by Robert Evans
It’s weird to me that the Internet just ran with the beer angle and completely missed a chance to sensationalize Dr. Hayden’s much cooler point. Parties are the basis of international government. Brewing beer wasn’t the sole focus of agriculture. But because it was so well loved and such a status symbol, producing enough of it was of major importance to the state, such as it was 14,000 years ago.
The very earliest recipe known to archaeology is an ancient Sumerian guide to brewing beer. It’s written in the form of a hymn to the goddess of beer, Ninkasi (literally, “the lady who fills the mouth” [sexual innuendo hadn’t been invented yet]), and it describes in detail the ancient Sumerian beer-brewing process.
That process started with the baking of bread made from barley flour, malted barley, and honey. Delicious as that sounds, this bread, bappir, wasn’t for eating. It would be baked twice and stored until the time came to crumble it into a mixture of smashed dates and water and then brew it into a hearty, unfiltered beer. This probably wasn’t the first beer in history, but it’s the first beer—the first anything, in fact—that we have a recipe for.
The ancient Sumerians were all about beer. It wasn’t an occasional indulgence for them. It was the duct tape that held their society together and kept it productive. Most homes would brew their own beer, for regular consumption, and the government brewed and distributed a liter of beer per day for its employees. I can’t help but think the DMV would move much more smoothly if we instituted the same policy for our government workers. Who needs a pension plan, anyway?
Sumerians likely brewed their beer together with family and friends, and they consumed it the same way. The earliest pictorial depiction of alcohol consumption in the historical record dates back to about 4000 BCE, and it shows something recognizable even today as a party.
Artist re-creation of the original pictograph. Tavia Morra
That’s not a hookah those dudes are sucking on. It’s a huge beer-filled vase, and they’re drinking out of it with straws. It’s a little like setting up individual taps for each person’s face, only less hygienic. This picture makes one thing very clear: Backwash is a problem literally as old as human society.
At this point, reader, you know me well enough to guess what comes next: It’s time for another experiment.
HOW TO: Drink Like a Sumerian
Full disclosure: I’m not the first person to try and re-create this oldest of recipes. Not even close. The Anchor Brewing Company developed its own version of Sumerian bread beer in 1989. And as I researched this chapter I came across a detailed recipe for Sumerian beer in a 2007 article in Brew Your Own magazine by Dan Mouer.
Both those recipes are based on interpretations of the “Hymn to Ninkasi,” the nineteenth-century BCE religious devotional that doubles as a very rough guide to brewing Sumerian beer. It’s not a perfect recipe by any means, and several steps are left up to the determination of the brewer. But I’m going to try and re-create it as directly as possible here. First you’ll need date wine. And unless you live in Egypt or by a particularly adventurous Whole Foods, you’re going to have to make your own.
Date Wine Ingredients (Per 5 Gallons)
1 five-gallon food-grade plastic bucket or wooden barrel
A large metal bowl, 2 gallons (-ish)
An airlock (found in homebrew stores/Internets all around)
3.5 pounds dates
1 packet yeast, either bread yeast or wine yeast (found in your local brew store)
Directions
The hymn doesn’t go into detail on how the date wine is brewed, just that it gets mixed together in the final product. A lot of date wine recipes involve extra sugar, black tea, etc. I’m keeping this as simple as possible. The Sumerians didn’t have black tea, and they were probably still in enough awe of the whole “rotting fruit turns into awesome” process to not mess around too much with the basics.
Mash your dates with a potato masher or, if you’re really dedicated, the stone from a very old mortar and pestle. Once properly mashed, pour in water and simmer on low heat until the water takes on the color of the dates. Then dump the whole mix into your brew bucket, add enough water to fill your five-gallon bucket up to a little less than four gallons.
Now dump in your yeast. The ancient Sumerians would’ve just (unknowingly) used the natural yeast hitching a ride on the outside of those dates. My dates, and probably your dates, had to be washed of pesticides—and nearly everything else—before being turned into wine. We’re going to have to cheat a little with our yeast if we want to be sure all those dates weren’t bought in vain. I used a champagne yeast, but a cider yeast or even just some Fleischmann’s bread yeast will all do the trick.
