The Naked Pint by Christina Perozzi Read Free Book Online Page B

change of plan, sometimes leading to unique beers—happy accidents that take on a life of their own. It’s important to be able to recognize this great effort when tasting your way through the craft beer world, to know when you are drinking a work of art.
    After all, a Beer Journey isn’t just about drinking every style, it’s also about having a creative approach to your beer choices. It’s about understanding what makes certain beers stand out among others and asking yourself why. At this point, you should be forming some opinions and beginning to differentiate between beers based on flavor notes, giving your own personal opinion some gravitas, and anointing your palate to a higher calling. The following chapters break down the flavor profiles and history of different beer styles, from Hefeweizens to Barleywines, and this chapter arms you with the knowledge and skills needed to formulate an approach when evaluating a variety of beers. Now that you have mastered Beer 101, it’s time to examine the intricacies of tasting beer—the mouthfeel, the carbonation—to revere beer’s great history, and to seek out the deeper questions posed by each pint.

Who Should We Thank? A Little Beer History
    B eer is old. We don’t mean Sistine Chapel old, we mean old old. We’re talking people-carving-notes-to-each-other-in-stone old. We’re talking sacrificing-goats-at-parties old. Beer is, in fact, arguably one of the oldest of all alcoholic drinks. Scientists have been able to date beer back to around 7000 BCE from remnants in ancient pottery found in what is now Iran. The Sumerians seem to have been the first to have made detailed notes about beer, one of the most famous pieces being “The Hymn to Ninkasi,” their goddess of alcohol.
    No, the hymn doesn’t provide specific malt measurements, but it does mention familiar beer ingredients like water and grain. In fact, beer probably came about from baked grains (a sort of dough, porridge, or bread) that were wetted with water (which released sugars in the grain, making it sweeter) and left out for storage. Enter wild naturally occurring yeasts, and the concoction becomes an early, albeit strange, beer. In those days, there were no hops to be found, so spices, fruit (like dates), honey, and herbs were added to make the funky beer more palatable.
    Beer happened all over the globe to many types of grain that were used to make dough or other mash: in China it was wheat, in Japan it was rice. Everyone found a way to turn the gift of harvested grain into a happy beverage.
    Beer soon became a thing of ritual throughout history. The beverage is sometimes even given props as the savior of humanity. Without safe drinking water, beer often became the only sanitary beverage around. It was a choice between beer-o’clock around the clock or water that offered a cholera or dysentery bonus. And beer’s ingredients made it a substantial food at times. Beer has a lot of minerals, fiber, and antioxidants, which added a huge health benefit to the diet of early civilizations. There is also an argument that beer played a part in people’s settling down to plant and harvest instead of roaming and hunting. The idea being that as soon as they found beer, they stopped in their tracks and began planting and harvesting grains for the revered beverage. Sounds logical to us.
    Beer even shows up in the first set of laws. Around 1780 BCE, Hammurabi created his code (in which is the origin of the famous “eye for an eye” punishment) and included in it rules for fairly pricing beer. He places responsibility for this on the tavern keeper (sometimes referred to as female). If the beer was overpriced, the tavern keeper would be drowned (Hammurabi was a bit of a hard-ass).
    The Egyptians have been praised for their reverence of beer for centuries. Pharaoh Rameses II had a large brewing operation during his reign. Their god of beer was Osiris, and beer became a huge part of ritual in their society. Beer was