writing about. Basically two. They’re writing about administration, so economic texts, that’s most of them, and then a smaller set of lists. This is something that starts at the beginning of writing in Mesopotamia and lasts all the way through. They love to make lists. Of all different kinds. for example, lists of things made of wood, or different sorts of pigs, or city names, or deities.

GRABER: And why did these people make pictures in clay that were actually endless lists of pigs and gods and things made of wood?

TWILLEY: Bureaucracy, Cynthia—it’s the key to civilization.

PAULETTE: This period when you get the first writing is also when you get the first cities, the first states.

GRABER: That’s right, Mesopotamia is an incredibly exciting and archaeologically rich region of the world, because it’s not just home to the earliest writing, but also to the oldest known cities. There’s Ur and Nineveh and Babylon and more. And all of these cities had bureaucrats.

PAULETTE: One can certainly argue that writing emerged as part of their effort to manage an increasingly complex economy in this context of urbanization. Suddenly you have huge numbers of people living together. And so that’s generally considered the kind of motivation for developing writing in Mesopotamia.

TWILLEY: Writing is really the earliest management hack. Which is extremely unpoetic. But over time writing evolved from pictograms to something a little less literal.

PAULETTE: One of the big shifts that happens is a few hundred years later, they changed the kind of stylus they were writing with, and they moved from incising to impressing. So instead of drawing a sort of curving line in the clay, they would start impressing individual wedges with this other stylus.

TWILLEY: This was a new alphabet made of wedges and lines, and letters didn’t correspond to just one thing anymore, they also represented sounds.

PAULETTE: And very quickly, this becomes a much more abstract system. And you can’t recognize those individual pictures anymore.

GRABER: Which makes things a little hard to read. When you hear about an archaeological discovery and they find something cool on a tablet, like an ancient recipe or something, it sounds so straightforward. But then if you stop to think about it—just like there isn’t Mesopotamia anymore, there are no communities that use ancient Sumerican or Akkadian. So how in the world did they decode all this writing?

PAULETTE:The decipherment of cuneiform happened basically in the mid-19th century. And it was a major thing. One important thing to point out is that this writing system was completely forgotten. Knowledge of how to read these texts was completely forgotten. So it’s a very different world than when we study texts in Greek or Latin, for example. And so, I mean, people even had to be convinced that this was a writing system at the beginning.

TWILLEY: It’s not just that the alphabet that ancient peoples in the region were using didn’t look much like any alphabet in use today. It’s also that people were using this incomprehensible alphabet to write things in *two* different forgotten languages!

PAULETTE: Sumerian and Akkadian. And they’re really densely intertwined in the writing in very confusing ways. And they’re very different languages. So Akkadian is a Semitic language, so it’s related to Arabic and Hebrew and others. And Sumerians is not related to any other known language. So… this moment of decipherment, they were having to deal with both of these issues: figuring out the script and figuring out their languages.

GRABER: What they needed was a Rosetta Stone. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a stone, you can see it in the British Museum, and it was discovered a couple of hundred years ago. It had the same text written three ways: in two different ways of writing in ancient Egyptian, and then one in ancient Greek. We knew ancient Greek, and the Rosetta Stone let archaeologists decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics for the very first time.

PAULETTE: And we have the same thing for Mesopotamia, where we had in Western Iran, there’s this inscription up on the side of a mountain. You have the same text in three different languages.

TWILLEY: There was Old Persian, and then two things written in this mysterious cuneiform alphabet: one in Akkadian and one in a related language.

PAULETTE: And we had some knowledge of the old Persian. And so this—it was kind of like a little opening to be able to start figuring these out. The most important thing was being able to identify things like a king’s name that was repeated over and over. So the king here is Darius. Seeing his name in the text that was better known, and then gradually figuring out where you could identify that in the other ones, and then moving outwards from there to try to understand what kind of sounds the different signs represented to make up that name.

TWILLEY: This initial breakthrough took place in the 1800s, but Tate said deciphering cuneiform is still a work in progress.

PAULETTE: It wasn’t as if we discovered some kind of code that we sort of cracked it and then from then on we understood this writing system and the languages. It’s very much ongoing.

GRABER: And that’s because it’s really hard to figure out what a word might mean just by finding the same word in lots of different sentences. To get an idea of the challenge, Tate did a little experiment. He’s interested in beer words, so he went around his house looking for all the printed documents that have the world malt. He found a label with the ingredients of malted milk balls. There’s a beer label that says it’s a “people pleasing blend of smooth malt and crisp hop flavors.” There’s a book of poetry that has an old world for malt, ‘maut’ in it.

