German Beer

Abstract

23.1 Introduction Beer has been man's constant companion from the dawn of agriculture and seden-tism through the rise of civilization and into the modern age of industry and biotech-nology. The word " civilization " refers to the progression over time that communities undergo toward increasing complexity, as small clan-based settlements slowly become cities, where social stratifi cation, urban development, and eventually writ-ing emerge. There is no doubt that beer played a central role in this evolution. The so-called Neolithic Revolution or demographic shift toward agriculture and seden-tism was not limited to one area of the world but occurred independently in a num-ber of regions. It did, however, happen fi rst in the ancient Near East in what is known as the Fertile Crescent approximately 11,000 years ago. Though there is currently no direct evidence for brewing there at that time, it seems quite plausible that the hunter-gatherers of the Fertile Crescent began brewing beer before grain was domesticated, which would make beer a very ancient beverage indeed. Prior to the discovery of the brewing process, ancient humanlike creatures, species of Homininae from which humans and their ilk are descended, had already evolved the ability to digest alcohol due to their propensity for eating rotting fruit—and much later honey diluted with water (Hornsey 2012). Because malting and brewing are much more complicated processes, beer would have fi rst appeared on the scene after wine and mead. In order to malt cereal grains, their moisture content has to be increased to the point that the plantlets inside of each kernel are induced to 298 commence growth, thereby releasing enzymes which degrade the large molecules found in the endosperm. These kernels are then dried, crushed, and subsequently added to water—known as the mash—to form a suspension, where further enzy-matic processes occur to then create an aqueous solution free of the husks, known as wort, from the molecular remnants of the complex compounds, which were bro-ken down during the processes of malting and mashing. Beer is defi ned as any fer-mented beverage created using cereal grains, but the majority of modern beer styles are produced using only water, barley malt, hops, and yeast (Zipfel and Rathke 2008). Although beer was produced for millennia in Mesopotamia and Egypt, coun-tries in Western and Central Europe, such as Great Britain, Belgium, Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republic, are now best known as traditional beer-brewing nations.