Beer in Ethiopia

Brewing is the most ancient manufacturing art, and is most likely as old as agriculture. It’s a known fact that Beer is as old as bread. Of course, it is possible that either beer or bread may have been a result of the other.

‘Kui’ is a Chinese beer made some 5,000 years ago. In Mesopotamia, a 4,000 year-old clay tablet shows that brewing was a very much appreciated profession - and women were the master brewers. In ancient Babylon, the women brewers were woman priests, too.

The 6th King of Babylonia, Hammuabi, incorporated provisions regulating the business of tavern keepers in his great law code in 2,100 BC. These provisions enclosed the sale of beer and were intended to protect the consumer. The penalty of short measure by an innkeeper was drowning.

An ancient tablet now in New York’s Metropolitan Museum registers Babylonian beers as:

• dark beer
• pale beer
• red beer
•  three fold beer
• beer with a head
• without a head, etc

Besides, it lists that beer was sipped through a straw - in the case of royalty a golden straw, long enough to reach from the throne to a large container of beer kept close by.

3,000 year old beer mugs were discovered in Israel in the 1960s. Archaeologists believed that their finding at Tel Isdar pointed to that beer drinking in Israel went back to the days of King Saul and King David. An Assyrian tablet of 2,000 BC registers beer among the foods that Noah used to provision the ark.
Keywords: beer, brew, Kui, Mesopotamia,