Almost 4,000 years ago, scribes in ancient Mesopotamia carved the oldest known recipe for beer into a clay tablet. It wasn’t written as a list of instructions. It was written as a hymn - a song of praise for Ninkasi, the Sumerian goddess of brewing. Each verse describes the next step of making beer.
The recipe calls for bappir, a kind of twice-baked bread, soaked in water and mixed with honey and dates. Yeast in the air would have started the bubbling. Most Mesopotamian brewers were women, and beer was so important that workers were sometimes paid in jars of it instead of money.
Modern brewers have recreated the recipe by following the verses. The result is sweet and a little sour, somewhere between bread and apple cider. People in ancient Sumer probably drank theirs through long straws to filter out the chunks of bread and barley that floated on top.