PAULETTE: Okay, what if you were, you know, an archeologist of the future and you found these things, and you didn’t know what this word “malt” meant in English. How would you go about approaching these, this challenge of figuring out what this world meant?

TWILLEY: Tate’s point is, without context, malt can mean a lot of things. So there’s definitely an element of guesswork involved in figuring out what the ancient Mesopotamians were going on about when they write about beer. But we do have a lot of writing to work with.

PAULETTE:We have these things called the archaic texts that were in this proto-cuneiform script, this sort of precursor to cuneiform, these pictographs. And we have, in the vicinity of 5,000 of these, and that’s the ones that are either economic documents or lists. And a decent number of the economic documents are about beer. So basically… You get the first writing in world history, and already one of the things they are writing about a lot is beer.

GRABER: What do all these ancient texts have to say about this glorious beverage? That’s coming up, after the break.

[BREAK]

TWILLEY: Imagine it’s 5,000 years ago and you’re in Uruk, which at the time was the largest city in the world, with a population of about 400,000 people. So basically picture Tampa but the buildings are made of mud bricks and it’s in the Middle East.

GRABER: One of your neighbors in Uruk might have been a guy named Kushim. Tate walked us through what one of his days might have been like.

PAULETTE: He shows up at work, and it’s a brewery.

TWILLEY: Ku shim is actually a big boss, he’s the supervisor at the brewery.

PAULETTE: So we see he comes in, and there are his workers going about their tasks, and he goes over into a little side room, which is his office, and he picks up a few cuneiform tablets to examine, because he’s basically been worrying about them the whole night before.

GRABER: But phew, everything is fine, nobody’s messed with any of his records. After he spends some time going over his tablets, he heads out, probably to run some errands, maybe he decides to grab lunch with a friend.

PAULETTE: He ends up staying there for hours. He comes back and his brewery is on fire.

TWILLEY: That probably was a major bummer for Kushim but it was a total win for beer archaeologists like Tate, because the flames basically fired the clay tablets. Normally, clay is soft so you can write in it, and then wet it, scrape it flat, and use your tablet again. But Kushim’s tablets were accidentally baked into pottery in this fire, and that pottery is still legible today.

GRABER: That’s how we know that Kushim existed, his name was written on the tablets. But Tate did point out that maybe it wasn’t actually his name.

PAULETTE: It might have been like an administrative office or some kind of institutional office or title. We don’t even really know that the signs that we read as Kushim would have been pronounced “Kuh” and “Shim.” We’re reading backwards basically from a later time.

TWILLEY: We also don’t know for sure that the tablets came from Uruk, they were bought at auction 30 years ago by the British Museum and the Met and others, from a collection put together by a Swiss professor. And Tate says they were likely looted originally—which means we don’t know exactly where they came from or very much about Ku shim’s brewery.

PAULETTE: We don’t even know how many people might have worked in it, what the layout would have been, et cetera. Actually, we don’t even really know that Kushim was in charge of a brewery. It might have been more like a storehouse for brewing ingredients.

GRABER: But what’s amazing about these tablets is that they are some of the very earliest writing in the world, and they are also the very earliest writing about beer.

TWILLEY: In this collection of 85 tablets total, one in five concerned beer in some way. Which helps give you a sense of how important beer was in ancient Mesopotamia

GRABER: And several of the tablets had the word or the name Kushim on them.

PAULETTE: And allow us to sort of peek into his realms of responsibility, which especially involved ingredients that were used in brewing. And then also in a number of cases the distribution of the finished product.

GRABER: One whole side of a tablet is a delivery list, and it’s not like there’s just one thing he was shipping around town.

PAULETTE: So you have four different kinds of beer that show up on this one tablet. And on the front of the tablet each of those cases says X number of jars of beer of this kind of beer. And then the next one says Y number of jars of this other kind of beers, Z number of jars of this other kind of beer.

TWILLEY: So already this is exciting information, because now we know that ancient Mesopotamians didn’t just have one drink called beer—there were at least four different kinds of beer available to quench your thirst in ancient Uruk. And then the other side of the tablet has even more clues.

PAULETTE: If you flip the tablet over, you figure out what was really the purpose of it. Which is where as an administrator, Kushim was accounting for all of the ingredients that he used to brew that beer. Almost certainly because he had been sent those ingredients by someone else and was basically accounting to them for what he had done with all those ingredients. And so there’s two key kinds. There’s malted barley, and there’s basically cracked or ground barley, barley groats. So what he does on the back is he—in one column, he tabulates the total number of jars of each of the four types of beer that were delivered. And then he breaks each of those down and says, okay, for this number of jars of that type of beer, we used this quantity of malted barley and this quantity of barley groats. So he does that for each of the four types.

