It all started with a beer.
By “it,” I mean all of human civilization and civic organization. And by “beer,” I mean something that technically falls under the same umbrella as the six-pack (or case) in your fridge, despite looking and tasting quite different.
I started this book by taking you back to the prehistory of humankind’s love affair with fermented beverages. Primates have been drinking alcohol since long before Homo sapiens ever stepped onto the world stage. But humans brought something very important to booze: intention.
The ability to make alcohol out of fruit (etc.) has been with our species all along; our skin is permanent home to a variety of yeasts. Conventional drunken archaeology places the first organized beer brewing between the eighth and fourth millennia BCE. That’s, at least, around 1,500 years after the birth of agriculture, and it makes beer roughly contemporaneous to the birth of cities and human civilization.
But archaeologists have long suspected that the brewmaster’s art goes back even further to the Natufian Period (12,500–9,500 BCE). See, the grains required to brew beer don’t have much nutritional value in their raw state, and it’s a pain in the ass to shell and husk them into something you can turn into proper cereal. There were other foods more easily available to Neolithic humans. They had animals to face/spear, fruit to pick, roots to chew, a vast array of options that didn’t involve sitting down on a plot of land and inventing agriculture.
Beer, and the promise of unlimited future beer, would’ve made that sacrifice much more palatable. In 2013, a team of archaeologists (Brian Hayden, Neil Canuel, and Jennifer Shanse) published a paper, What Was Brewing in the Natufian?, that makes a strong, albeit circumstantial, case that civilization evolved because our ancestors grew tired of “nature alcohol,” and started craving a more reliable fix. Farming is the only way to make enough grain to ensure a regular, consistent rate of beer production. So farmers we became.
As I pointed out in the introduction, you may have read references to Dr. Hayden’s article before. When it came out in 2013, the Internet exploded with a variety of articles like “How Beer Gave Us Civilization” (The New York Times) and “How Beer Created Civilization” (Forbes). Dr. Hayden thinks those summaries oversimplify the truth and leave out something really awesome.
Feasts were like the United Nations of the Natufian world. Tribes would invite their neighbors, even their enemies, and use the celebration as an opportunity to brag about how badass they were. Feasting was a way to project power, as well as to cement alliances and work out political disagreements. Dr. Hayden described the whole process to me:
So here’s my advice: Bake some bappir for party treats, buy a couple gallons of good beer, pour it in a pot, break out the straws, and call some friends over. I think you’ll agree that the people of Sumer had a few ideas about drinking that we could stand to imitate.
"There was sort of a rotating system of feasting. So one family has a feast one week, another family has a feast another week . . . and then there’s the rotating feasts, one house [after] another. It keeps going on and on. These societies are much more social than contemporary industrial society. And all the social relationships are cemented with beer."
Rather than describe it as “beer created civilization,” Dr. Hayden suggested an alternate summary of his work: “Complex communities do more feasting, brewed beverages represent more of an investment in resources and as such are high value and high status. People focused on making more of it, and one consequence of that was increased agriculture.”
It’s weird to me that the Internet just ran with the beer angle and completely missed a chance to sensationalize Dr. Hayden’s much cooler point. Parties are the basis of international government. Brewing beer wasn’t the sole focus of agriculture. But because it was so well loved and such a status symbol, producing enough of it was of major importance to the state, such as it was 14,000 years ago.
The very earliest recipe known to archaeology is an ancient Sumerian guide to brewing beer. It’s written in the form of a hymn to the goddess of beer, Ninkasi (literally, “the lady who fills the mouth” [sexual innuendo hadn’t been invented yet]), and it describes in detail the ancient Sumerian beer-brewing process.
That process started with the baking of bread made from barley flour, malted barley, and honey. Delicious as that sounds, this bread, bappir, wasn’t for eating. It would be baked twice and stored until the time came to crumble it into a mixture of smashed dates and water and then brew it into a hearty, unfiltered beer. This probably wasn’t the first beer in history, but it’s the first beer—the first anything, in fact—that we have a recipe for.
