In 1814, Meux's Horse Shoe Brewery was the victim of some very bad luck.

Or maybe just poor engineering.

At the time, massive storage vats were en vogue in London's breweries, and when one of these large vats burst at The Horse Shoe Brewery, it led to over a hundred thousand gallons of beer flooding the surrounding area.

The surge led to the collapse of two nearby buildings and the loss of eight lives.

Over the years, rumors even popped up that unconscientious ale-lovers had flocked to the scene of the accident to consume the runaway beverage.

Yikes.

Contemporary accounts suggest there's not much substance to those rumors, but it's easy enough to see why people would believe them.

People really like beer.

Behind water and tea, it's thought to be the third most widely consumed drink on Earth.

It helped shape civilization as we know it, and I'm not just talking about those commercials where the guys say "whassup?"

No I didn't want to say it that way, it's embarrassing.

I HAVE to?

Whassssupppp.

Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that the story of the world's most-widely consumed intoxicating beverage is shrouded in legend and half-truths.

Was beer brewed to make water potable?

When did hops enter the picture?

And what do the Budweiser Frogs have in common with Captain Jack Sparrow?

The short answers, respectively, are "no," "the 9th century, at the latest," and "Gore Verbinski."

But the long version is more fun.

Let's get started.

Hi, I'm Justin Dodd.

Welcome to Food History.

As we talked about in our last episode, Ancient Sumerians were cultivating grains thousands of years ago.

But we didn't actually get into what those possibly-first sedentary people were doing with the grains they grew, and there's actually some debate on the matter.

According to one theory, the grains were used to make beer before bread ever entered the picture.

The discovery of ancient tools potentially designed for beer brewing supports this.

That would mean beer was part of the origin of agriculture, which is arguably what allowed humans to build civilizations, which led to the development of new technologies, which made it possible to brew even more beer.

Oh, man, this is some Inception level history stuff.

In 2018, archaeologists from Stanford announced they had evidence that people in what is now Israel were brewing something like beer around 12,000 years ago, which they noted predates "the appearance of domesticated cereals by several millennia in the Near East."

The archaeologists speculated that it was likely a thin gruel possibly consumed for religious purposes.

Beer, by the way, is any fermented, alcoholic beverage made with cereal grains such as wheat or barley.

There was a time when beer and ale were considered two different beverages, with beer defined by the presence of hops, but we're gonna proceed with more modern usage, where the two words are basically interchangeable.

We'll get to hops pretty soon, though.

By which I mean, in about 11,000 years.

Early beer was likely made by crushing up grains, heating them gradually in water, then possibly baking them, and steeping them again.

This process encourages fermentation.

Grains contain starches, and heating up grains helps break these starches down into their simple sugar components.

Fermentation happens when yeast microbes consume these sugars and convert them into alcohol, flavor compounds, and carbon dioxide.

It's sometimes said that Louis Pasteur discovered yeast in the mid-1800s, but that's a little misleading.

Sure, single-celled organisms like yeast are invisible to the naked eye, but when millions or billions congregate in the beer-making process they can be seen and manipulated.