Who drank the first fermented wheat?
Beer is nearly as old as civilization itself, historians believe, as the accidental fermentation of wheat or barley — which produces a rudimentary beer — almost certainly occurred soon after the advent of crop agriculture (the question becoming then who was the first to volunteer to drink a murky pool of wheat water?). The first concrete archaeological evidence of the first beer comes from Iraq, where ancient Sumerians built the first agriculture-based cities approximately 6,000 years ago. A stone seal discovered and dated to that era actually details the beer-making process in a poem dedicated to Ninkasi, the Sumerian goddess of brewing. Two millennia later, Babylonians living in the same area had perfected at least 20 different brews. Brewing was a highly regarded profession and almost the exclusive domain of the society’s women, as females were also responsible for turning grain into bread. Beer was enormously popular with the masses in all early civilizations, historians believe, s
