BREWING, the process of extracting a saccharine solution from malted grain and converting the solution into fer mented and sound alcoholic beverage called ale or beer.
The manufacture of ale or beer is of very high ,antiquity. The Chinese, Jap anese, ancient Egyptians and Assyrians all drank beer. All the most ancient people made intoxicating drinks out of cereals. It is said that King Osiris, 1960 B. C., made beer out of malted corn. In ancient Spain there was also a form of beer drank by the prehistoric peoples which were genealogically connected with the Libyans of Africa. This Span ish drink, which was also known to the Gauls, was, according to Pliny, called caelia or cerea. The Phrygians and Thracians brewed beer and used it for a beverage. Archilochus, 700 B. c., tells about their bryton, which was made out of barley and herbs. The ancient Ar menians had a strong, intoxicating bar ley drink, which was imbibed by means of straws. Beer, called sabja or sab jum, was known among the Thracians, the Illyrians, and Pannonians. Pris cus, 448 A. D., traveled through Bavaria and mentions a barley drink which the Bavarians called camum. In the first century A. D., in central France, beer was known to the people under the name of korma. When the Germans turned from fighting to the cultivation of the soil they began to manufacture beer and ale. does not mention this, but Diodorus and Tacitus, who lived later than Caesar, mentioned it.
The various beers manufactured from grain have sometimes been classified un der the three heads, beer, ale, and por ter. The word beer in old German is spelled peor, pior, or pier, and is sup posed to be connected with the word biber, which means "to drink." Another
old German expression for drink was alu, alo, or ealo, preserved in the Eng lish word ale. The beer of the ancients was essentially different from modern beer, because hops were not used in its manufacture, they having been intro duced from the Orient. The first men tion of a hop garden is in a law of Pepin in 768. Apparently the monasteries were the first in the Middle Ages to brew a good beer; St. Hildegard, Abbess of Rupertsberg, in 1079, mentions hops as used in the manufacture of beer, and there were many hop gardens in Bavaria, France, and lower Saxony. The industry gradually spread from the monasteries into the hands of the common people.
The special patron of the modern brewing of beer was considered to be the fabulous King Gambrinus, who, about the year 1200, is said to have dis covered the method and to have sanc tified the land of Brabant with his dis covery. Gambrinus is supposed to have been the Duke John I. (Jan Primus), the son of Henry III.
Lager beer was brewed in Germany as early as the 13th century. The rep utation of the Frankish and Bavarian beer dates from the 15th century. The first pale beer was produced at Nurem berg in 1541. Wheat beer is an Eng lish invention, and in the 15th century much of it was exported to Hamburg, and as early as 1520 it was brewed in that city. It soon spread over the whole of northern Germany. In 1572 it was brewed in Berlin and developed into the modern weiss beer. Porter was discov ered by the brewer Harwood, and by the end of the 18th century was exported to all parts of the world.