#ninkasi

New Years Feast

In one phase of the Babylonian New Years Festival, the statue of Nabu would be brought into the city's temple and reunited with his parents, Marduk and Sarpanit.

(Photography by Terren Wein)

“Five things I learned about Sumerian beer

Not just from a lecture, but a tasting.

By Author

Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93

|Web exclusives

— 04.09.2014

The esteemed scholars at the Oriental Institute—who have their priorities in order, as far as I’m concerned—have been working on Sumerian beer for half a century.

In 1964, Miguel Civil, a Sumerologist at the OI, published the first definitive translation of “A Hymn to Ninkasi.” Ninkasi, whose name literally means “lady who fills the mouth,” was the goddess of brewing.

Earlier translations of the hymn, relying on imperfect knowledge of Sumerian, had produced much different results, Civil observed: “A line that now even a first-year Sumerian student will translate ‘you are the one who spreads the roasted malt on a large mat’ was translated ‘thou real producer of the lightning, exalted functionary, mighty one!’”

The hymn describes the brewing process, in oblique, literary, grateful terms. For example:

Ninkasi, you are the one who soaks the malt in a jar, The waves rise, the waves fall. You are the one who spreads the cooked mash on large reed mats, Coolness overcomes… You are the one who holds with both hands the great sweetwort, Brewing [it] with honey [and] wine… The fermenting vat, which makes a pleasant sound, You place appropriately on [top of] a large collector vat…

While I circle around the abundance of beer, While I feel wonderful, I feel wonderful, Drinking beer, in a blissful mood, Drinking liquor, feeling exhilarated, With joy in the heart [and] a happy liver— While my heart full of joy, [And] [my] happy liver I cover with a garment fit for a queen!…

The instructions for making beer, murky as they were, now existed in English. But another 25 years passed before anyone attempted to decipher the secret code.

In 1989 the Anchor Brewing Company of San Francisco, working with Civil and a bioanthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, first tried to brew and bottle a Sumerian-style beer. Its creators pronounced it “drinkable.”

Another 20 years passed before a second attempt was made. This time, Pat Conway, AM’78, of Great Lakes Brewing in Cleveland, was determined not only to use the hymn as a recipe, but to brew the beer in clay vessels like those used 4,000 years ago.

With the help of graduate student Tate Paulette, AM’04, and other OI experts, Great Lakes created three Sumerian beers: Enkibru, a “baseline” beer, as Conway described it; the same beer with date syrup added at the end “to kick off the sweetness”; and Gilgamash, the same beer brewed on 21st-century equipment. The beers are named after Enkidu and Gilgamesh, the main characters in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Paulette explained to me later.

Last month, at a sold-out OI event called “A Hymn to Ninkasi,” I got to try them.

But first we all had to sit through an hour-long lecture by the Sumerologists at the OI and the brewers at Great Lakes. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I was a bit squirmy by the end.

Nonetheless, here are five things I learned.

1. “Beer production predates the first cities, perhaps by thousands of years,” Sumerologist Chris Woods explained. “Beer production may even be as old as agriculture itself.” Beer in Mesopotamia was consumed by both men and women and all social classes.

2. There are “thousands upon thousands” of references to beer in the clay tablets of Mesopotamia, and yet not a single recipe, Woods continued. “The Hymn to Ninkasi” is the closest thing that has been discovered as of yet.

3. People drank beer out of a communal jar using long reed straws. The beer was probably still actively fermenting, “so you’d have a layer of husks and other stuff on top,” said Paulette. “The straws get down through that top layer, acting as a filter.” Beer drunk through a straw would also get into your system more quickly, he pointed out.

4. The two main ingredients of Sumerian beer were malted barley (barley that has been allowed to germinate) and bappir, usually translated as “beer bread.” But there are two big questions about bappir, Paulette said: “What was it, and how does it fit into the process?”

The OI-Great Lakes group decided to test the possibility that bappir introduced the yeast for fermentation; but if that were the case, the bread couldn’t be baked, or the yeast would die. So they worked with an artisanal baker in Cleveland who baked the bappir at an extremely low temperature—around 100 degrees, about how hot it gets in Iraq in the summer—for up to a week. “It was almost like drying out bread, rather than baking it,” said Paulette.

5. Sumerian beer is not my thing. Enkibru was cloudy and lemony; I heard other, more open-minded tasters describe it as “refreshing” and “kind of like shandy.” Enkibru with date syrup looked and tasted like dish soap; I didn’t hear any nice comments about this one. Gilgamash, brewed on modern equipment, was clear and light, a bit like the wheat beers that I’m partial to. I drank a pint of it and enjoyed it at the time, but woke up the next morning with a college-style hangover. My liver was not filled with joy.”

Nine of Cups. Art by Taylor Hultquist-Todd, from Myths & Legends: An Illustrated Tarot.

LYON : on a fait

BEER HAS BEEN AN ESSENTIAL aspect of human existence for at least 4,000 years—and women have always played a central role in its production. But as beer gradually moved from a cottage industry into a money-making one, women were phased out through a process of demonization and character assassination.

It’s telling that the oldest-known beer recipe comes from a Sumerian hymn to the goddess of beer, Ninkasi. It also includes a description of how the fermented beverage was made in ancient times:

[…]It is you who bake the beerbread in the big oven, and put in order the piles of hulled grain. Ninkasi, it is you who bake the beerbread in the big oven, and put in order the piles of hulled grain. It is you who soak the malt in a jar; the waves rise, the waves fall. Ninkasi, it is you who soak the malt in a jar; the waves rise, the waves fall. It is you who spread the cooked mash on large reed mats; coolness overcomes. Ninkasi, it is you who spread the cooked mash on large reed mats; coolness overcomes [....]