GRABER: This isn’t a full recipe list yet, but it’s starting to give a clue about what was in the beers and at least some of the differences between the different kinds.

PAULETTE: So it’s really interesting info in these very earliest tablets about beer production. We don’t know exactly what those types of beer were. At least at the moment. These texts are still very much in the process of decipherment. But it’s a really great information about the difference between these different types of beer.

TWILLEY: Kushim’s lists differentiate between four types of beer, like we said. But in Mesopotamia as a whole, there were a bunch of different varieties.

PAULETTE: In those earliest proto-cuneiform documents, there’s maybe nine different types, but we don’t know exactly what they were. If you fast forward a little bit into what’s called the early dynastic period, there’s basically five types. Golden beer, dark beer, sweet dark beer. Reddish brown beer and strained beer. So they’re paying attention to things like color and sweetness. If you fast forward a bit, the Ur Three period, you get ordinary beer, good beer, and very good beer. Maybe ordinary strong and very strong beer.

TWILLEY: The Mesopotamian fetish for lists is really helpful when it comes to figuring out all the varieties of beer available to drink, but it doesn’t really give us much of a sense of what beer meant to people. We know it was important, but we don’t know *why.* For that, we have to wait until writing evolved to become more abstract and less literal, and people started using this new technology to record their poems and myths.

GRABER: And some of those, Tate says, were drinking songs or poems, I mean we don’t really know if they were sung or not but they probably were.

TWILLEY: One of the drinking songs that has survived is often referred to as the Hymn to Ninkasi.

PAULETTE: It’s often called a recipe for making beer, but it is definitely not a recipe for making beer. It is some kind of song that is praising the goddess of beer, Ninkasi. And the way to praise her, because she is mainly—when you see Ninkashi mentioned, she is mainly a brewer. And so to praise her, it gives us this depiction of these little images of her at work in the brewery doing some of the key tasks of the brewer.

GRABER: The poem goes through the steps of making beer pretty clearly, and it ends with these lines: Ninkasi, you are the one who pours out the filtered beer of the collector vat; it is like the onrush of the Tigris and the Euphrates.

TWILLEY: Stirring stuff. But I have to say, one of the other Mesopotamian drinking songs archaeologists have found has better lyrics. It’s just called The Drinking Song, and the singer is enjoying, quote, “an abundance of beer.” It includes the immortal lines “I feel wonderful, drinking beer, in a blissful mood” Or, as the Clancy brothers put it, several thousand years later: beer fills us up with cheer.

THE CLANCY BROTHERS: And look what he has done for us, he’s filled us up with cheer; Lord bless Charlie Mops, the man who invented beer!

PAULETTE: The drinking song in particular really gives us insight into the positive sides of beer consumption from their perspective. There are some famous lines from it, for example: “Our liver is happy, our heart is joyful.” And so it’s celebrating the joys of drinking beer.

GRABER: There’s still a lot we don’t know about these songs—there are words in the songs that still haven’t been translated, we don’t know what that second song was for, Tate says maybe it was meant to be sung at the opening of a brewery. But we do know that people in Mesopotamia really loved their beer.

TWILLEY: And they weren’t just drinking it for hydration purposes. They clearly enjoyed the buzz. They weren’t necessarily getting absolutely hammered, but the literature does suggest they sometimes drank enough to be under the influence.

PAULETTE: I think a lot of the descriptions sound more like… tipsy, some version of tipsy.

GRABER: One place where these descriptions of tipsy people can be found is in ancient medical documents.

PAULETTE:There’s a whole body of diagnostic texts where they say, if you see the following symptoms, then this is the cause and here’s what you should do about it. And sometimes beer is involved as part of the remedy for other things. But then there are a small number of these, where it seems to be related to the drinking of beer and some effects. So slurring of speech, blurring of vision, unsteadiness while walking.

TWILLEY: This certainly sounds like the medical advice of a culture that does truly love beer, sometimes too much.

GRABER: And it’s not just the doctors who thought maybe you could sometimes overdo it on the beer.

PAULETTE: We have some, also some wonderful pieces of literature. There’s this classic piece of literature about the god Enki and the goddess Inanna.

GRABER: Inana was the goddess of love and war, and Enki was the god of water, wisdom, crafts, and creation. He had a bunch of powers that were considered kind of the arts of civilization, all the special qualities that made civilization what it was.