The ancient Sumerians were all about beer. It wasn’t an occasional indulgence for them. It was the duct tape that held their society together and kept it productive. Most homes would brew their own beer, for regular consumption, and the government brewed and distributed a liter of beer per day for its employees. I can’t help but think the DMV would move much more smoothly if we instituted the same policy for our government workers. Who needs a pension plan, anyway?
Sumerians likely brewed their beer together with family and friends, and they consumed it the same way. The earliest pictorial depiction of alcohol consumption in the historical record dates back to about 4000 BCE, and it shows something recognizable even today as a party.
That’s not a hookah those dudes are sucking on. It’s a huge beer-filled vase, and they’re drinking out of it with straws. It’s a little like setting up individual taps for each person’s face, only less hygienic. This picture makes one thing very clear: Backwash is a problem literally as old as human society.
At this point, reader, you know me well enough to guess what comes next: It’s time for another experiment.
The Alcohol Age (or, Drinking Constantly, in Moderation)
In 2013, I spent between four and six days dying in a hotel in Pushkar, India. It’s hard to pin down the time line exactly, because I was shitting and puking myself the entire time. It was the first time in my life I’d ever felt like a part of my body was actively angry: I could feel my intestines writhing inside me like an epileptic anaconda. My friends sleeping on the next floor could hear me screaming through the night.
The culprit was a cup of lukewarm instant coffee I’d ordered the day before, in Jaipur. Coffee and tea are usually safe bets in India. If you get dirty water hot enough, long enough, it becomes safe water. But as I brought the cup up to my mouth I caught the faint sewage scent of doom. And by the time I realized I was in danger, the first drops were already cascading down my throat. Warm drops. Not hot, and certainly not clean.
Clean, safe tap water for all is probably the single greatest privilege the first world has over the rest of the world. Most of you have instant access to clean water that won’t make you shit your pants to death after drinking it. That’s an unbelievably rare thing, historically. Our ancestors gambled with every cup.
If you’ve never experienced dysentery, count yourself winning-the-goddamn-lottery lucky. I caught it for the first time in Guatemala, gargling with water from the shower like a damned fool. In the seven or eight weeks we were there, I remember three distinct, bathroom-wrecking bouts.
There were eight people in my group in Guatemala. Most of us dealt with dysentery more than once, and there were times when basically all of us were sick simultaneously. From an unthinking cup of local tap water, to a droplet down the throat in a shower, to treacherous, treacherous soup, only one of us proved immune: my friend Josh. He made the novel decision to chase every drink, all day, with swigs from an ever-present bottle of Guatemalan whiskey. Josh ate the same food, drank the same coffee, did everything the same as everyone else in our group. And he never once got sick.
The ancients knew what Josh knew: The microbes that turn our guts into cannons can’t handle their liquor as well as we can. Alcohol makes bad water a whole lot safer.
Like millions of suffering freshmen around the country, our ancestors didn’t always have hard liquor to rely on. But the beer-brewing process tended to kill off the unfriendliest microbes in the water. Wine, much higher in alcohol content, could even be mixed directly with water. This made the water much safer, and ensured all of ancient society wasn’t one perpetual poopy hangover.
Drinking all day, every day is a lot of fun... for about three or four days, once a year or so. Start doing it constantly and those good times turn very quickly into a liver- and life-crippling problem. The ancients knew this just as well as you and I. We wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t kept enough of a handle on their habits to build cities, invent philosophies, and also sex generation after generation of new people into existence.
Drinking became culturally ubiquitous as a self-defense measure; our booze protected us from the untrustworthy water we needed to survive. But the ancients also needed self-defense methods to protect them from alcohol’s powerfully addictive potential. The ancient Greeks watered their wine down heavily, and they drank with food to avoid the dreaded empty-liquor belly. These social mores worked sometimes. But when they didn’t, there was the Pythagorean cup.