Seal the wine, put in your airlock, and let it sit for a week. About four days into that process, it’s time to bake up the bappir.
Bappir Ingredients
3 pounds malted barley
1 pound barley flour
1.25 pounds raw honey
Water
Directions
This one’s going to take a little bit of creativity on our part to turn into an actual recipe. Here’s what the “Hymn to Ninkasi” (Miguel Civil translation) gives us:
You are the one who handles the dough, [and] with a big shovel,
Mixing in a pit, the bappir with sweet aromatics,
Ninkasi, You are the one who handles
the dough, [and] with a big shovel,
Mixing in a pit, the bappir with [date]-honey.
You are the one who bakes the bappir in the big oven,
Puts in order the piles of hulled grains,
Ninkasi, you are the one who bakes
the bappir in the big oven,
Puts in order the piles of hulled grains,
The whole poem is like that, people. It gives Ninkasi credit for every stage of beer’s production as if there weren’t legions of hardworking brewers handling sweet aromatics and, uh, shoveling dough. Florid as it is, a lot of this recipe is pretty straightforward. Mix the barley and flour together, pour in a little water and fold it into dough. Then you stir in honey and stick it in a “big oven.”
The resultant mix looks a little bit like a protein bar, and it actually tastes great—I’ve found that a couple of pieces with coffee makes for a pretty satisfying breakfast. The Sumerians likely didn’t eat their bappir unless times were quite rough indeed, but I’m a fan of the stuff. (It tastes better than the beer.)
Once you’ve got your bread baked and your dates wined, it’s time to turn this whole mess into Sumerian beer. Here’s the hymn again:
You are the one who waters the malt set on the ground,
The noble dogs keep away even the potentates,
Ninkasi, you are the one who waters the malt
set on the ground,
The noble dogs keep away even the potentates.
You are the one who soaks the malt in a jar
The waves rise, the waves fall.
Ninkasi, you are the one who soaks
the malt in a jar
The waves rise, the waves fall.
I’m assuming that bit about the dogs and the potentates refers to some particularly booze-starved politicians who couldn’t calm the hell down and wait for the brewers to do their job. Hence the need for dogs, to keep the Man off the brewer’s back while he was busy making beer.
Malt is traditionally made from sprouted barley, but this recipe uses the bappir bread instead. Crumble your bappir into about a gallon of water in a pot, and simmer until the bappir is thoroughly soaked. The mix should turn thick and gloopy, and develop a brownish-white color. This is what beer brewers call wort. Next, spread your wort out on “large reed mats,” or, if you prefer, strain it in a colander. Drain it of water and then dunk the wort into your date wine bucket and seal it again.
Let the whole mess sit, fermenting, for two full w
eeks, longer if you want a stronger brew. Once you’re done letting it ferment, run the whole mess of beer through a filter (maybe that colander again?) to get out the biggest, uh, chunks. The hymn suggests using a “filtering vat,” but any tight mesh screen ought to do the trick. Don’t worry if the final beer is still much chunkier than you’re used to: That’s how it should be.
The last step is to make sure you consume your beer in the appropriate Sumerian fashion: out of a huge multigallon vase, through straws, with a bunch of your friends. I enjoyed my first batch with my fiancée and my roommate, Dave. We poured about two gallons into a large metal pan and cut out several two- to three-foot lengths of plastic tubing to act as straws.
Now: the flavor. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad, either. It had a slightly sweet, slightly sour taste, a bit like a Belgian lambic. And it packed a significant punch, at around 5 to 6 percent ABV. This was likely due to the modern yeast we used. Booze archaeologist Dr. Hayden assured me that ancient beer would’ve averaged 2 to 3 percent ABV. The delivery method had a major impact, too. Something about the whole setup, sitting around with friends, reclining in chairs and just sipping beer from a straw, encouraged excessive consumption. I found myself treating it like a hookah, drinking constantly whenever I wasn’t actively talking.
