A Brief History Of Beer.
Steve Green - 2001.
Early Sumerian scripts show bread made from barley being crumbled into water to make a mash, which people then drank. It is recorded as having made people feel 'exhilarated'. The baking of bread would have made the barley soluble and really achieved a similar role to the malting process used nowadays. Effectively, the bread was a means of processing the barley into a form that could be stored and transported. Fruits once picked had to be used during their season or turned into wine but wine lacks the proteins present in a beer.
A seal from around 4000 years ago suggests that the Sumerians by this time knew about producing malt.
Cultivation of barley originated around the Uphrates and Tigris rivers but spread North and Westwards. The Romans being accustomed to wine, noted that the people of the North drank beer.
After the dark ages, Christian Abbeys improved brewing processes as they produced for pilgrims and themselves. The modern abbeys that still produce beer today are mainly Roman Catholic. Disapproval of drinking by some religions is a recent phenomenon.
By the mid 1580s, brewing started to become more scientific. Significant advances and beer styles developed mainly in Bohemia, France, Germany, UK, Ireland, Denmark and the Netherlands.
The greatest milestone in the 1800s was the isolation of pure culture yeasts. Traditional real ales and most wheat beers use a top fermenting strain of yeast referred to as Saccharomyces cerevisiae. This yeast ferments on the top of the beer supported by it's production of CO2 as a by-product of fermentation. The yeast is skimmed from one fermentation to initiate the next.
As a comparison, lagers ferment at a cooler temperature and use bottom fermenting yeasts referred to as Saccaromyces calsbergensis. These ferment at lower temperatures of around 5 to 9 deg C for up to 2 weeks.
We at Le Brewery use only top fermenting traditional yeasts from a traceable culture. This ensures our ales conform with all the traditional characteristics of this ancient style of beer.