PAULETTE He’s in charge of all these different things. And we have this great story where Inana seems, potentially, to intentionally be going to visit him in order to take some of these away from him. She gets all dressed up, and then especially they sit down and they start drinking together. And then we get a break in the text. And when we come back, it’s basically Enki is giving Inana a whole series of these powers. You see another break. And then you basically get Enki waking up from his sort of drunken stupor. And he has this minister who’s standing there behind him. And he says, What’s happening? Where’s all my stuff? And the minister says, well, you just gave it all away to Inana.

TWILLEY: Ouch! Sorry Enki. Ten out of ten, can relate. I have not been put in charge of the arts of civilization, but I have definitely said things I later regretted after a beer or two too many. The gods, they’re just like us!

GRABER: These are some clues that excessive drinking could lead to some regrettable behavior, but also there are plenty of descriptions of just how important beer was every day.

PAULETTE: There’s lots of evidence for beer as a part of feasts of all different kinds, from very small intimate kind of occasions to big feasts. People were drinking beer in neighborhood taverns. We learn a lot about that. We have evidence for workers being given beer. It’s not part of the regular rations that were given to workers. Often that was probably raw grain. But we have plenty of evidence for cases of giving them beer. And in some rarer cases, tablets that seem to actually say they drank the beer on the job, essentially.

TWILLEY: What’s intriguing about this is that beer seems to have played a lot of different roles in Mesopotamian life. It clearly could serve as rations—as food. But at the same time, all this mention of the gods gets at something else.

GRABER: Beer was central to how people related to the gods. They had beer that they brewed and gave to the gods. They drank beer at celebrations for the gods. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is a Mesopotamian poem you might have heard of, one of the gods learns how to become human by drinking beer. The gods were a unifying force in Mesopotamia, and beer was one of the things that helped bridge the gap between us and the gods.

TWILLEY: Tate says, it’s really not a coincidence that beer was so important at the very same time that the first cities and states were emerging. Just like writing was the bureaucratic tool to keep track of all the new complexities of urban life, beer was the glue that held large groups of humans together.

GRABER: But like we’ve said there were different kinds and qualities of beer, different alcohol levels. There’s evidence that beer was sometimes given to kids, like two pints a day, so that’d probably have been pretty low ABV. And then there’d have been a slightly punchier variety for celebrating, that might also lead Enki to give up his special powers.

TWILLEY: And all of these different texts tell us something about the different roles beer played in Mesopotamian life. And there’s another kind of text that tells us a little about how people’s relationship with beer differed along gender lines. At the larger-scale, brewery level, it seems like men—like Kushim—were the ones in charge. But in the taverns, women were the bosses.

PAULETTE: If you look, for example, at literature, I think it seems to be a quintessentially female role. Usually when a tavern keeper shows up, it’s a woman.

GRABER: And as for who was in charge of doing all the brewing at home, there are letters. There are eight surviving letters between a woman and her merchant traveling husband, and she complains that he didn’t leave her a single shekel of silver, no grain, and the key ingredient that she needs for brewing her beer has gone rancid.

PAULETTE: The letters in general are about the nitty-gritty details of their business, really detailed business records. They’re really interesting but occasionally you get sort of home life, domestic affairs slipping in there, and interestingly, when that happen, brewing ingredients show up. And it’s, for example, a wife saying, we’ve run out of money at home, please send more, because we don’t have enough to make the bappir to brew the beer.

TWILLEY: Bappir is a Sumerian word, and archaeologists know from the texts that bappir was essential for beer brewing, but they aren’t sure exactly what it was.

PAULETTE: People have very differing opinions. There has been a long running discussion of it. Early on the assumption was that it was a kind of bread. And this is partly related to the way that the signs that they used to actually write this word seem to indicate a connection with bread. So it has often called beer bread. But we don’t really know exactly what it was. We get lots of little hints, it was made out of barley, maybe malted barley, maybe not malted barley. It seems to have at least sometimes been a dry, crumbly kind of product.

GRABER: People don’t know if it’s meant to contribute flavors and sugars or if it’s something to kick off the fermentation, like a dried-out sourdough starter. Tate leans towards the latter explanation.

PAULETTE: Cross-culturally there are all sorts of different dried out fermentation starters, that, to me at least, makes sense as analogs for bappir.

TWILLEY: That’s the other thing that textual evidence can give us: some clues to how the beer was made and thus hints about what we all want to know: what did this ancient Mesopotamian beer taste like? That’s coming up after the break.

[BREAK]

GRABER: Tate mentioned that another piece of the puzzle, another way to try to find out about beer in Mesopotamia, is through pictures.

PAULETTE: In Mesopotamia we have lots and lots of images of beer consumption, very few images of beer production.