Drinking Sumerian style is more of a long, slow burn than anything. We got drunk quickly, and stayed drunk all night. In all, we consumed about two gallons over the course of five-ish hours. It was enough that Dave and I (the primary drinkers) were significantly buzzed all night, but not enough that either of us vomited on anything.
My primary takeaway from this experiment had more to do with the Sumerian style of drinking party than the actual beer itself. The beer wasn’t bad (I tried it on four people and only one of them wasn’t willing to drink more than a sip) but it didn’t rise above the level of Bud Light, either. The Sumerian drinking setup is quite genius, though. It facilitates discussion, as well as drinking, but it isn’t conducive to a serious binge.
So here’s my advice: Bake some bappir for party treats, buy a couple gallons of good beer, pour it in a pot, break out the straws, and call some friends over. I think you’ll agree that the people of Sumer had a few ideas about drinking that we could stand to imitate.
The Alcohol Age (or, Drinking Constantly, in Moderation)
In 2013, I spent between four and six days dying in a hotel in Pushkar, India. It’s hard to pin down the time line exactly, because I was shitting and puking myself the entire time. It was the first time in my life I’d ever felt like a part of my body was actively angry: I could feel my intestines writhing inside me like an epileptic anaconda. My friends sleeping on the next floor could hear me screaming through the night.
The culprit was a cup of lukewarm instant coffee I’d ordered the day before, in Jaipur. Coffee and tea are usually safe bets in India. If you get dirty water hot enough, long enough, it becomes safe water. But as I brought the cup up to my mouth I caught the faint sewage scent of doom. And by the time I realized I was in danger, the first drops were already cascading down my throat. Warm drops. Not hot, and certainly not clean.
Clean, safe tap water for all is probably the single greatest privilege the first world has over the rest of the world. Most of you have instant access to clean water that won’t make you shit your pants to death after drinking it. That’s an unbelievably rare thing, historically. Our ancestors gambled with every cup.
If you’ve never experienced dysentery, count yourself winning-the-goddamn-lottery lucky. I caught it for the first time in Guatemala, gargling with water from the shower like a damned fool. In the seven or eight weeks we were there, I remember three distinct, bathroom-wrecking bouts.
There were eight people in my group in Guatemala. Most of us dealt with dysentery more than once, and there were times when basically all of us were sick simultaneously. From an unthinking cup of local tap water, to a droplet down the throat in a shower, to treacherous, treacherous soup, only one of us proved immune: my friend Josh. He made the novel decision to chase every drink, all day, with swigs from an ever-present bottle of Guatemalan whiskey. Josh ate the same food, drank the same coffee, did everything the same as everyone else in our group. And he never once got sick.
The ancients knew what Josh knew: The microbes that turn our guts into cannons can’t handle their liquor as well as we can. Alcohol makes bad water a whole lot safer.
Like millions of suffering freshmen around the country, our ancestors didn’t always have hard liquor to rely on. But the beer-brewing process tended to kill off the unfriendliest microbes in the water. Wine, much higher in alcohol content, could even be mixed directly with water. This made the water much safer, and ensured all of ancient society wasn’t one perpetual poopy hangover.
Drinking all day, every day is a lot of fun . . . for about three or four days, once a year or so. Start doing it constantly and those good times turn very quickly into a liver- and life-crippling problem. The ancients knew this just as well as you and I. We wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t kept enough of a handle on their habits to build cities, invent philosophies, and also sex generation after generation of new people into existence.
Drinking became culturally ubiquitous as a self-defense measure; our booze protected us from the untrustworthy water we needed to survive. But the ancients also needed self-defense methods to protect them from alcohol’s powerfully addictive potential. The ancient Greeks watered their wine down heavily, and they drank with food to avoid the dreaded empty-liquor belly. These social mores worked sometimes. But when they didn’t, there was the Pythagorean cup.