You probably know Pythagoras of Samos best from the Pythagorean theorem all high school graduates either remember, or remember they used to remember. But when he wasn’t trying to figure out the length of various sides of a triangle, Pythagoras was busy dreaming up ways to stop his contemporaries from prematurely destroying their livers. The Pythagorean cup was the apex of his studies in Wet Blanketude. If a greedy drinker filled the cup too high, its contents would instantly rain down onto his lap, or the host’s floor.
Also called the “Cup of Justice,” which sounds like something you’d shout while hammered, the Pythagorean cup was the most elaborate weapon in sobriety’s ancient arsenal. But it wasn’t the only one. The homebrewed nature of most historical booze provided a natural limitation to consumption: You could drink only as much as you could make. The ancient Egyptians even considered taverns and bars, places where beer and wine were available in endless quantity, given the right amount of money, as inherently immoral places.
Hippocrates, the Greek philosopher who basically invented Western medicine, considered alcohol incredibly useful for treating everything from fever to gas. But he railed against men who prescribed booze for every ailment, and who drank it straight and unwatered. Hippocrates was well in line with mainstream Greek attitudes when he said:
"Undiluted wine drunk in large quantity renders a man feeble; and everybody seeing this knows that such is the power of wine."
Alcoholism wasn’t unknown in ancient Greece, of course. Socrates famously dedicated many hours of his life to putting his heartthrob Alcibiades back together after drunken ragers. But it wasn’t until the age of the Romans, with their vast slave-run vineyards, that alcoholism became possible on a large scale. Before that time only the wealthy and powerful could afford to be problem drinkers.
That went about as well as you’d expect.
The Drunks Who Changed History
Alexander the Great had a backstory most of you will find fairly sympathetic: He was born to a distant, workaholic father who drank constantly and in public. The fact that his father, Philip II of Macedon, was the mightiest warlord of the era didn’t make young Alexander any less embarrassed at his dad’s drunken shenanigans.
The ancient Macedonians didn’t use Pythagorean cups, nor did they water down their wine. They were a nation of nomadic horse-based warriors and they frequently rode shitfaced into battle, or at least with two full sheets to the wind. Drinking to excess was a common if not ubiquitous thing in their warrior culture. And Philip, their king, drank as hard as any of his soldiers.
Young Alexander had been tutored (and partly raised) by the famous philosopher Aristotle. Since Aristotle was a Greek, it’s not a stretch to assume he passed along some judgment of barbarous Macedonian drinking traditions to his pupil. This famously came to a head at a feast Philip threw to celebrate his second wedding, to a woman named Cleopatra who was very much not Alexander’s mom.
The feast quickly turned into a drunken feast, as was the Macedonian way, and one of Cleopatra’s relatives made a snide comment to Philip about him getting a “real” heir now. Alexander took offense at this and threw his wineglass at the man, sparking a drunken brawl. At one point during the fight, Philip drew his sword and lunged at Alexander, but drunkenly fell over a couch and busted ass on the floor. At the time, Philip had been planning an invasion of Asia. Alexander couldn’t resist using this to needle him:
"Look, men, he’s about to cross from Europe to Asia, and he falls crossing from couch to couch."
Alexander and Philip never fully reconciled. And by “never reconciled,” I mean “Alexander and his bio mom probably had Philip assassinated.” We’ll never know the historical truth, because drunken warlords accumulate enemies like horses’ asses accumulate flies, but we do know that Philip’s drunken ways eventually passed from father to son.
Over the course of his short life, Alexander went from being the closest thing to a teetotaler in his booze-soaked society to being one of history’s greatest raging drunks. Alcohol became more and more of a problem for him as the stresses of running a great empire piled up, along with the pain of a multitude of war wounds. Alexander hosted epic drinking parties on a near-daily basis, and it’s unlikely he was sober while planning (or fighting) the majority of his campaigns.
