On Food and Cooking

barley and wheat beers were being brewed in
Egypt, Babylon, and Sumeria by the third
millennium BCE, and that somewhere between
a third and half of the barley crop in
Mesopotamia was reserved for brewing. We
know that brewers preserved the malted grain,
or malt, by baking it into a flat bread, then
soaked the bread in water to make beer.
The knowledge of beer making seems to
have passed from the Middle East through
western Europe to the north, where in a
climate too cold for the vine, beer became the
usual beverage. (Among the nomadic tribes of
northern Europe and central Asia who did not
even cultivate grain, milk was fermented into
the drinks called kefir and koumiss.) To this
day, beer remains the national beverage of
Germany, Belgium, Holland, and Britain.
Wherever both have been available, beer
has been the drink of the common people and
wine the drink of the rich. The raw material
for beer, grain, is cheaper than grapes and its