This is a brief history of home brewing – home brewing refers to the making of beer or related alcoholic beverages on a small-scale for personal consumption and non-commercial purposes.

Beer has been around almost since inception with facts dating back about 10,000 years ago. This implies the history of home brewing beer has long been around, longer than the existence of breweries (since breweries didn’t appear until the early Middle Ages).

The first written record of home brewing beer came from the Sumerian people. In fact, beer was so important in Sumerian society that almost half their grain production ended up in brews.

There are also records of beer being produced from rice in China about 7,000 years ago.

Subsequently, the Babylonians took the home-brew beer process to a different level by setting up the first ever regulations controlling beer production and consumption.

As time passed, people migrated to Europe with their home brewing skills, and the history of home brewing continued.

However, about 1,000 A.D., breweries began to make their appearance.

Today, more and more people are returning to home brewing both as a satisfying hobby, and to experience an improved, fuller bodied beer than is available from the commercial breweries. Generally, beer can be classified into 2 major categories. These include: the ale and the lager.

Ale

Ale was a popular drink throughout the 15th century, and popular to drink as water.

Ale would have been drunk by nearly everybody, including children, at one time or the other.

The brewers of Ale in the Middle Ages were majorly women, being a common household chore performed continuously.

It is home-brewed both for household consumption and small-scale commercial sale and with that, they were able to offer a much more income for their households. However, only in some couple of instances, as was the case of widows, was brewing regarded as the primary income of the household.

While producing Ale, if fermentation is prolonged, one may end up with a lager instead of ale that was set out to be made.

Lager

Lager beer started in the Middle Ages when Bavarian (Germany) brewers realized that their beer kept on fermenting whilst it is kept in ice-caves during the winter.

The outcome was a remarkably enhanced, smooth and mellow tasting beer.

Consequently, they would brew in late fall and preserve the beer, wrapped with ice collected from neighboring rivers and lakes, until the beginning of spring. It was named lager beer as a result of the long storage period.

Lager was the brewing trend of the late 19th and early 20th century and as time passed, its brewers rapidly cornered the leading beer markets in most part of the world, with the major exception of Belgium and the Great Britain wherein the brewers kept on to stick to their cherished ales.