the afternoon break

 

My sister and her spouse often have a beer on their deck late in the afternoon before they start preparing dinner. In a way, it’s a throwback to the time that my parents would have cheese, crackers, and beer (usually Hamm’s) on the table outside in the backyard in the afternoon during the summer months.

 

Sharon and I often have cheese and crackers when I get home from school, but I normally have a glass of wine instead of a beer. I still like beer, but I normally have one at dinner time if it pairs well with whatever we are having for dinner that night.

We had roughly 30 people in attendance at our 50^th wedding anniversary part two weeks ago, and most of them brought beer. As a result, we had a LOT of beer left over. My favorite beer, though, was a Paulaner Hefe-Weizen, which was first brewed in Munich in 1634, roughly 80 years after the 1516 German purity law was passed.

1634 was a long time ago, but humans have been consuming beer for a MUCH longer period of time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_beer

Beer is one of the oldest drinks humans have produced. The first chemically confirmed barley beer dates back to the 5th millennium BC in modern-day Iran, and was recorded in the written history of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia and spread throughout the world.

As almost any cereal containing certain sugars can undergo spontaneous fermentation due to wild yeasts in the air, it is possible that beer-like drinks were independently developed throughout the world soon after a tribe or culture had domesticated cereal. Chemical tests of ancient pottery jars reveal that beer was produced as far back as about 7,000 years ago in what is today Iran. This discovery reveals one of the earliest known uses of fermentation and is the earliest evidence of brewing to date.

Author Thomas Sinclair says in his book, "Beer, Bread, and the Seeds of Change: Agriculture's Imprint on World History" that the discovery of beer may have been an accidental find. The precurser to beer was soaking grains in water and making a porridge or gruel, as grain were chewy and hard to digest alone. Ancient peoples would heat the gruel and leave it throughout the days until it was gone. A benefit to heating the gruel would be to sanitize the water and the temperature required to denature grain proteins would also denature disease microbes. Leaving the gruel to sit would change it. Fermentation would occur and they noticed the change in taste and effect. Yeasts would settle on the mixture and rapidly consume the oxygen in the mixture. The low oxygen was a significant consequence of allowing the yeast to digest sugars by anerobic respiration. The yeast would release ethenol (alcohol) and carbon dioxide as by-products and, hence, beer was born.

In Mesopotamia, the oldest evidence of beer is believed to be a 6,000-year-old Sumerian tablet depicting people consuming a drink through reed straws from a communal bowl. A 3,900-year-old Sumerian poem honouring Ninkasi, the patron goddess of brewing, contains the oldest surviving beer recipe, describing the production of beer from bread made from barley.

In China, residue on pottery dating from around 5,000 years ago shows beer was brewed using barley and other grains.

The invention of bread and beer has been argued to be responsible for humanity's ability to develop technology and build civilization. The earliest chemically confirmed barley beer to date was discovered at Godin Tepe in the central Zagros Mountains of Iran, where fragments of a jug, from between 5,400 and 5,000 years ago was found to be coated with beerstone, a by-product of the brewing process. Beer may have been known in Neolithic Europe as far back as 5,000 years ago, and was mainly brewed on a domestic scale.

Beer produced before the Industrial Revolution continued to be made and sold on a domestic scale, although by the 7th century AD beer was also being produced and sold by European monasteries. During the Industrial Revolution, the production of beer moved from artisanal manufacture to industrial manufacture, and domestic manufacture ceased to be significant by the end of the 19th century. The development of hydrometers and thermometers changed brewing by allowing the brewer more control of the process, and greater knowledge of the results.

Today, the brewing industry is a global business, consisting of several dominant multinational companies and many thousands of smaller producers ranging from brewpubs to regional breweries.^[13] More than 133 billion liters (35 billion gallons) are sold per year—producing total global revenues of $294.5 billion (£147.7 billion) in 2006.

 If you are looking for a way to wind down at the end of the day, you may want to forgo your afternoon latte and go for a beer instead.

After all, you deserve a break today.