GRABER: Too bad, because it’d be nice to have a lovely clear diagram with, like, a step-by-step series of instructions for how to make Mesopotamian beer. Apparently in Egypt they have more depictions of the process, but they didn’t record that in ancient Mesopotamia. At least not that we’ve found.

TWILLEY: The images that do exist are often found on seals, so these are like small stone or metal cylinders that you roll onto wet clay to create a relief picture. They were used kind of like a signature or a notary stamp, or like a logo to show who made something. And often they’re truly exquisite. Some show tiny little hunting scenes with gazelles and trees, for example—or little birds, or monsters. Quite a few depict beer drinking.

PAULETTE: I think they’re showing us a very specific kind of event. Almost certainly a sort of elite level event. Where people are typically sitting around kind of in a very prim and proper way, either drinking from cups that they hold in their hand, or especially drinking from a communal vessel through long straws.

GRABER: It’s really clear when you look at them, we’ll have images on our website. There are these shapes that are clearly meant to be human, they’re sitting on recognizable chairs, and there are vessels in between them, with long arching things coming out that are obviously straws they’re drinking from.

TWILLEY: I will confess that the only alcoholic beverages I drink through a straw are cocktail slushies—I’ve never tried beer through a straw. I’m a little confused as to why you would even want to do that.

PAULETTE:The general assumption is that they used straws because the beer needed to be filtered. That is, it had some amount of solid matter in it. So these straws, they would almost certainly have mostly been made out of reeds, which was available in abundance in Mesopotamia. But they don’t survive well archaeologically, so those are not generally preserved. What we have is a few really super fancy metal straws. They’re kind of finger-length metal filters that are sort of cone-shaped, with holes poked in them. That would have been attached to the end of a straw, and that would’ve then been submerged down into the beer and functioning as a filter.

GRABER: Because the final fermented beer wasn’t as fully strained as our beautiful clear beer today, Tate said it would have had grain husks and other kind of chunky bits. And so filtering straws would have been useful.

TWILLEY: But that isn’t the only reason Mesopotamians liked to slurp their beer from one big jug using a straw.

PAULETTE: I think it’s also the communal element of it. Almost certainly one of the motivations, because that’s a very different experience drinking from an individual cup. You know, each person has one, and drinking from this shared vessel.

GRABER: Remember, these are some of the earliest cities and urban areas, and the social component, creating a society, that was critical—and as we said, beer was a social glue. So it makes sense you’d sit around and drink it communally, from a big jug.

TWILLEY: So archaeologists have built up a really detailed picture of ancient beer using texts and images. But the other thing they typically use to help them understand how our ancestors lived is stuff—buildings, objects, the tools and artifacts that they excavate. And lots of stuff has been dug up in the area that was Mesopotamia. But for a culture that pretty much ran on beer, there’s a weird gap in the archaeological record: breweries.

GRABER: We asked Tate how many clearly identifiable breweries archaeologists have uncovered.

PAULETTE: Not very many. [LAUGH]

GRABER: Tate told us that so far, the best example is from a city called Lagash.

PAULETTE: This is a particularly interesting example, partly because there’s a cuneiform tablet that was found in that building that mentions a particular named brewer, and it mentions the word for brewery, and it seems to be partly about the distribution of beer to consumers. And then the building includes other things like a huge oven, different sorts of vats, several fireplaces that people have said, well, that makes sense, this could have been used for brewing. It’s also really interesting because it’s right next to a major temple in the city. So it was almost certainly brewing beer for this temple complex.

TWILLEY: But I’m sorry, one brewery does not a civilization make. Where are all the others?

PAULETTE: We have a few other cases, but none of them are perfect examples. Where we could definitely say this was a brewery, which is amazing because in this society they were brewing and drinking a lot of beer over several thousand years.

GRABER: But so why is so hard to identify those breweries? In theory, that seems like it’d be pretty obvious.

PAULETTE: It’s difficult. I think partly my answer is that we don’t really know what a brewery looked like, then, and so it’s that we don’t have a good model that we can sort of apply to our excavations. Like what are we looking for if we want to identify a brewery? I think—it’s entirely possible that there are already excavated structures that would have been breweries that we have not identified as breweries. But I’m not sure.

TWILLEY: Part of the problem is that these breweries we’re looking for, they might just be a single room in another bigger building

PAULETTE: If we actually look at particular archives, from particular breweries, for example, and say, well, how much were they actually producing on a day-by-day basis? It ends up not being that much. So if we go in thinking that we are looking for a massive building, you know, analogous to breweries of today, that’s maybe the wrong kind of scale. And the kind of brewing that these, say, palace breweries were doing might have only required a pretty small space with a few large vessels.

