Beer is one of the oldest alcoholic beverages and one of the most consumed beverages after water and tea in the world. Beer continues to be vital in our daily lives and was very important in the lives of ancient civilizations and people, the first evidence actually comes from a cave in Israel that is located near what is now Haifa and is dated to 13,000 years ago. They found on the side on the floor of the cave, which is formed of arsenic stone, they found holes containing residues that archaeologists collected and analyzed and the remains contained seeds that were deformed by fermentation, white cereal seeds that were deformed by fermentation, so this in a sense is the first evidence of using seeds to create alcoholic beverages, but we have a lot of other archaeological evidence of beer production in antiquity, in many places, as scientific recovery methods developed, we recovered ancient beverages that were similarly sprouted and were found in sort of baths and vessels that clearly indicate that those cereals were sprouted to generate a type of beverage as in beer. We used barley to recreate this ancient beer, we sowed cereals in the ancient way, without any kind of crossbreeding and we collected them in the traditional way, then we used the ceramic vessels, we used barley, the main cereal of this period is the type that we call amber, we added in a hole and the barley grew and in another we added honey to start the fermentation and after some days we obtained beer.
They recreated a beer from the residue found in a royal tomb in ancient Turkey, which was attributed to the legendary King Midas, that was made from barley, grapes and mead and tasted it that way. Dogfish Head Brewery continues to make those ancient beers seasonally, also experimented with chicha beer, using traditional methods, adding sage and all that.
In Mexico, pulque was considered the traditional drink by locals and foreigners, however, we should consider it unfortunate or incorrect because beer is also the national drink despite being far from the levels of mass consumption during the next century. Between the first wave of industrialization between 1890 and 1910, the main brewing companies would emerge, Cuauhtémoc, Moctezuma, Toluca and México, among others, while in this scenario they strengthened economically and socially in the region. Victoria beer was approved by the German residence, who preferred it for being equivalent to the best beers of their country. Hops is a fruit that is added to beer because brewers research what produces more beer, which allowed brewers to produce more than others and more thorough marketing because hops act more as a stabilizer and allowed beers to be produced at lower temperatures and to be more easily transported and stored.
Right now, the main producers are Anheuser-Bush, which produces almost half of the beer consumed in the world, then there is SABMiller, Heineken, Carlsberg, Tsingtao and Modelo. Now in Mexico the production of craft beer has grown a lot; we are the country that exports more beer in the world but we are in the sixth position of producers right now, that tells us about the level of consumption we have, about the knowledge of beer we have and about the magnificent marketing strategies that have been implemented for commercial beers that have allowed them to position themselves outside the country, in a culture and practice of consumption that has been intrinsic to Mexico. There is evidence in fact that a type of quinoa was used for the production of beer in Mesoamerica, it is not known if there is any beer produced on a large scale with quinoa or malt, about malt it is necessary to investigate but of other cereals mainly there is still beer production.