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Friday May 28, 1999

Beer's humble beginnings can be traced to Mideast

MICHAEL S. ARNOLD
Jerusalem Post Service

JERUSALEM -- Despite its lack of a following in modern Israel, beer was born in the Middle East.

The original beer was brewed quite by accident in Mesopotamia when, it is believed, some lucky soul found a piece of wet bread in an advanced stage of fermentation and popped it into his mouth.

The effect apparently was intoxicating, and so was born the Mesopotamian beer industry.

The Sumerians called beer "the divine drink" and used it in their sacrifices. Later, the Babylonians diversified into 20 different types of beer, a product line that would be the envy of many a contemporary brewery.

In the 18th century BCE, the Babylonian King Hammurabi established the first drinking laws, limiting simple workers to half a gallon of beer a day while allowing priests and civil servants to down nearly 1.5 gallons each day.

The drink steadily made its way around the Mediterranean basin, taking hold in civilizations as diverse as Pharaoh-ruled Egypt, ancient Greece and Rome.

In the Middle Ages, brewing became a specialty of the European monasteries, which needed a dietary supplement for the meager meals of the monks.

Soon the monasteries began commercial production of beer, experimenting not just with hops but with various plants and herbs that offered special tastes and at times, hallucinatory visions.

By the mid-19th century, the French scientist Louis Pasteur realized that heating alcohol to high temperatures could kill undesirable bacteria and prolong beer's storage time. Though his discovery is more famous for its application to milk, Pasteur's purpose was to find a remedy to the souring of beer and wine, which at the time was a significant economic problem in France.

Another 19th-century innovation, industrial refrigeration, allowed for large-scale production of lager, a light beer brewed by slow fermentation and matured under refrigeration. Today, virtually all the beer brewed and sold in Israel is lager.

Beer also has a place in Jewish tradition.

The Talmud discusses beers made of barley, figs and blackberries, and from barley and dates. Beer was popular among Jews in Babylon and was even used in ceremonies such as the havdallah prayer at the end of Shabbat. Rabbis visiting from other lands were skeptical of such practices, but they accepted beer, believing that it was the wine of the land.

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