Let's talk beer. Not the kind you buy, but the kind you make at
home. My friends Gui Yingling and Dennis Witnauer are part of a
brew club in Wellfleet, and the other day, we sat down with a
homebrewed pint and talked our way through the process—from
history to ingredients to brewing itself. Let's start with a
timeline. According to Dennis, the current consensus is that
beer brewing started with the Sumerians about 5,000 years ago.
They think it happened by accident—someone left some barley out
in the rain, it started to spore and grow, and in an effort to
save it before it went bad, they heated it up. This led to the
discovery that you could extract sugars from it, and malt was
born. The Sumerians wrote out the earliest known beer recipe on
a tablet—in the form of a prayer called Hymn to Ninkasi, who was
the goddess of brewing. Goddess? Yes, because originally, women
were the brewers. Fast forward a few thousand years. It's the
Middle Ages, and women are still the brewers. They're making
beer at home the way