It's a gesture we make daily. Mechanical. We open the fridge and grab something that, thanks to refrigeration, hasn't spoiled. Maybe that something is a beer, without knowing that precisely thanks to this alcoholic beverage, today we have an essential household appliance. The fridge is a descendant of a device designed by Carl von Linde and the Munich brewery Spaten in 1873 to keep their production cold.
This is just one of the many examples that Jonny Garrett, a journalist, filmmaker, and beer expert podcaster, describes in his latest book: The Sense of Beer (Ned Ediciones). A volume that is not just a compilation of inventions and historical milestones related to this beverage, but a treatise on "how beer made us who we are".
Talking about beer is talking about more than just a drink or a form of "fun," Garrett explains via video call from England. "We depended on it to survive: it was high in calories, safe to drink, and could be stored," he explains. "This was important from 13,000 years ago until about 200 years ago," he adds. "It was the most drinkable liquid in the world," he summarizes. This virtue made it a "vital food" for those who worked on the construction of the pyramids of Egypt, for example.
"Without beer production as an engineering project and architectural challenge, and without beer as currency and part of the daily diet, the pyramids might never have been built," argues Garrett. Each worker on this mega-construction received four liters of low-alcohol beer per day. This is documented in cost records and in the findings of the tombs of several of these workers.
In addition to being a form of payment and a basic food, beer has also played a fundamental role in theadvancement of Medicine. Pasteur's studies on how microorganisms affect the quality of wine and beer led to the creation of the pasteurization process. Inspired by these studies, Joseph Lister, a British surgeon, applied acid washes to his patients' wounds. He managed to prevent thousands of injuries from becoming infected. "If it hadn't been for that leap from beer to humanity, millions of people would have died," Garrett argues.
Its relevance is almost as old as its existence, and it has often been appreciated as "a gift from the gods." In modern times, it was the physical and economic sustenance of religious communities. Today, there are still a few monasteries that produce and sell their own beer to cover part of their expenses. One of them, located in Belgium, brewed what was considered the best beer in the world for years, the Westvleteren 12, which caused kilometer-long queues in this Flemish town 20 years ago to get a bottle.
Politics is also not immune to the beer foam. "They can never be separated from each other," warns Garrett. "It has been at the heart of civilization since its creation."
In 1516, Duke William IV of Bavaria approved a law, still in force, to control the quality and supply of beer - and incidentally ensure the supply and low price of wheat, essential for making bread - known as the Reinheitsgebot or Purity Law. In addition, states like Bavaria founded their own breweries, such as Weihenstephan or Hofbräuhaus. Adolf Hitler gave several of his speeches in a brewery Adolf Hitler, one of which led him to jail in 1923, where he wrote Mein Kampf.
The Nazi party leader was a teetotaler, Garrett emphasizes, although he "understood how manageable crowds of drinkers were." "It's easy to exaggerate the role of breweries and beer in Hitler's rise," the English journalist elaborates, "but it was a factor that would be naive to ignore." Breweries served the future leader of the Third Reich "as a stage, and beer was a magnet, a narcotic, and a social nexus that made his work much easier."
Jonny Garrett, author of 'The Sense of Beer', with a beer in a pub.
In the Palace of Westminster, home to the two houses of the British Parliament, there were in the early 2000s more than 20 pubs and restaurants, some with suggestive names like The Churchill Room, The Debate, or The Strangers, where many parliamentarians waited to vote on laws.
Over the centuries, the role of beer changed almost in parallel with society. "During the period before the Industrial Revolution, production shifted from homes and monasteries to factories, food shortages ceased to be a problem, disposable incomes became more common, and the pubs and bars we know today were formed," Garrett recounts. It went from "being part of the diet" to a product that "we enjoy when we have time and money."
What can affect this beverage is the closure of venues. The British pub, and therefore beer, is an "extraordinary point for creating community and preventing loneliness, one of the greatest killers of modern society," he argues. "If those places can't sell beer, those communities fade away."
Beer can also help fight against global warming or cancer. Or, more accurately, one of its basic ingredients: yeast. "Scientists can learn about the metabolism of cancer cells by studying brewer's yeast," he explains.
In any case, this beverage has been present, to a greater or lesser extent, in all civilizations for thousands of years. Although today it only serves as an excuse to meet up with friends. Or, as Garrett confesses with a laugh, to write a book that would show his daughter "what beer had contributed to the world."