Our 9,000-Year Love Affair With Booze

Alcohol isn’t just a mind-altering drink: It has been a prime mover of human culture from the beginning, fueling the development of arts, language, and religion.

National Geographic

By Andrew Curry

Photographs by Brian Finke

May 19, 2017 (appeared in February 2017 issue)

If you’re a beermaker in Germany, Martin Zarnkow is a guy you want to know. Students come to his department at the Technical University of Munich because it’s one of the few places in this nation of beer drinkers to get a degree in brewing science. Some of Germany’s biggest breweries come to Zarnkow to troubleshoot funky tastes, develop new beers, or just purchase one of his hundreds of strains of yeast. His lab is secured with coded door locks and filled with sophisticated chemical equipment and gene sequencers. But today he’s using none of that.

Instead I find him down the hall, hunched over an oven in the employee kitchen, poking what looks like a pan of mushy granola cookies with a black plastic spatula. The cookies are made from brewer’s malt—sprouted, toasted barley grains—mixed with wheat flour and a few spoonfuls of sourdough starter. Pouring a coffee, Zarnkow tells me that his plan today is to re-create beer from a 4,000-year-old Sumerian recipe.

Zarnkow, who started his career as a brewer’s apprentice, is also an eminent beer historian. He’s a big man with a full salt-and-pepper beard, ruddy cheeks, a booming voice, and a belly that strains the buttons on his short-sleeved plaid shirt. Put him in a brown habit and he’d be well cast as a medieval monk, the one in charge of stocking the abbey with barrels of ale. The former abbey next door, for example: Zarnkow’s building shares a hilltop, overlooking the Munich airport, with the Weihenstephan brewery, which was founded by Benedictine monks in A.D. 1040 and is the oldest continually functioning brewery in the world.

In parts of South America the corn beer known as chicha has been a staple for thousands of years. Brewing it has traditionally been women’s work. A page from a 16th-century Spanish chronicle made in Peru shows a noblewoman serving chicha to an Inca emperor, who raises it to toast the sun god, Inti.

You don’t have to be a regular at an Oktoberfest to know that Germany has a long history with beer. But Germany also has a long history with sausages. France started making wine in earnest only after it was conquered by the Romans (as did most of Europe) and has never looked back—but the French are also famously fond of cheese. For a long time that’s about how most historians and archaeologists have regarded beer and wine: as mere consumables, significant ones to be sure, but not too different from sausages or cheese, except that overconsumption of alcohol is a far more destructive vice. Alcoholic beverages were a by-product of civilization, not central to it. Even the website of the German Brewers’ Federation takes the line that beer was likely an offshoot of breadmaking by the first farmers. Only once the craft blossomed at medieval abbeys like Weihenstephan did it become worth talking about.

Zarnkow is one of a group of researchers who over the past few decades have challenged that story. He and others have shown that alcohol is one of the most universally produced and enjoyed substances in history—and in prehistory too, because people were imbibing alcohol long before they invented writing. Zarnkow’s Sumerian beer is very far from the oldest. Chemical analysis recently showed that the Chinese were making a kind of wine from rice, honey, and fruit 9,000 years ago. In the Caucasus Mountains of modern-day Georgia and the Zagros Mountains of Iran, grapes were one of the earliest fruits to be domesticated, and wine was made as early as 7,400 years ago.

Outside a chicheria in Lamay, Peru, in the Sacred Valley of the Inca Empire, Lucio Chávez Díaz drinks a glass of chicha frutillada, a corn beer flavored with strawberries. The pure beers, wines, and spirits of today are a historical exception; alcoholic beverages have long been doctored with everything from pine needles to tree resins to honey. Ancient Greek warriors even grated goat cheese onto their beer. When the Inca drank chicha out of wooden cups called keros—like this 17th-century one—they often stirred not strawberries but psychoactive herbs into the beer.

All over the world, in fact, evidence for alcohol production from all kinds of crops is showing up, dating to near the dawn of civilization. University of Pennsylvania biomolecular archaeologist Patrick McGovern believes that’s not an accident. >From the rituals of the Stone Age on, he argues, the mind-altering properties of booze have fired our creativity and fostered the development of language, the arts, and religion. Look closely at great transitions in human history, from the origin of farming to the origin of writing, and you’ll find a possible link to alcohol. “There’s good evidence from all over the world that alcoholic beverages are important to human culture,” McGovern says. “Thirty years ago that fact wasn’t as recognized as it is now.” Drinking is such an integral part of our humanity, according to McGovern, that he only half-jokingly suggests our species be called Homo imbibens.

Today Zarnkow is trying to connect his students with those roots. The barley cookies are a vehicle for the sourdough, which contains the yeast that will make the magic happen. When the cookies are ready—dark brown on top, still a little soft in the middle—Zarnkow carries them from the kitchen to an upstairs lecture hall. There, in front of his class, he slides them into a huge glass pitcher, then scoops in more crushed barley malt and some milled emmer, an ancient grain, as the Sumerians would have done. The final ingredient: three quarts of tap water from a sink in the hallway. Zarnkow stirs the resulting slop with his kitchen spatula until it’s a uniform, yellowish beige, like bread dough.

It looks decidedly unappetizing. But by tomorrow, Zarnkow promises, this will be beer—a primitive, wild beer, one that people 5,000 or more years ago might have been intimately familiar with. “Mix three different ingredients with water, and that’s it,” he says. “Craft brewers today aren’t discovering anything new. Billions of people have brewed, over thousands of years.”

All through my visit I’ve been distracted by a rich, malt aroma wafting through the open windows from the brewery next door. It’s a primal, pleasant smell, and it taps into a part of my brain that makes me want to stop, sit down, inhale deeply, and take a seat in the nearest beer garden.

Alcohol lowers inhibitions, and that can make people feel closer to their friends and to the spiritual world. The Inca consumed chicha in feasts that lasted days; they offered it to the gods on mighty altars. At a chicheria in Cusco today, men drink as they play cards, while at a shrine in one corner of the bar (left), a glass is offered to a Peruvian icon known as the Black Christ. The centuries have added layers to Peruvian culture, and Christianity has replaced worship of the sun and moon as the dominant religion—but the ancestral tipple endures.