Beer of the Goddess
Beer is as old as civilization. Some experts even think it was beer, not bread, that coaxed humans into hanging up their spears and starting to plant grain. By 2000 B.C., Mesopotamian women — brewing was considered a woman's job at the time — were the world's brewmasters, with at least 55 words describing different varieties of beer. One 3,800-year-old Sumerian beer recipe was engraved onto a tablet as a hymn to the beer goddess Ninkasi; it was first translated in 1964 but not re-created until the late 1980s, when a University of Pennsylvania anthropologist teamed up with the Anchor Brewing Company to make the Sumerian goddess's brew. At the beer's 1989 debut, beer aficionados sipped the beer as the Sumerians did, from jugs, using long drinking straws. There are no reports, however, that they followed another ancient drinking tradition — in ancient Sumer, after drinking Ninkasi's brew, men would often wrestle while wearing beer jars on their heads.