GRABER: And the issue with the vessels is that they might not have been used just for beer.

PAULETTE: A lot of the vessels that might have been functioning in a brewery, similar vessels could also be doing all kinds of other things in just a kitchen. You know, if they’re needing to heat up liquid in a brewery, well, you also need to heat up liquid to make soups and things, which we know they consumed.

TWILLEY: Tate said the problem is not a shortage of pots. There are shed-loads of pots, and also lots of lists of pots—you know the Mesopotamians loved lists.

PAULETTE: One of the big challenges here is that we have this wonderful written evidence and a lot of that is all kinds of different words for different kinds of vessels. Lots and lots of terminology related to this. We don’t know exactly what all of those vessels were used for or what they would have looked like. So a big challenge is, well, how do you take that and link it up with the huge numbers of ceramic vessels that we find archaeologically? To try to figure out which ones might have been used in brewing.

GRABER: But there’s one kind of pot that archaeologists feel pretty confident was used to brew beer.

PAULETTE: There’s a whole class in the written record of different terms that refer to these types of vessels. One of those terms, nig dur bor, it actually means a vessel with a hole in its base. So the term tells us, you know, what kind of vessel this was. And in general, or in the written record, when they talk about that vessel, they often like to talk about a pair of vessels. So there was the one with the hole in the base, and it’s set above another one that they call a collecting or receiving vessel. That’s the kind of iconic pair of brewing vessels. They love to talk about the sound that they make. A pleasant sound, or there’s this wonderful onomatopoeia, where they say they make a dubul-dabal sound. So like, dubul-dabal, dubul-dabal, dubul-dabal. Liquid, I guess, dripping or running from one into the other one.

TWILLEY: And these days, archaeologists have a new tool up their sleeves for figuring out what that liquid dripping between the dubul-dabal pots actually was.

PAULETTE: The big shift that’s been taking place over the last couple of decades is the introduction of organic residue analysis. So that increasingly, you can take a particular vessel, analyze residues that are basically preserved in the fabric of that vessel, and say: this vessel once contained…beer. There hasn’t been a lot of that done yet in Mesopotamia, but that’s going to almost certainly change in the coming years.

GRABER: The way scientists do organic residue analysis is they scrape at pottery to get at the stuff that really sunk into it, and then that gunk gets analyzed. You can’t see any ingredients with your naked eye. It all has to be examined through a microscope.

TWILLEY: But one thing that is super cool: if you do look through a microscope, you can see individual starch granules in this gunk. Not the grains themselves, of course, but you can tell from the granules what species of grain they came from, so like barley or oats. But even more importantly, you can see if they’ve been processed in some beer-related way. You can tell from how swollen, or pitted, or hollowed out the starch granules are, exactly what has happened to those grains—whether, for example, they’ve been malted, or fermented.

GRABER: Because otherwise the only evidence we have of grains are charred ones. When they’re charred, the Maillard reaction completely transforms the grain.

TWILLEY: A charred grain doesn’t decompose like a normal one, so they can last thousands of years. But the internal transformation is so extreme, it’s impossible to tell what they’ve been used for. Like, they could have been porridge for food, not malted for beer. Residue analysis gives a whole different understanding of grains.

GRABER: Archaeologists are also trying to find signs of ancient yeasts, because that would help us understand the flavor profile of the drinks. But so far that hasn’t been super successful.

TWILLEY: But where this kind of pottery residue analysis has been really fun is in helping archaeologists and brewers come up with an ingredient list to be able to recreate some of these ancient brews.

PAULETTE: There have been a lot of efforts lately. So archeologist Pat McGovern, for example, who does a lot of this organic residue analysis. He worked for a long time with Dogfish Head Brewing, and they made this whole series of ancient ales. Where they would focus, especially, on figuring out what ingredients might have been involved in these ancient beverages and then they basically brewed them on their modern brewing equipment. They bottled them and sold them.

TWILLEY: They haven’t made a Mesopotamian one, sadly, because that organic residue analysis hadn’t been done.

GRABER: But they did make a whole series of ancient ales: they did a Chinese one and an Egyptian one, and they did one called Midas Touch. Like King Midas. He was a king in what’s now Turkey, about 2700 years ago. Pat McGovern talked about it in an interview he did with the newspaper at the University of Pennsylvania where he’s a professor.

PATRICK MCGOVERN: So inside the drinking set, in the tombulus of Midas was residue. And it was excavated by the Penn Museum. Get the samples. And we started doing the analysis.