Sumerian women brewed low-alcohol beer for religious ceremonies (including ones dedicated to Ninkasi) as well as for daily food rations. Ancient Egyptians worshipped a beer goddess named Tenenet, and hieroglyphics have been found depicting women brewing and drinking beer. Baltic and Slavic mythology both include a goddess, named Raugutiene, who provided protection over beer. And the Finnish told of a legendary woman named Kalevatar who invented beer by mixing honey with bear saliva.

Egyptian hieroglyphics depict women pouring beer. PUBLIC DOMAIN

The image of the woman as ale-maker persisted well into the Middle Ages, moving from a sacred role to an everyday necessity of homemaking, historically typified as “women’s work.” Water in cities was unsanitary, at times bringing with it deadly diseases. But the process of fermentation created a sterile drink, so beer was considered a safer option. Most ale was very low-alcohol level, while more potent ales were reserved for special occasions such as holidays and weddings. So even before the year 1500, nearly all women in England knew how to brew.

Making beer is difficult and time-consuming in any age. But given that a typical medieval family of five might have needed roughly 9 gallons of beer to subsist per week, and said beer spoiled quickly, women had to get creative. They then began sharing the workload with friends and neighbors, a system that often involved one woman making extra each week to sell to other households. As this culture of shared work evolved, some women in England began making ale more professionally, with some providing a constant flow of it for sale. Occasionally, these women might open makeshift bars located in their own homes, where people could sit together and drink. And so the term “alewife” (or “brewster”) emerged, referring to a woman who brewed beer for a small profit.

Professional brewsters and alewives had several means of identifying themselves and promoting their businesses. They wore tall hats to stand out on crowded streets. To signify that their homes or taverns sold ale, they would place broomsticks—a symbol of domestic trade—outside of the door. Cats often scurried around the brewsters’ bubbling cauldrons, killing the mice that liked to feast on the grains used for ale.

If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because this is all iconography that we now associate with witches. While there’s no definitive historical proof that modern depictions of witches were modeled after alewives, some historians see uncanny similarities between brewsters and anti-witch propaganda. One such example exists in a 17th-century woodcut of a popular alewife, Mother Louise, who was well-known in her time for making excellent beer.

Mother Louise, a popular alewife. FÆ / CC BY 4.0

While the relationship between alewives and witch imagery has still yet to be proven, we do know for sure that alewives and brewsters had a bad reputation from the jump. Beyond the cheating that some of their counterparts engaged in, brewsters also had to deal with the bad rap their entire gender suffered because of original sin. “The ale trade was (and is) filled with trickery—poor ale substituted for good, pint measures that were just a bit too small, inflated prices, and of course, inebriated customers who found they’d been robbed or cheated,” explains Dr. Judith Bennet, author of Ale, Brewsters, and Beer in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World 1300-1600. “For medieval people, it was easy to link these deceptions with women. Were not women, as daughters of Eve, naturally more deceptive and wicked than men? By such logic, any alewife, no matter how friendly and open, was suspected of being a secret swindler.”

The medieval Church was also not a fan of brewsters. They saw these early female entrepreneurs as temptresses who used their wiles to get pious men drunk and spend money. The Church also saw alehouses as playgrounds for the devil, where the cardinal sins of gluttony and lust ruled supreme.

Furthermore, as Bennet notes, one of the most iconic images of feminine evil in the Middle Ages was that of the alewife in hell: The Church specifically taught that alewives would be the only people left in hell after Christ freed all the damned. “Enacted in plays, drawn on the walls of parish churches, and carved into wood, it was a fate that medieval people imagined with resentful glee,” Bennet details.

The Church equated alewives with damnation. PROJECT GUTENBERG

Brewsters’ bad reputation didn’t help their case when wealthier, more socially-connected men started taking up the trade. After the devastation of the Black Plague, people began drinking a lot more ale, doing so in public alehouses instead of at home. This also marked a shift in people’s relationship with beer, which moved from being just a necessity and occasional indulgence to something closer to what we have today. Men suddenly saw they could make a real profit off of what was once seen as a semi-lucrative side gig for women. So they built taverns that were bigger and cleaner than the makeshift ones that alewives provided, and people flocked to them to revel and conduct business alike. Over time, alewives grew to be seen not only as tricky, but also dirty and their beer unsanitary.

Women continued to make low-alcohol ale for their family’s daily consumption after the Industrial Revolution increased production methods, which made buying beer cheaper and easier than making it at home. But that died in the 1950s and 1960s, when marketing campaigns branded beer as a “manly drink.” Companies such as Schlitz, Heineken, and Budweiser depicted beer as a means of unwinding after a long day of work, often featuring women serving their suited-up husbands cold bottles of brew.

That’s been a factor in why the contemporary brewing industry is a notorious boy’s club, but the craft beer industry has helped moved the needle a bit: A 2014 Auburn University study found that women represented 29% of all brewery workers. It seems that the brewing industry has taken a circuitous route, moving away from small homebrewing methods to large-scale production, and back again. These days, the sky’s the limit for brewsters. They don’t even have to ride broomsticks to get there.