You probably know Pythagoras of Samos best from the Pythagorean theorem all high school graduates either remember, or remember they used to remember. But when he wasn’t trying to figure out the length of various sides of a triangle, Pythagoras was busy dreaming up ways to stop his contemporaries from prematurely destroying their livers. The Pythagorean cup was the apex of his studies in Wet Blanketude. If a greedy drinker filled the cup too high, its contents would instantly rain down onto his lap, or the host’s floor.
Tavia Morra
Also called the “Cup of Justice,” which sounds like something you’d shout while hammered, the Pythagorean cup was the most elaborate weapon in sobriety’s ancient arsenal. But it wasn’t the only one. The homebrewed nature of most historical booze provided a natural limitation to consumption: You could drink only as much as you could make. The ancient Egyptians even considered taverns and bars, places where beer and wine were available in endless quantity, given the right amount of money, as inherently immoral places.
Hippocrates, the Greek philosopher who basically invented Western medicine, considered alcohol incredibly useful for treating everything from fever to gas. But he railed against men who prescribed booze for every ailment, and who drank it straight and unwatered. Hippocrates was well in line with mainstream Greek attitudes when he said:
Undiluted wine drunk in large quantity renders a man feeble; and everybody seeing this knows that such is the power of wine.
Alcoholism wasn’t unknown in ancient Greece, of course. Socrates famously dedicated many hours of his life to putting his heartthrob Alcibiades back together after drunken ragers. But it wasn’t until the age of the Romans, with their vast slave-run vineyards, that alcoholism became possible on a large scale. Before that time only the wealthy and powerful could afford to be problem drinkers.
That went about as well as you’d expect.
The Drunks Who Changed History
Alexander the Great had a backstory most of you will find fairly sympathetic: He was born to a distant, workaholic father who drank constantly and in public. The fact that his father, Philip II of Macedon, was the mightiest warlord of the era didn’t make young Alexander any less embarrassed at his dad’s drunken shenanigans.
The ancient Macedonians didn’t use Pythagorean cups, nor did they water do
wn their wine. They were a nation of nomadic horse-based warriors and they frequently rode shitfaced into battle, or at least with two full sheets to the wind. Drinking to excess was a common if not ubiquitous thing in their warrior culture. And Philip, their king, drank as hard as any of his soldiers.
Young Alexander had been tutored (and partly raised) by the famous philosopher Aristotle. Since Aristotle was a Greek, it’s not a stretch to assume he passed along some judgment of barbarous Macedonian drinking traditions to his pupil. This famously came to a head at a feast Philip threw to celebrate his second wedding, to a woman named Cleopatra who was very much not Alexander’s mom.
The feast quickly turned into a drunken feast, as was the Macedonian way, and one of Cleopatra’s relatives made a snide comment to Philip about him getting a “real” heir now. Alexander took offense at this and threw his wineglass at the man, sparking a drunken brawl. At one point during the fight, Philip drew his sword and lunged at Alexander, but drunkenly fell over a couch and busted ass on the floor. At the time, Philip had been planning an invasion of Asia. Alexander couldn’t resist using this to needle him:
Look, men, he’s about to cross from Europe to Asia, and he falls crossing from couch to couch.
Alexander and Philip never fully reconciled. And by “never reconciled,” I mean “Alexander and his bio mom probably had Philip assassinated.” We’ll never know the historical truth, because drunken warlords accumulate enemies like horses’ asses accumulate flies, but we do know that Philip’s drunken ways eventually passed from father to son.
Over the course of his short life, Alexander went from being the closest thing to a teetotaler in his booze-soaked society to being one of history’s greatest raging drunks. Alcohol became more and more of a problem for him as the stresses of running a great empire piled up, along with the pain of a multitude of war wounds. Alexander hosted epic drinking parties on a near-daily basis, and it’s unlikely he was sober while planning (or fighting) the majority of his campaigns.
