BARBARIAN BREWS
Professor shares barrels of beer history and quashes misconceptions
The next time you’re drinking a beer, raise a toast to the barbarians.
If it wasn’t for those barbarians — the Germanic tribes — the Greek and Roman notion that beer was a sissy, low-class, putrid drink might have endured.
Society still ranks it below wine but beer was the barbarian’s beverage and that is crucial in the history of brews.
“Usually people see them as looters who destroyed Rome and started off the Dark Ages and some of that is true. But one good thing is they restore beer to its proper place,” said Max Nelson, a beer history buff who will be speaking at a beer symposium Sept. 30 at the University of Windsor and teaching an ElderCollege course on beer in October.
The university professor who teaches Greek and Roman studies did his 2001 PhD dissertation on the subject.
The Greeks and Romans saw beer as an effeminate foreigner’s drink, he said. The Germanic tribes bought into the idea that wine was superior but loved their beer and quashed ideas of it being unmanly. Even in modern history, beer got a bad rap but craft brews are changing that. Beer may be in its golden age, he said.
“We live in great times for beer. We’re very lucky.”
When Nelson talks beer history he’s often correcting misconceptions. Beer, as we know it today, is a European drink but don’t credit the monks, he said.
It was the Celts who gave us hopped beer — there’s evidence of hopped beer in the sixth century B.C. — and the Celts used barrels for beer as early as the first century B.C. The first explicit written evidence to brewing beer (rather than making it by fermenting malted loaves) is also for the Celts in the fifth century A.D., he said.
It’s not clear how far back in history early forms of beer were made. Finding evidence of beer depends on finding trace amounts on a drinking vessel.
Egyptian Pharaohs drank beer but it’s a misconception that beer got its start in Mesopotamia or Egypt and spread from there. Beer was probably discovered accidentally in various places, he said.
Nelson calls early versions “mixed fermentables” rather than beer. In prehistoric times people fermented various things together — grapes, cereals and honey — to make alcohol.
“We can’t really say where beer began with certainty.”
Today’s drinkers wouldn’t recognize those early versions. An early form of a plain beer with herbs in 2000 B.C. would have been drunk warm and tasted sour because of the bacteria, and smoky because it was made on wood fires.
Another misconception is that people made beer because water wasn’t safe to drink. The ancient Greeks knew to boil water to purify it so people made beer because it tasted better than water and could get you drunk, he said.
Nelson is one of three beer history experts speaking at a beer symposium Sept. 30 at the University of Windsor. It’s a free event that starts at 1:30 at McPherson Lounge in Alumni Hall.
It won’t have any beer tastings but Nelson’s Canterbury ElderCollege course in October will.
Canterbury ElderCollege, which offers courses for people age 55 or over in Windsor, Essex County and Chatham-Kent, has more than 80 courses lined up for its 2017 Fall Semester. This year there are a number of free courses being offered on Canadian history topics thanks to funding from the Canada 150 Grant, Community Foundations of Canada, and WindsorEssex Community Foundation. Classes fill up fast and registration started last week.
Usually people see them as looters who destroyed Rome and started off the Dark Ages .... But one good thing is they restore beer to its proper place.