Is This Common Drink the Foundation of Society?
There’s an old myth which states that the first alcoholic beverages – likely a mealy, thick, calorically dense version of beer – were discovered by accident. The idea goes that our nomadic ancestors started encouraging local plant life to grow in areas that they knew they would return to, so that they could harvest the – still mostly wild – growth each year. For a long time, historians believed that these nomads utilized the grains by mashing them and mixing them with water to make a sort of rus