Posted on 01/20/2012 5:10:16 PM PST by SunkenCiv
This has cast doubt on the popular theory that Mesopotamian brewers used to crumble flat bread made from barley or emmer into their mash. The so-called "bappir" (Sumerian for "beer bread") is never counted as bread in the administrative texts, but in measuring units, like coarsely ground barley. Damerow also points out that the high degree of standardisation, which meant that the quantities of raw materials allocated to the brewers by the central administration remained exactly the same over long periods, sometimes even decades, makes it difficult to base any recipes on them.
According to Damerow, even the "Hymn of Ninkasi", one of the most significant sources on the ancient art of brewing, does not provide any reliable information about the constituents and steps of the brewing process. This lyric text from the Old Babylonian period around 1800 B.C. is a mythological poem or song that glorifies the brewing of beer. Despite the elaborate versification, Damerow states that the procedure of brewing is not conclusively described. It merely offers an incomplete record of the individual steps. For instance, there is no clue as to how the germination of the grain was interrupted at the right time. It can only be speculated that the barley was layered and that the germination was stopped by heating and drying the grain as soon as the root embryo had the right size...
Given our limited knowledge about the Sumerian brewing processes, we cannot say for sure whether their end product even contained alcohol", writes Damerow. There is no way of ascertaining whether the brew was not more similar to the bread drink kvass from Eastern Europe than to German Pilsner, Altbier or wheat beer.
(Excerpt) Read more at physorg.com ...
This is an archaic writing tablet from Mesopotamia (approx. 3000 B.C.): The tablet which contains proto-cuneiform writing, belongs to the most ancient group of written records on earth. It contains calculations of basic ingredients required for the production of cereal products, for example, different types of beer. Credit: M. Nissen, 1990
Bummer for them.
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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I was going to not post this (it was ready to click into being) without having the "zymurgy" and "beer" keywords ready to go. Turns out there's a LOT of beer topics. |
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/johnny
They had Budweiser back in the day? ;-)
No beer?! Reason 5,498 for being thankful that I wasn’t born during ancient times.
No wonder there aren’t any more Sumerians—they missed out on all the health benefits of beer. Poor guys.
Does the grain really need to be malted for the drink to be called “beer”?
Yea,really. I`ll stick with Sam Adams.
A similar tablet was found that explains how two Sumerians tricked the Egyptian guy into paying their bar tab.
This guy is talking out his HEY!!! LOOK!!! A butterfly!!!!
The whole paper (pdf)
And I'm gonna go to all the work to invent a nonalcohol beverage.
Being the expert I am, I am going to hypotesizzzuh that back in the day, SOMEONE was in such a hurry to sit down and pee they sat on the grain pot and not the pee pot and introduced the grain to water and yeast...
A supposed 143 year old Kenyan woman says she owes her long life to drinking homemade beer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_-iks6L0w4&feature=related
Thanks for the link! Those guys really lost it, didn’t they?
It is true that Guinness Stout is the beer that is suppose to be the best for you. People with AIDS who didn't drink alcohol and took good care of themselves, it was found, were dying much sooner than those who didn't take good care of themselves and drank beer everyday. It is hard to find on the net, but there use to be studies out there about the finding that people with AIDS lived the longest who drank beer everyday, but the people who drank Guinness Stout, especially tap, lived on the whole the longest of all the beer drinking people who had AIDS. The lack of pasteurization is what caused the tap Stout to be even better for you. The old, old lady in the video drank homemade beer so it wouldn't have been pasteurized.
St. Patrick’s Day celebrations may actually be good for you – if they include a pint of the Guinness Irish stout beer. It turns out that ads touting Guinness as being good for you really are true.
A 2003 American Heart Association study found that drinking a pint of Guinness each day can reduce the risk of blood clots that cause heart attacks.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin conducted tests to compare the health benefits of stout Guinness with lager Heineken.
They fed the two beers to dogs with clogged arteries and then measured the effects on the stickiness of blood-clotting cells. The results showed only the dogs that were fed Guinness had reduced clotting activity, making them less likely to have a heart attack.
Researchers said that dark stout beer, like Guinness, is packed with powerful antioxidant compounds called flavonoids, which can help reduce damage to the lining of arteries.
Other possible health benefits of drinking beer in moderation include protecting against type 2 diabetes, increasing good cholesterol levels, lowering the risk of developing dementia and improving cognitive function.
http://www.drcutler.com/blood-clots/guinness-is-good-for-you-19675297/
Pretty easy to understand the Guinness Stout from the tap thing. People discover there are some things worth living for.
Perhaps the beer bread was in fact malted barley or emmer which would have been sold in bulk. Some early civilizations had communal ovens for baking bread where houswives would bring their bread for baking. So perhaps there were communal malters sprouting the grain in preparation for beer making.
Commercial, not communal.
People weren't stupid: They know drinking water made them sick with diarrhea, but if they drank beer or wine they didn't.
And I had always understood that the "beer"of Egypt and Mesopotamia was low alcohol, but full of protein from the yeast so had nutritional value: More like thick grey home brewed African beer than clear lager.LINK
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