But the clearest impact drinking had on Alexander’s life achievements came during the occupation of Persepolis, the former capitol of the Persian Empire and one of the greatest cities on earth at the time. Alexander initially wanted to leave the royal palace intact. But during the victory feast, he and his men got rip-roaring drunk. Drunk enough that when one of the partygoers suggested lighting the whole damn thing on fire, Alexander’s first instinct was to start handing out torches.
By his early thirties, Alexander ruled over the largest empire on earth. He died before his forces could conquer all of India, an invasion with the potential to change the entire history of curry, and also the world. The Macedonian king fell sick at a feast; after chugging a glass of wine he clutched his side in agony, and claimed his liver felt like it had taken an arrow.
Most historians suspect that typhoid is what finally did Alexander in, days later. But his years of drinking and his shitty alcoholic’s immune system certainly helped typhoid do the job.
History is full of drunken conquerors: Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan were both Don Draper–level alcoholics. But the exact influence of alcohol on the decision-making process of any given drunken world leader isn’t always easy to parse out, especially if he was drunk throughout his reign.
One of the few clear examples of alcohol changing the course of world history comes from Russia. According to the Primary Chronicle (literally the only written history of the Kievan Rus, a.k.a. proto-Russians, in this period), Prince Vladimir of Kiev, a pagan, started shopping for a new religion around 988 CE. Bulgarian Muslims made a strong case, promising him “women and indulgence,” but also admitting that the Russians would have to quit drinking alcohol if they were going to convert to Islam.
Prince Vladimir didn’t even consider the possibility.
“Drinking,” said he, “is the joy of the Russes. We cannot exist without that pleasure.”
Prince Vladimir opted to join the Christian rather than the Muslim world. There’s no way to know just how different human history would’ve been with an Islamic Russia. But we can pretty safely assume the global popularity of vodka would’ve taken a hit.
That’s not the last time alcoholism and Russia collided to change history. Joseph Stalin was a famous alcoholic, particularly during World War II. The only thing he and British prime minister Winston Churchill had in common was a desperately unhealthy habit. Both men drank basically all day, every day, while piloting their ships of state through the bloodiest, most violent conflict in human history.
They didn’t get along at all, due in part to Stalin’s status as a power-hungry mass murderer, and to the fact that fucking nobody got along with Winston Churchill. In 1942, the pair met in Moscow to try and iron out some of their disagreements and thus facilitate the important work of killing Nazis.
It didn’t go well.
Not at first, that is. Both men met for two days of negotiations, with Stalin backpedaling and arguing every step of the way. By the last night of the mission, things seemed hopeless. An awful dinner party passed, and it looked as if the two would part at worse odds than ever before.
Then Churchill and Stalin started drinking. They kept it up for hours, and around one A.M. the prime minister sent for his secretary, Sir Alexander Cadogan, who arrived at the party in medias res and later wrote about what he saw:
"There I found Winston and Stalin, and Molotov who had joined them, sitting with a heavily laden board between them: food of all kinds crowned by a sucking pig, and innumerable bottles."
The two world leaders managed to drink their way to some sort of common ground. The party didn’t end until three in the morning, by which time the mood was “merry as a marriage-bell.” It’s hard to tie the meeting to a specific policy or plan, but Stalin and Churchill seem to have valued it as an allied “team-building” exercise—like a ropes course, but with all of human civilization riding on whether or not they did the trust fall.
Alcohol brought Churchill and Stalin together, and in doing so it may have played a small role in saving Western civilization from Nazism. But alcohol has also played its role in the end of civilizations, including the great Wari Empire of South America.
Wari: The Empire That Ended with a Drinking Binge
The Wari Empire controlled a large chunk of South America’s western coast, located mainly in what’s now Peru, from about 600 to 1100 CE. In a lot of ways it was your traditional empire, conquering any nation that wouldn’t bend a knee to it, brutally suppressing local traditions—basically, all the different reasons no “empire” in any movie is ever the good guys.
