Nelson, Max;
The Barbarian's Beverage: A History of Beer in Ancient Europe
Routledge, 2005, 213 pages
ISBN 0415311217, 9780415311212
topics: | food | drink | beer | history
This book balances well the dryness of history and the passion of a beer-lover. It is concerned with the history of beer brewing, but also the cultural aspects, and especially tries to find some reasons why it has come to be considered as socially inferior to wine. However, there is a strong European tone running through the book and I fail to see the need for an "European" perspective on this history. The first stated objective is to establish a separate origin for beer within Europe: It is my intention to show here that [beer brewing] was already formulated before AD 1000, and not in Egypt or Mesopotamia, but quite independently in Europe. p.1 Next is the intention of arguing for a distinctiveness for European beer: As I will argue in this book, though the earliest remains or literary attestations of beer come from outside Europe, it is in Europe that beer as we know it today originated, namely a brewed malt beverage made with hops. Indeed both the technique of brewing beer and that of adding hops to beer are arguably purely European innovations... p.3 I am not sure we need a geo-cultural history of anything as universal as beer (or for that matter, heliocentricity, or the decimal sysytem). What we need is an universal history. And any effort otherwise is clearly biased. And will someone tell me what "purely European" might mean? "Europe", in my view is not a sufficiently separated landmass, nor is it a sufficiently separated in a cultural sense. What we know as Europe today is an invention of the Enlightenment era, which saw a tremendous denigration of other races and an enhancement of European achievements (e.g. in the work of Comte de Buffon, see, e.g. Jack Weatherford's Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World or the inheritor of the Greek mantle (which was largely Turkish and Egyptian anyway), The book provides a good overview of beer in Roman and Greek times, and particularly the Grek prejudice towards beer (the actual account details the Greek opposition to Dionysius, which may have also included wine drinking). Later writers looked down on drinkers of "brutos" of barley wine, which was most likely beer. Subsequently, the book claims that beer disappeared from "Europe" but nonetheless, these prejudices influence modern thinking (possibly through Arabic translations, perhaps)? A good chapter on the monastic culture of brewing, with particular emphasis on the Scottish monasteries. He may be wrong in associating the Celts with the decline of beer in medieval Europe. In Ian Hornsey's far more detailed (and global) History of Beer and Brewing, Spencer argues that it may have been the Celts who first brought beer to Europe, and traces its development in Britain and elsewhere well before the monasteries began to take interest. For understanding the history of beer as well, that may be a better read.