TWILLEY: And then, once he had the ingredients list, he called up one of America’s most interesting craft brewers, Sam Cala joney (Calagione) of Dogfish Head. And Sam got to work on recreating it. A process that he talked about with none other than Martha Stewart.

SAM CALAGIONE: This beer is based on evidence found in King Midas’ Tomb, a 2700 year old recipe.

MARTHA STEWART: King Midas?

CALAGIONE: Yep. It’s got white muscat grapes, saffron, and thyme honey in it. Let me know what you think of this one. Cheers, Cheers.

STEWART: Mmm.

GRABER: We know this wasn’t from Mesopotamia, but we really did want to taste at least some kind of ancient beer. This beer unfortunately isn’t available in the stores right now, but they did make a few cans recently and they were able to send us each one.

TWILLEY: So once again, we roped our partners into the tasting fun.

TWILLEY: And this time we have a recreation of an ancient beer.

GEOFF MANAUGH: Yeah, I’m excited about it. Yeah, and I feel like some people think that these sorts of beers or ancient recreations are a little gimmicky, but I think it’s pretty fun actually. It’s a good way to explore archaeology and the past and imagine what people were eating or drinking th- literally thousands of years ago.

GRABER: Tim and I were also pretty excited and we took the can out of the fridge—

TIM BUNTELL: Okay. Let’s pour this into a glass. [BEER POURING, FIZZING] Pretty nice, golden wheat sort of color.

TWILLEY: It’s got a nice bubble on it, which I must say, just initially, I am kind of surprised about. Because… they didn’t really have a way of not having beer go flat in those days. But, you know, maybe for a modern audience you want—you want a little bubble. Flat beer isn’t all the rage anymore.

GRABER: I also noted that the carbonation might not be strictly authentic. Then we each stuck our noses into the glass and sniffed.

MANAUGH:. So the smell is, is… [SNIFF] off the top of my head. If this was just given to me at a bar, I would think it might even be a cider. It’s got a kind of… it’s got a smell that isn’t very beer-like. And, yeah, I’d say cider going over toward mead.

GRABER: Smells a little sweet. [SWALLOW] Ooh. There’s a whole bunch of stuff going on there.

BUNTEL: Certainly is. [LAUGH] Yeah, it almost has a little of that, like Belgian ale… kind of, soft yeast? Kind of, taste going, I think.

GRABER: But then there’s all this sweetness, like it tastes like honey to me. And like… very sweet spices. But I get a lot of like honey in it.

TWILLEY: Geoff and I made a toast to King Midas, and took a sip each too.

MANAUGH: Hmm. Oh, funny. It definitely—it actually does taste like beer.

TWILLEY: Oh! But the taste actually is quite refreshing. Really quite good actually. I was afraid it was going to be—like it was going to be like a spiced kind of, ye olde, Renaissance fair kind of thing going on. And it’s actually, I mean, if, if I was served a cup of this by King Midas, I would happily drink to his continued good health, or success in the afterlife or whatever they were supposed to.

GRABER: I like it. I, I don’t know if I feel transported to ancient times. It definitely tastes different than anything that I would usually drink today. There’s got a lot of the, the herbs and the flavors in it, the herbs and spices are very different from what I would usually have in beer.

BUNTEL: And it doesn’t have that hoppy bitterness though. It’s, it’s got a bitter note, but it’s not hops.

TWILLEY: Weird but good was the verdict.

MANAUGH: But then also it occurs to me that we’re drinking it basically straight out of the refrigerator.

TWILLEY: I cannot actually believe that Geoff thought about refrigeration and not me, but yes: in ancient times, this beer would have mostly been consumed on the warmish side. Which, despite being British, and thus coming from the home of warm flat cask ales, I do draw the line at room temperature beer. So maybe I wouldn’t have been such a huge fan of ancient beer.

GRABER: Tate also did a recreation with a local brewer, not of King Midas’s beer, but of a Mesopotamian type. And he said it’s not as simple as Pat made it sound. First, there are these organic residues, sure, but a lot of the ingredients that were in there originally could well be totally lost. And an ingredients list doesn’t tell you how the beer was made, which has a big influence on the final product, too.

TWILLEY: When Tate started working on his recreation, with the Great Lakes Brewing Company, he realized right away exactly how much he didn’t know. Everything from what kinds of brewing vessels to use, to when to add various ingredients.

PAULETTE: So a huge amount of educated guesswork was involved here, in us trying to figure out how we think they brewed, which vessels they might have used. And so that was the, sort of trying to be authentic in terms of the equipment. And then we also tried to be as authentic as we could in terms of the process. But there are huge gaps in our knowledge about how they brew beer.