But the Wari were different from most empires in one critical way: They threw the absolute best parties.
I’m talking about a level of drinking that would make Saint Patrick crap his festive shamrock-embroidered drawers. The Wari gathered en masse to dance and to drink boggling quantities of their traditional beer, chicha. They’d often consume more than three gallons of beer in a single sitting. Even if we’re talking about the ancient equivalent of Miller High Life, that’s a heroic amount of alcohol. The Wari drank like frat boys, right down to their boozing accoutrements: bizarre, half-gallon cups called keros, some of which were shaped like human feet.
Yes, those Las Vegas kiosks selling giant plastic boots full of liquor are actually part of an ancient tradition.
The Wari built large, orderly cities, giant defensive citadels, and mountains of exquisite art in honor of their gods. But every great empire did that. What made the Wari special, at least in the red-rimmed eyes of this author, were their breweries. These enormous wooden structures contained twenty or more ceramic brew vats, each twenty-five to thirty-five gallons in size. In a day, one of these titanic beer shrines could serve up to five hundred gallons of chicha.
We don’t know much about gender relations in the ancient Wari Empire. Most of their records were kept on khipu, an early Mesoamerican form of recording information with elaborate rope knots. Sadly, most khipu rotted away long before the first archaeologist was born. But what evidence we have from their ruins suggests that the vast Wari beer industry was operated entirely by women.
The Wari drank for a lot of the regular reasons: religious celebration, the changing of the seasons, a crippling street-vomit shortage. But they also used beer as a diplomatic tool, inviting their rivals, including the neighboring Tiwanaku, over for epic drinking binges. These international celebrations must’ve forged a few friendships, but they also gave the Wari an opportunity to show off their wealth and organization. The intended message was, “We’re happy brewing beer right now, but if you piss us off we’ll start focusing on wrecking your day.”
The Wari started dying out somewhere around the year 1100. We know the Tiwanaku collapsed around 1000, possibly setting off a chain reaction that doomed the Wari. It’s also possible they fell victim first to whatever eventually broke the Wari. We don’t know why the Wari Empire fell. But thanks to scientists from the University of Florida and the Field Museum in Chicago, we do know how it fell: in a giant drunken party.
Excavations in the Wari city of Baúl have shown that the great city brewery, and much of the city itself, was destroyed in a gigantic ritual fire at the end of the very last Wari drinking party. As the brewery and the surrounding feasting house crumbled, the Wari nobles dropped their boot-shaped half-gallon beer steins in the fire, symbolically ending their empire with the closest thing any historical record has to a mic drop.
Bidding farewell to your entire civilization with an epic drinking binge is one of those things that sounds impossibly badass on the surface. But it also doesn’t make much sense. Why would a people on their last legs, forced to abandon their home, waste critical resources on one last awesome party? History will never have the full answer to that question. But this Song of Booze and Fire makes a lot more sense when you understand...
Chicha: The Beer That Held Mesoamerica Together
Various types of chicha were, and still are, popular across South and Central America. The Wari made theirs with pink peppercorn, the berry of the Schinus molle plant. Their rivals the Tiwanaku used corn. Most ancient Mesoamericans used corn, or some other starchy plant like yucca. The Wari probably used molle for a few reasons, not the least of which is that it made a stronger beer. But choosing a unique beer also made a major political statement.
See, chicha isn’t like regular beer. In ancient Mesoamerica it was made both in government breweries and in households by citizens—mostly women—chewing up and spitting out the key ingredient. Amylase, an enzyme in human spit, converts unfermentable plant starches into fermentable sugars. Introduce yeast and water to wads of spit-up plant matter, and within a couple of days you’ll have beer. There are many, many different chicha recipes in the world, but the basics are the same for all of them. (You can read more about chicha in Justin Jennings’s 2004 paper, “La Chichera y El Patron.”)
