Bread and beer both come from grain. Bread was made from wild wheat and barley in the Stone Age. Beer-making may have started as a byproduct of early bread-making. And no one knows whether the first grain was cultivated because of a need for bread or a taste for beer.
Stone mortars, pestles and grinding stones found on ancient sites indicate that people in the Middle East were making, some form of unleavened bread or mash with wild grain even before they knew how to make pottery.
With wild grain, it is difficult to separate the edible seed from the chaff — the outer sheath. Archaeologists believe that early people learned to split the chaff by parching the grain on hot stones while they were threshing it. Mixing the parched grain with water would have produced an edible mash. Unparched seeds may have been moistened and left to sprout, like bean shoots. Natural yeasts could have fermented the liquor left from such sprouting retaking it into beer.
The first people known to have grown their own grain were the Natufians who lived around Mount Carmel in what is now northern Israel. Research by a British archaeologist, Dr Romana Unger-Hamilton. in 1988, showed that they were using flint sickles to cut wheat and barley they had grown themselves as long as 13,000 years. She found sickles with scratch marks caused by dust, showing that the plants were reaped in cleared ground, not among natural vegetation where ground cover from other plants keeps the dust down.
The Sumerians, who lived in southern Mesopotamia (now mainly modem Iraq) around 5000 years ago, used about 40 per cent of their grain harvest to make beer of eight different flavours. About 1750 BC. King Hammurabi of Babylon, in southern Mesopotamia. Issued laws regulating the quality of beer to be sold in taverns.
The ancient Egyptians were the first people known to have made leavened brew:, in about 2600 BC. They used wheat flour to keep a store of sour, fermented dough (sourdough) that was added to each mix to make the bread rise. Sourdough has been discovered by accident, when airborne yeast entered dough that had been mixed and put aside before baking. Later civilizations, such as the Celts, used foam from — the yeasty foam from fermenting beer – to leaven bread.
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