In the Beginning: Mesopotamian Beer

By Adhid Miri, PhD

Martin Luther is credited with saying, “Whoever drinks beer, he is quick to sleep; whoever sleeps long, does not sin; whoever does not sin, enters Heaven. Thus, let us drink beer!” 

Beer is one of the oldest drinks known to man.

Before Adolphus Busch, Arthur Amstel, and Samuel Adams – before Budweiser, Miller Lite, Coors, Michelob, the English Newcastle Brown Ale, the Irish Guinness, the Dutch Heineken, the Mexican Corona, the Belgian Stella Artois, and the Australian Fosters, there was Mesopotamian beer from Sumer.

In the writings of the ancient Sumerians, beer was considered a magical brew from the gods endowing the drinker with health, peace of mind, and happiness. They even had a goddess of beer named Ninkasi.

In Babylon, beer was considered a divine drink, a true gift from the Gods. It was also a sign of wealth. The Code of Hammurabi, the ancient Babylonian set of laws, decreed a daily beer ration to citizens. Every citizen had his daily dose of beer, depending on his wealth. The drink was so respected that people were sometimes paid for work in beer, instead of money.

History

Beer was invented in Mesopotamia by hunter-gatherers who learned to ferment wild grains. They soon settled in villages to cultivate and brew.

The ruins of Mesopotamian civilizations are full of hundreds of clay tablets and artifacts that record the methods and means of making and drinking beer; they even depict drink councils. Cups and vessels for drinking and manufacturing wine were also found. Archeologists discovered and deciphered an ode to Ninkasi, the patron goddess of brewing. This poem contained the oldest known recipe for making beer, using barley from bread.

The most ancient depiction of beer drinking is found on a 6,000-year-old clay tablet showing people sipping the beverage through straws from a large communal bowl. There was no way of filtering beer back then, so their beer was thick, like porridge, and hard to drink; however, the ancients considered beer a safer alternative to water, as nearby rivers and canals often became contaminated by animal waste.

Also, since alcohol is a chemical preservative, the process of fermentation boiled out harmful microorganisms while preserving nutrients absent from other drinks. Thus, it is unsurprising that, besides its use in religious ceremonies and rituals, beer was associated with the gods.

Brewing Methods

Every beer that you have been served at your local brewery, bar, or restaurant can be broken down into two basic types: ales and lagers. The main differences between an ale and a lager are the type of yeast used to ferment the beer and fermentation time. The four main ingredients in beer are water, malt, hops, and yeast.

The ancient brewing process was quite labor-intensive and began with the malting of grains. The grains were soaked in water for several days, then dried in the sun or on hot stones. The malted grains were then ground into a coarse powder which was mixed with water to form a mash. 

The mash was boiled, then strained to remove the husks and other solids. The resulting liquid, known as wort, was then boiled again and flavored with herbs and spices. Finally, the wort was fermented with yeast, resulting in beer.

For centuries, the basic way to make beer was to boil malted barley with water and let it ferment. Sometimes, natural yeast did the vital work, but generally, the brewers would add yeast to speed up the process. The resulting mix would then be flavored with a mixture of various herbs. Adding hops improved the chances that the beer would not spoil, but the large variety of recipes continued to make beer-making difficult.

The ancient brewing process was quite different from modern brewing, as it was more of an art than a science. Ancient brewers had to rely on their senses to determine when the beer was ready to drink; they did not have access to the sophisticated technologies used in modern brewing. As a result, ancient beer was often sour or bitter and could be quite strong.

The Industrial Revolution brought the mechanization of brewing. Better control over the process, with the use of the thermometer and saccharometer, was developed in Britain and transferred to the continent, where the development of ice-making and refrigeration equipment in the late 19th century enabled lager beers to be brewed in the summer.

The origin of the word “beer” is somewhat unclear, but it likely comes from an ancient Germanic word meaning “barley.” This makes sense, as barley was one of the main ingredients used in early beer production. Another theory is that the word “beer” comes from the Latin word “bibere,” which means “to drink.”

Iraqi Beer

European style beer was introduced to Iraq shortly after World War II, when Iraq was ruled by the British-backed monarchy. Madhaf Khedairi, a wealthy Muslim businessman, bought a small brewery from a British naval vessel. He founded The Iraq Brewery Co. in 1950 and began making stout. It was not profitable, so he invested more money and switched to making lager.

In 1956, Khadhuri Khadhuri, a Christian, established the Eastern Brewery Company and made Farida, a nutty brew which became a symbol of Iraq. The plant was in the Zaafaraniya industrial area near Baghdad. The street leading to is still called “Bottle Road.”

These two firms flourished. British colonial servants and, later, prosperous Iraqi businessmen gathered to quench their thirsts at the elegant teak bar of the Alwiya Club off Firdus Square in central Baghdad. The 1958 revolution swept away the king and the British, but not the beer – although the deeply suspicious officers who took power considered the Alwiya Club a subversive organization.