Chicha was a beer by the people, and quite literally of the people. And no great empire rose to power in Mesoamerica without a great beer behind it. Empires like the Wari and the Inca spread their culture and word of their power by hosting feasts and drinking parties for rivals and subject peoples alike.
In Andean society, drunken feasts took on an even more critical role: They were the foundation of the entire economy. In an era before money was really relevant to most of the subsistence-farming populace, workers were often paid for their hard labor with elaborate feasts. Chicha was a critical part of this system of reciprocity, and so an empire like the Inca could build great cities and monuments only if it kept the beer flowing.
You can’t really age chicha; once it’s made, you’ve got a few days before it starts to go bad. This meant brewing was a full-time, year-round occupation. And in most of Mesoamerica, the beer industry was dominated by women. Ladyspit was renowned for making the very best chicha. The Incans even had a special class of brewers, called "aqllas", or “chosen women.” The chosen women were basically beer-brewing royal nuns. Most of them were related to the Incan ruler, and they all swore vows of chastity.
It takes a very specific type of person to give up sex for the privilege of having hundreds of people drink her spit. But the central role chicha played in public life meant these women would’ve been very highly regarded. Their chicha represented the Incan state at public holidays and state functions.
"Visiting emperors and kings got drunk off the aqllas’ spit."
You’ve got to admit, that’s pretty cool.
**********
HOW TO: Drink Like a Sumerian
Both those recipes are based on interpretations of the “Hymn to Ninkasi,” the nineteenth-century BCE religious devotional that doubles as a very rough guide to brewing Sumerian beer. It’s not a perfect recipe by any means, and several steps are left up to the determination of the brewer. But I’m going to try and re-create it as directly as possible here. First you’ll need date wine. And unless you live in Egypt or by a particularly adventurous Whole Foods, you’re going to have to make your own.
Date Wine Ingredients (Per 5 Gallons)
1 five-gallon food-grade plastic bucket or wooden barrel
A large metal bowl, 2 gallons (-ish)
An airlock (found in homebrew stores/Internets all around)
3.5 pounds dates
1 packet yeast, either bread yeast or wine yeast (found in your local brew store)
Directions
The hymn doesn’t go into detail on how the date wine is brewed, just that it gets mixed together in the final product. A lot of date wine recipes involve extra sugar, black tea, etc. I’m keeping this as simple as possible. The Sumerians didn’t have black tea, and they were probably still in enough awe of the whole “rotting fruit turns into awesome” process to not mess around too much with the basics.
Mash your dates with a potato masher or, if you’re really dedicated, the stone from a very old mortar and pestle. Once properly mashed, pour in water and simmer on low heat until the water takes on the color of the dates. Then dump the whole mix into your brew bucket, add enough water to fill your five-gallon bucket up to a little less than four gallons.
Now dump in your yeast. The ancient Sumerians would’ve just (unknowingly) used the natural yeast hitching a ride on the outside of those dates. My dates, and probably your dates, had to be washed of pesticides—and nearly everything else—before being turned into wine. We’re going to have to cheat a little with our yeast if we want to be sure all those dates weren’t bought in vain. I used a champagne yeast, but a cider yeast or even just some Fleischmann’s bread yeast will all do the trick.
Seal the wine, put in your airlock, and let it sit for a week. About four days into that process, it’s time to bake up the bappir.
Bappir Ingredients
3 pounds malted barley
1 pound barley flour
1.25 pounds raw honey
Water
Directions
This one’s going to take a little bit of creativity on our part to turn into an actual recipe. Here’s what the “Hymn to Ninkasi” (Miguel Civil translation) gives us:
"You are the one who handles the dough, [and] with
a big shovel,
Mixing in a pit, the bappir with sweet aromatics,
Ninkasi, You are the one who handles
the dough, [and] with a big shovel,
Mixing in a pit, the bappir with [date]-honey.
