Open your history books, homies: A timeline of beer
Beer’s been around longer than your mate who still reckons he can out-drink everyone at the pub. It’s the OG social lubricant, the frothy glue that’s held humans together for thousands of years. Whether it’s the banter, the buzz, or just the sheer joy of variety, beer’s always had our back.
The earliest known recipes
Picture this: Mesopotamia, thousands of years ago. People are still working out fire and farming… and then someone says, “Oi, what if we chuck barley, water and dates together?” Boom — beer. Some reckon it even came before bread. Priorities, right?
That first “beer” was less crisp lager, more soupy brew, but hey, you’ve got to start somewhere. And clearly, they were onto something.
Civilisation and the frothy glow-up
As humans got better at building cities and not just bonfires, beer spread like wildfire. Every culture started putting their own spin on it.
In medieval Europe, monks basically ran the beer game. They brewed up barrels of the stuff, handed it to patients like it was medicine, and — plot twist — it actually kept people alive because it was safer than water. (Take that, hydro homies.)
Enter the beer barons
By the 1500s, Germany alone had over 15,000 breweries. Beer was big business, and along came the “beer barons” — the Jeff Bezos types of their day, building massive breweries and flogging beer across the globe.
Then the Industrial Revolution rolled in with shiny new brewing tech, and suddenly, mass-produced beer was everywhere. Think Anheuser-Busch, Coors, and the slow sad fade-out of the little guys.
The craft beer comeback
Fast forward to the 1970s. A new wave of brewers looked at bland mass-market lagers and said, “Nah, we can do better.” They dug up old recipes, played mad scientist with hops, and sparked the craft beer revolution.
Now? There are over 600 craft breweries in Australia alone, serving up everything from tropical hazy IPAs to dark-as-night stouts. We’re spoilt for choice, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
So next time you crack a cold one, raise it to thousands of years of human ingenuity, dodgy experiments and monks who accidentally kept the party going. Here’s to beer — the real MVP. 🍻