Beer not only survived the seizure of power by the secular pan-Arab socialistic Baath party in 1968, but breweries proliferated. The party nationalized the Khedairi firm in 1973-74 and in 1975-76, the government established two breweries; one in the city of Mosul and the other at Amara, an extremely strict Muslim city where workers had to be brought from China.

Farida achieved peak production of thirty million bottles a year during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. Their slogan? “Always in bottles, never in cans.”

There was another major twist of events during the sanction years of the 1990s, when Saddam Hussein’s oldest son Uday started harassing the private sector companies and successful brewery owners. Uday, a sadist with a taste for cruelty, sports cars, women, and alcohol, had a complex, dark character and carried a grudge against the elite. Once you came to Uday’s notice, he never left you alone. He also had an appetite for liquor and beer.

Uday, also known as Al-Ustath, had his staff call Khadhuri’s son and managing partner of the Eastern Brewery Company for a meeting in his office. In that meeting, Uday claimed the company was best run by the state and offered to buy the company with Iraqi currency. The Iraqi dinar at that time was a worthless piece of paper printed by the government during the Iran-Iraq war.

Khadhuri politely tried to decline the offer, stating that the brewery was the only family business, and many family members depend upon it for their living. Khadhuri’s request to decline the offer was denied; however, as a gesture of good will, Uday told the owner’s son that he would keep him on as a plant manager.

Two years later, after the sanctions squeeze and a series of reversals, Uday summed Khadhuri again and asked him to buy the company back, this time with US dollars that the family must have stashed in the west. With his own survival instincts and some knowledge of Ustath Uday’s history of deceit, Khadhuri took his family and fled to Jordan the next day.

Beer and Politics

The ancient Iraqis made drinks from barley and wine extracted from palm dates. The wine from palm juice was made by cutting the top of the trunk of the palm tree, collecting the resulting juice, and fermenting it for two or three days. It became quite a strong intoxicant. The drink was intended for the people, distributed at a rate of more than a gallon per person; meanwhile, the Iraqi government of today prevents it, confiscates it, and forbids it.

When sanctions were imposed by the UN in 1990 after Iraq invaded Kuwait, the government imposed a 50 per cent cut in production and banned money transfers abroad. Farida carried on by obtaining malt and hops from a supplier who did not mind flouting the decree. It is reported that a Farida spokesperson said, “How he paid was not our concern. He gave us one hundred tons of malt for 30,000 cases of beer!”

In 1998 Farida licensed a Jordanian company to make their beer in Amman, Jordan. Farida remained privately owned until 2001, when ousted President Saddam Hussein’s eldest son, Uday, and his friends took over the firm and made soft drinks as well as beer.

In the weeks after the invasion of Iraq by the Bush administration, Farida was forced to compete with imports from Holland and Turkey. Popular name brands and imports such as Amstel, Heineken, Almaza, Corona, and Budweiser dominated the Iraqi market.

Until Shia fundamentalists were installed in power in Iraq by the US occupation, brewing beer was a profitable business. In 2004, Shia fundamentalists halted beer production in all breweries. Smugglers hawking chilled beer appeared beneath the Jadriya Bridge alongside peddlers selling illegal drugs. The supplies of Farida vanished. Sadly, today the breweries and shops selling beer and other alcoholic drinks have shut down or been torched. Clubs, bars, and restaurants have closed.

Carrying on the Tradition

Beers that were brewed in Iraq have mostly female names. In addition to the most famous of all — Farida, meaning “unique”— there was Diana, “the golden lager;” Shahrazad; Loulou’a; Kahramana; and Sanabel.

In the 1940s, King Farouk of Egypt married the Iranian princess Safinaz Zulfiqar, and then called her Princess Farida. Like most other nations, the Iraqi were obsessed with the ruling royal family, and so was the managing director of the Iraqi Eastern Beer Company, who bestowed upon their product the name “Farida.”

Keeping up with the Mesopotamians, some Chaldean Americans dived into the micro-brew industry in the United States. The first Chaldean known to do so was the author of this article, Dr. Adhid Miri, who opened Copper Canyon Micro-Brewery in Southfield, Michigan in 1998. The Sarafa brothers, Anmar and Haithem, entered the industry and purchased Frankenmuth Brewery in Michigan in 2009. They are still going strong today.

Beer and friendship go back thousands of years. William Bostwick, the beer critic for the Wall Street Journal (plum job!) once said, “Humankind was built on beer. From the world’s first writing to its first laws, in rituals social, religious, and political, civilization is soaked in beer.”

Some other favorite beer quotes include, “Friends bring happiness into your life; best friends bring beer,” and, “Life and beer are very similar, chill for best results.”

Cheers!

Sources: Wikipedia, Al-Gardinia.com, Andrea Fallibene, Brew Master, Yaqthan Chadirji, Naiem Abid Mhalhal