As we get closer to our next Beer Breakfast Event on Saturday, March 29, 2014 in support of Tampa Bay Watch, let’s take a moment to reflect on our favorite frothy beverage and its pretty amazing origins!
Humans and yeast have been working together for millennia to create tasty brews. As early as the sixth millennium B.C., ancient Sumerians had discovered the art of fermentation. By the 19th century B.C., they were inscribing beer recipes into tablets in the form of a Hymn to Ninkasi, their female deity of beer (that’s right, chicks DIG beer guys!!).
Other cultures around the world developed beer independently, but the job of brewing often went to women. Tenenit, the Egyptian deity of beer, was female, as was the Zulu beer goddess Mbaba Mwana Waresa. A 2005 study found that among the Wari people of ancient Peru, elite women brewed the beer. Centuries later, women dominated the European brewing scene, according to a 1993 article in Yankee Brew News by late beer anthropologist Alan Eames. According to Eames, it wasn’t until the late 1700s that beer became a male-dominated drink.
So there you have it, we need to be thankful for the beer AND the ladies in our lives when we raise a pint in Revelry~Fellowship~Sanctuary at the Mandarin Hide for Beer Breakfast!