La naissance de la Bière (texte en anglais)

It can be, blond, dark : beer. Beer, the most popular alcohol in the world, is made out of natural ingredients and it is served and drunk all around the world.

The earliest evidence for alcoholic beverage dates to 7000 BC in Jiahu, China.

Then the first evidence of beer brewering was founded on an engraving, 10 000 years ago in Iraq.

Then evidence of early beer brewing has been confirmed by discoveries at the Sumerian settlement between 3500-3100 BC.

The Sumerians thought that beer was created by god, beer plays an important role in many of the Sumerian myths, Brewers were female and priestress of Ninkasi one of their god. Later, beer was brewed by women at home to accompany meals. But at the time beer didnt exactly have the same recipe as today’s.

The Sumerians passed on their knowledge of brewing to the Babilonians who further commercialized it and passed law regulations the beverage. Through trade, beer travelled to Egypt. Egyptians loved their beer as much as the Mesopotamians

did and breweries grew up all around Egypt. The Egyptian god of beer was Tenenit. Beer was healthier for egyptians than drinking water and was consumed by Egyptians of all ages, the youngest to the oldest.

From Egypt, beer traveled to greece. At the time Greek and Romans prefered wine rather than bear.

Women were the first brewers in Germany and beer was made from only fresh water, heated, and grains. The tradition continued to the Christian era and monks took up the craft of brewing and sold beer from their monasteries. Today beer process is more complicated and beer is a very popular beverage.

How to make beer today?

As this little drawing show it, to make basic beers you need : barley, hops, water and yeast. But of course you can put a lot more ingredients in order to have different flavour. In fact in the world there is more than 8000 different beers!

Now in order to make beer you have to follow some steps.

First there is the malting wich is represent below

It start with of course the harvesting of the barley then heating the barley wich results in drying it, then it gets grinded.

With malting, the enzymes that we need for brewing beer is extracted and the barley is prepared for the next step wich is : mashing

Mashing is the action of putting the prepared barley into hot water for about an hour, by this way it will release the sugar it contains with the enzymes actions. Then you obtain a sweet liquid called wort. Then, the wort is boiled in hot boiling water for about an hour and hops and other spices are added to provide flavour.

The last step befor bottling is the fermentation.

Again the drawing show us the process of fermentation which is once the wort is cooled, they put yeast and fermentation vessel in the mixture and let these two ingredients act on the liquid. Then the mixture is stored for weeks and the process operates by itself and the liquid progressively turn out to be what we call beer.

Finally the beer is bottled or put into cans with adition of carbonated or not.

In order to explain the steps of making beers wich can be extremely complicated I find a very good website wich explain it very well and from where I took those explainative drawing that I founded great .

source : http://blog.beeriety.com/2009/07/06/how-beer-is-made/

Now that we know the history and the process of making beer let’s focus on the cultural aspect of the beer.

As we have seen through the history of beer, beer progresively invades different countries around the world. Beer globalization is not to debate it is a fact. Beer consumation as reached over 177 billiard litres per years in other words it is more than 5600 litres drunk every second! Beer consumation is massive and beer consumers are spread all around the globe. China with more than 42 billions of litres of beer consumed per year is the biggest country

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