WEEK 3 LESSON 5

WEEK 3 LESSON 5BEVERAGES

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INTRODUCTIONFor much of history, water wasn’t the first choice of beverage. Often, it was dirty or carried disease, so people drank other things instead, such as beer or tea. Five drinks have travelled around the world and become near universal in both their use and appeal: beer, wine, tea, coffee, and cacao.

BEER IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Beer was the first alcoholic drink people discovered, reaching as far back as Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt. Fermentation was most likely first discovered by accident, but people quickly learned how to replicate it, even if they weren’t sure how it worked. Early beers were cloudy and unfiltered, and people drank them with straws to keep from swallowing some of the bitter fermented grains.

Beer was popular both as an intoxicant and as a food—it has a lot of carbohydrates, due to being made from grain. One glass of beer has as many calories as two slices of bread. In ancient Egypt, beer was one of the rations provided to the workers building the Pyramids, and it both refreshed them after working long hours in the sun and kept their energy up. Pharaohs were buried with yeast and barley in their tombs so that they could drink in the afterlife.

In the Middle Ages, beer was the most common drink—even for children. The alcohol killed bacteria, making it safer to drink than water. In most households, beer was typically brewed by the women, but when plague and famine wiped out half of the population, monks began brewing alcohol instead. They built breweries to provide pilgrims with food, drink, and shelter, and those breweries were the blueprint for the very first taverns and beer halls.

BEER IN THE MODERN WORLD

After the Middle Ages, countries became more protective of their beer culture. England banned hops for a century in the 1400s, even though they improved the flavor and longevity of beer, simply because they were an innovation from Holland. Germans adopted hops as their own, but avoided other foreign influences. In 1506, Germany passed a law—still on the books today—saying that only the local ingredients of water, malted barley, malted wheat, hops, and yeast could be used to make beer.

By this point, brewing beer had become profitable. When King Henry VIII closed the monasteries of England, someone else had to start brewing, so brewers’ guilds sprang up in cities across the country. In the country, private estates had their

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own breweries, and servants and workers on those estates received beer as part of their wages. Beer brewing, once a household chore, became a profession.

WINE IN THE ANCIENT WORLDWine grapes grow best in warmer climates. While northern European countries like England and Germany brewed beer, countries on the Mediterranean preferred wine. Wine-making started in Egypt, where the drink was used in ceremonies due to being the color of blood. The ancient Greeks made it a staple drink, and wine became a symbol of health and wealth. Romans loved wine even more, and planted grapevines all across the Roman Empire, from Spain to Italy to eastern Europe. The Greek and Roman pantheons both had a god of wine (Dionysus and Bacchus).

When the Roman Empire converted to Christianity, wine became a central part of the Catholic sacrament. Anywhere Christianity went, wine followed. In the Middle Ages, the monks who brewed beer also grew wine, both for religious reasons and to refresh travelers.

WINE IN THE MODERN WORLDWine had a hard time reaching an international audience. Viking explorer Leif Erikson brought wine grapes to his settlement in Canada to grow

grapes, but had to abandon the settlement and its vineyards. Portuguese missionaries brought wine to Japan, but it was only ever drank in religious ceremonies. In 1587, Christianity was outlawed in Japan, and the demand for wine dried up until the religion was legalized again in the 1800s.

Other places were more receptive. The conquistadors brought wine to Mexico and Brazil, where it spread across South America, and missionaries built their own wineries in Chile and Argentina not long after. During his time as ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson fell in love with French wine and brought French grape clippings back to America. When France took control of Algeria in the 1830s, they started planting vineyards—and when a blight killed most of the French vineyards in the 1860s, Algerian wine production soared.

TEA IN THE ANCIENT WORLDTea first originated in China. Legend has it that the great herbalist Shennong discovered it by accident in 2737 BCE, when the wind blew some tea leaves into his pot of boiling water—but nobody knows for sure, since it happened before the time of the earliest surviving records of ancient China. Since it was discovered by an herbalist, it was first considered a medicine, and it wasn’t until centuries later that people started drinking it recreationally. It became the Chinese national drink, and people began to see it in an almost spiritual light.

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Japanese Buddhist monks discovered tea in China and brought it back to Japan, where it became an integral part of Japanese culture. The tea ceremony is a traditional cultural ritual of serving tea in a very specific way.

TEA IN THE MODERN WORLDDuring the Age of Exploration (the 1500s and 1600s), Europe and Asia began trading more than they ever had in the past. Tea, which the Chinese had drank for centuries, became a novelty among the upper classes in Europe. Britain was one of the last places for tea to catch on—it only became popular when Princess Catherine of Portugal married Edward II in the 1600s, bringing her tea with her. The British aristocracy began drinking tea in imitation of the royal family, and from there it became the most popular drink in England.