GRABER: As Tate told us earlier, one ingredient called bappir was clearly essential in making beer, but also people aren’t exactly sure what it was.

PAULETTE: We debated a lot and eventually decided to try out this version treating bappir as basically a fermentation starter. And we collaborated with a local baker in Cleveland to try to help us figure out how to make this.

TWILLEY: One of the things that does get mentioned in the written evidence is that bappir was typically made using a special oven

PAULETTE: Which suggests some kind of baking was involved and so we talked to them about it and said well, if we bake the bread, is that going to function as a fermentation starter? And they said, no. So we had to experiment a lot to figure out what kind of baking would be involved here that would still maintain this as a functioning starter. And we tried a lot of different versions, but eventually we did come down with what was essentially a sort of dried out sourdough starter. And it actually functioned very well for us.

GRABER: A ceramicist made modern versions of the dubul-dabal jar. But then okay, so there’s malted barley, there’s bappir, but like, in Midas Touch they used saffron as a flavor and as a bittering agent. What other ingredients were in this beer?

PAULETTE:The big uncertainty we have is what they might have flavored the beer with what are often called aromatics. And that is frustratingly difficult topic.

TWILLEY: Like we’ve said, they didn’t have hops, so what did they use as sort of the backbone, flavorwise?

PAULETTE: There’s been a lot of discussion of one particular ingredient called kasu, which certainly, especially in later periods, was used as a flavoring ingredient. But… we don’t know exactly what it was. There’s been all kinds of different suggestions about exactly what kind of plant this was.

TWILLEY: This is one of the Akkadian words where decipherment is still ongoing. Tate said depending on who you consult, kasu could be cassia, which is like cinnamon. Or it could be mustard, beet, carob, or wild licorice. So, quite a range there.

GRABER: So what they did instead was they gave the brewers a list of herbs and spices that would have been available at the time, like coriander, cardamom, fennel, juniper berries, and dates. It was pretty clear that date syrup was regularly used in making beer, but it wasn’t so clear how it was used.

PAULETTE: They could have added it early in the process to boost the alcohol content, maybe add some flavor. Or they could add it at the end to add, basically, sweetness. We did both of those things for different events. And I think the people trying it were perfectly happy with the ones where we added it early in the process, with the higher alcohol content. Not so happy about the ones where we added it after fermentation to sweeten it. I think people did not generally enjoy that.

TWILLEY: Sadly, these experiments weren’t available for us to taste. But overall, Tate’s beer recreations seem to have also been a hit.

PAULETTE: Were they good? I think generally the consensus was yes. They did vary pretty significantly across our different tasting events. And they varied in alcohol content. I think from about three to eight percent, because of various decisions that we made. They were generally pretty opaque, but sometimes a kind of milky looking opaque, sometimes more yellowish. We were not doing anything to carbonate them, depending again on specific decisions we made.

GRABER: This was certainly a fun experiment for Tate, but it also demonstrated just how much there still is for archaeologists who love beer to figure out.

TWILLEY: There are so many more pots to analyze and holes to dig!

GRABER: Tate has a dream of what the perfect find would be, somewhere in the Middle East…

PAULETTE: I guess personally, I would love a really good brewery that’s just got everything sitting there in place, you know, maybe it would be nicely split up by, you know. One activity was happening over here in this room and a different one over here—that’s probably not likely. But I would love something like that.

TWILLEY: But the real fantasy would be to find multiple breweries from different time periods—that way archaeologists like Tate could start to see changes in brewing techniques and beer culture over time. Like the way in the US we’ve gone from homebrew to mega corporate breweries to today’s explosion of craft breweries.

PAULETTE: I wish we could address those kinds of questions in Mesopotamia. But as is probably clear, there are still a lot of fundamental questions. So we are not at that point yet. But that’s the kind of big picture questions about the sort of development of the brewing industry that I would personally be interested in.

[MUSIC]

GRABER: For our special supporters, we’ve saved more about the story of the epic of Gilgamesh and what it has to do with beer, that’ll be in our newsletter, which you can get by going to gastropod.com/support. And speaking of supporters, a very happy birthday to one of our supreme supporters Alice Kuo! Happy birthday, Alice!

TWILLEY: We say it all the time, but we really couldn’t make the show without such generous listeners. Thanks, also, this episode to Tate Paulette, his new book is called In the Land of Ninkasi, and we have a link to it on our website.

GRABER: Thanks as always to our fantastic producer, Claudia Geib. We’ll be back in two weeks with a brand new episode, till then!