Pyramid builders at Giza drew a daily ration of nearly four litres of beer
Egyptian records show the workers who built the Giza pyramids received close to four litres of beer a day, and a modern recreation of the recipe came out at about 5 percent alcohol, like a pint today. Humans have been brewing on purpose for at least 13,000 years, and no other animal does it.
The oldest verifiable brewery lies in a prehistoric burial cave near Haifa, where stone mortars cut into the floor held traces of wheat and barley beer about 13,000 years old, possibly brewed for feasts honouring the dead. At Jiahu in northern China, jars from 7000 to 5600 BC held residue of a mixed drink of grape and hawthorn wine, honey mead and rice beer. In Georgia, cultivated grape pips and pottery showing celebrating figures point to winemaking around 6000 BCE, and the first clear chemical proof of barley beer comes from Godin Tepe in western Iran, about 3500 to 3100 BCE.
Early civilisations built drinking into their myths. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the wild man Enkidu downs seven jugs of beer and bursts into song, and a Sumerian hymn to Ninkasi, goddess of beer, describes fermenting bread with grapes and honey into a cloudy brew sipped through straws. At Hierakonpolis in Egypt a brewery from about 3400 BCE could turn out up to 1,135 litres a day. Wine there was an imported luxury for the elite, while beer belonged to everyone. A festival called the Drunkenness of Hathor recalled gods tricking a raging goddess with beer dyed to look like blood, sparing humanity.
The world's oldest surviving liquid wine sits in a first-century Roman glass urn found in 2019 at Carmona in Spain, three centuries older than the Speyer bottle discovered in 1867. Celts were making cider by 3000 BCE, and Pliny the Elder described Rome's golden age of winemaking in the second century BCE.
Today drinks are usually grouped as beers, wines and spirits, at roughly 3 to 50 percent alcohol. About a third of humanity drinks, and the industry passed 1.5 trillion dollars in 2017. Alcohol is a depressant: small amounts relax people, large ones can kill, and long-term use raises the risk of dependence, heart disease and several cancers. It is a group 1 carcinogen, and a 2023 World Health Organization release said health risk begins with the first drop.
Source: Alcoholic beverage