By the 1700s, the British East India Company controlled trade with China. They had a tax exemption that allowed them to ship directly to the American colonies, while the American tea traders had to pay taxes. Americans responded with the slogan of “no taxation without representation,” and the tension exploded in the Boston Tea Party of 1773, when Boston colonists stormed British East India Company ships and threw their duty-free tea overboard.

Iced tea originated at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, Missouri. A tea merchant from abroad was offering free tea samples, but the weather was hot and nobody wanted hot tea. To promote sales, he asked a nearby ice cream vendor for some ice, which he dumped into the brewed tea. The American iced tea tradition was born. Today, iced tea makes up around 80% of U.S. tea sales.

COFFEE IN THE ANCIENT WORLDCoffee and its effects were first discovered in Ethiopia in the 11th century. In those early days, people were more likely to eat the fruit of the coffee plant than make it into a beverage (a “coffee bean” is actually the seed of the coffee fruit). It quickly became popular throughout the Muslim world. It was chewed plain, ground into a pulp and mixed with animal fat, or fermented into an alcoholic beverage.

Coffee is a staple of Turkish culture in particular. In the 1500s, the Turkish developed a new way of preparing coffee by roasting the beans. It was first drunk in the royal courts, and spread to the populace as merchants began establishing coffeehouses throughout Turkey. Even today, coffeehouses are centers of Turkish social life, where people gather, play chess and backgammon, and discuss current events.

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COFFEE IN THE MODERN WORLD

The European coffeehouse tradition began in 1683, after the Battle of Vienna. A Polish diplomat (Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki) saved Vienna from a Turkish

siege by sneaking out of the city to ask the King of Poland for reinforcements. He was rewarded with a huge sum of money, an estate in Vienna, and—by his request—hundreds of pounds of a mysterious green bean captured from the Turkish army. Nobody had any idea what the beans were, except for Kulczycki, who was familiar with Turkish culture; with more coffee beans than he knew what to do with, he started his own coffeehouse in Vienna—the first of many.

In many parts of Europe, coffee replaced beer as the social drink of choice. Suddenly, many people were becoming awake and alert because of their socializing, instead of slightly drunk. Some historians believe that this is what caused the Age of Enlightenment (1685-1815)—people with leisure time meeting in coffeehouses, being more awake and more able to think about Big Ideas.

CACAO

Chocolate was first consumed by the Aztecs, not as a candy but as a beverage. It was also much more bitter than we’re used to—today’s milk chocolate is only 10 to 20 percent cocoa (and mostly sugar), whereas the Aztecs usually spiced their chocolate with chilies rather than sweetening it at all.

When it was brought to Europe, after Spain’s first encounter with the Americas, the Spanish aristocracy were interested but found it too bitter. Thus, they added sugar or honey to the drink, making it more like today’s chocolate. It was a drink for the rich only until the development of the

cocoa press in the 1820s, which allowed it to be mass-produced. Soon after that, it became more popular as a bar than as a drink.

PER CAPITA US CONSUMPTIONHere’s how much of each of these drinks the average American drinks in a year:

Beer – 28.3 gallons*Wine – 2.94 gallons*Tea – 12 ounces (dry)Coffee - 9.3 poundsChocolate – 10.6 pounds ** (not a beverage anymore, but 11 pounds per person is a lot)

*Age 21 and over**Solid form

IMAGE SOURCESPhoto of assortment of beverages courtesy of Pexels and licensed under the Pexels License.

Image (painting) of Egyptian woman pouring beer courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and licensed under Public Domain.

Photo of beer courtesy of Pexels and licensed under the Pexels License.

Image (painting) of grape cultivation, winemaking, and commerce in ancient Egypt c 1500 BC courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and licensed under Public Domain.

Photo of glass of wine courtesy of Pexels and licensed under the Pexels License.

Photo of tea ceremony courtesy of Pexels and licensed under the Pexels License.

Photo of commercially sold tea courtesy of Pexels and licensed under the Pexels License.

Photo of Turkish Coffee being poured from a copper cezve by Müslüm Bayburs courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.

Photo of Starbucks logo in Poland by Szymon Jarocki Kraków courtesy of Unsplash and licensed under Unsplash License.

Image of an Aztec woman generating foam by pouring chocolate from one vessel to another in the Codex Tudela 1553 courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and licensed under Public Domain.

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