You are the one who bakes the bappir in the big oven,
Puts in order the piles of hulled grains,
Ninkasi, you are the one who bakes
the bappir in the big oven,
Puts in order the piles of hulled grains",
The whole poem is like that, people. It gives Ninkasi credit for every stage of beer’s production as if there weren’t legions of hardworking brewers handling sweet aromatics and, uh, shoveling dough. Florid as it is, a lot of this recipe is pretty straightforward. Mix the barley and flour together, pour in a little water and fold it into dough. Then you stir in honey and stick it in a “big oven.”
The resultant mix looks a little bit like a protein bar, and it actually tastes great—I’ve found that a couple of pieces with coffee makes for a pretty satisfying breakfast. The Sumerians likely didn’t eat their bappir unless times were quite rough indeed, but I’m a fan of the stuff. (It tastes better than the beer.)
Once you’ve got your bread baked and your dates wined, it’s time to turn this whole mess into Sumerian beer. Here’s the hymn again:
"You are the one who waters the malt set on the ground,
The noble dogs keep away even the potentates,
Ninkasi, you are the one who waters the malt
set on the ground,
The noble dogs keep away even the potentates.
You are the one who soaks the malt in a jar
The waves rise, the waves fall.
Ninkasi, you are the one who soaks
the malt in a jar
The waves rise, the waves fall."
I’m assuming that bit about the dogs and the potentates refers to some particularly booze-starved politicians who couldn’t calm the hell down and wait for the brewers to do their job. Hence the need for dogs, to keep the Man off the brewer’s back while he was busy making beer.
Malt is traditionally made from sprouted barley, but this recipe uses the bappir bread instead. Crumble your bappir into about a gallon of water in a pot, and simmer until the bappir is thoroughly soaked. The mix should turn thick and gloopy, and develop a brownish-white color. This is what beer brewers call wort. Next, spread your wort out on “large reed mats,” or, if you prefer, strain it in a colander. Drain it of water and then dunk the wort into your date wine bucket and seal it again.
Let the whole mess sit, fermenting, for two full weeks, longer if you want a stronger brew. Once you’re done letting it ferment, run the whole mess of beer through a filter (maybe that colander again?) to get out the biggest, uh, chunks. The hymn suggests using a “filtering vat,” but any tight mesh screen ought to do the trick. Don’t worry if the final beer is still much chunkier than you’re used to: That’s how it should be.
The last step is to make sure you consume your beer in the appropriate Sumerian fashion: out of a huge multigallon vase, through straws, with a bunch of your friends. I enjoyed my first batch with my fiancée and my roommate, Dave. We poured about two gallons into a large metal pan and cut out several two- to three-foot lengths of plastic tubing to act as straws.
Now: the flavor. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad, either. It had a slightly sweet, slightly sour taste, a bit like a Belgian lambic. And it packed a significant punch, at around 5 to 6 percent ABV. This was likely due to the modern yeast we used. Booze archaeologist Dr. Hayden assured me that ancient beer would’ve averaged 2 to 3 percent ABV. The delivery method had a major impact, too. Something about the whole setup, sitting around with friends, reclining in chairs and just sipping beer from a straw, encouraged excessive consumption. I found myself treating it like a hookah, drinking constantly whenever I wasn’t actively talking.
Drinking Sumerian style is more of a long, slow burn than anything. We got drunk quickly, and stayed drunk all night. In all, we consumed about two gallons over the course of five-ish hours. It was enough that Dave and I (the primary drinkers) were significantly buzzed all night, but not enough that either of us vomited on anything.
My primary takeaway from this experiment had more to do with the Sumerian style of drinking party than the actual beer itself. The beer wasn’t bad (I tried it on four people and only one of them wasn’t willing to drink more than a sip) but it didn’t rise above the level of Bud Light, either. The Sumerian drinking setup is quite genius, though. It facilitates discussion, as well as drinking, but it isn’t conducive to a serious binge.
By Robert Evans in "A (Brief) History of Vice" How Bad Behavior Buit Civilization - Plume (an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC), USA, 2016, chapter 4. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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