Drinking

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the 'wild man' Enkidu is given beer to drink. "... he ate until he was full, drank seven pitchers of beer, his heart grew light, his face glowed and he sang out with joy." That was written around 4,000 years ago and the story is based in Uruk. Well, I seem to remember being in a similar state myself over the years.

3,900 year old Sumerian beer recipe

The first written records of brewing come from Mesopotamia where Uruk was situated. These include early evidence of beer in the 3,900-year-old Sumerian poem honouring Ninkasi, the patron goddess of brewing, which contains the oldest surviving beer recipe, describing the production of beer from barley via bread.

There is also a receipt found at Ur, another city in the area. The ‘Alulu beer receipt’ provides specific information about the world's earliest known drinks transaction. It was written during the 45th year of the reign of Shulgi, the King of Ur (2050 BCE) – we can be sure of this because the scribe who wrote it, Ur-Amma, signed and dated it. The text translates as “Ur-Amma acknowledges receiving from his brewer, Alulu, 5 sila [about 4 ½ litres or eight pints] of the ‘best’ beer”.

Sumerians enjoying a drop of 'best beer'

Written records aside, Thomas Sinclair says in his book, 'Beer, Bread, and the Seeds of Change: Agriculture's Imprint on World History' that the discovery of beer may have been an accidental find.

Paul Lenz writes in ‘A History of Ancient Beer’ that the very earliest, Neolithic, beers were almost certainly made in Africa, from grains such as sorghum and millet, but as the brewing vessels would most likely have been made from animal skins no evidence for them survives.

Then in the New Scientist on the 10th December this year Michael Marshall asks the question ‘Did ancient humans start farming so they could drink more beer?’ New evidence suggests that alcohol was a surprisingly big motivator in our monumental transition from hunting and gathering to farming. He continues thus:
‘Why this happened is puzzling, given that our species had survived successfully for around 300,000 years without having to reap and sow – not to mention milk, shear and shepherd. Many ideas have been put forward as possible explanations. The earliest physical traces we have found date back 13,000 years and were found in the Raqefet cave on Mount Carmel in Israel. Residues of fermented wheat and barley were identified on stone mortars, suggesting these grains were crushed to make a mash which was then brewed to form a thick, porridge-like beer.’

Anthropologists have been pondering this change since the 1950s. However, they didn’t have the technology back then to test any ideas. The challenge is to distinguish between beer and bread. Baking bread and brewing beer look superficially similar in the archaeological record, says Jiajing Wang at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire who has spent years finding evidence for the oldest alcoholic brew.

A good starting point was the later settled societies, like ancient Egypt, where beer-making was glaringly apparent. Egyptian archaeological sites often contain distinctive pottery jars. “They literally just call it a ‘beer jar’”, says Wang. At Hierakonpolis in southern Egypt, for example, they found beer jar fragments containing starch granules from cereals, yeast cells and crystals of calcium oxalate, or “beer stone”. These showed that people there were making beer from a mixture of wheat, barley and grass between 5800 and 5600 years ago – more than 2000 years before the first pharaoh of a unified Egypt.

Egyptian beer brewing

Similar evidence has been found in the 7,000-year-old site of Godin Tepe in modern-day Iran, while in Asia there is evidence from 9,000 years ago that a form of beer was being made in ancient China from rice, flavoured with honey and fruits. Meanwhile at the Skara Brae site in the Orkney Islands of Scotland, brewing was taking place more than 5,000 years ago. Beer was not invented just once; rather it seems that almost every culture that had grains figured out that they could be turned into beer.

Skara Brae brewery, Orkney

Well, that’s enough for now. It’s 10pm, New Year's Eve, and time for a small Guinness.

Terence, This is Stupid Stuff – from A Shropshire Lad – A.E. Housman (1859-1936)

Why, if ’tis dancing you would be,
There’s brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world’s not.
And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past:
The mischief is that ’twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad…

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

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Work

One of the first things I noticed when going through possible angles of approach to this topic is the sheer amount of nouns and verbs linked to Work. Although oddly enough, in the thesauruses and dictionaries I was checking very few mentioned a very real and defined version of Work. And as I vaguely remember questions about this in exams years ago it was a good chance to work out if I could still understand any of them now.

I’m talking about how to measure work. In the International System of Units (SI) then one joule is equal to the amount of work or energy done when a force of one newton displaces a body through a distance of one metre in the direction of that force. For example: lifting an apple one metre takes 1 joule of work or energy.

It is also the energy dissipated as heat when an electric current of one ampere passes through a resistance of one ohm for one second. It is named after the English physicist James Prescott Joule (1818–1889).

J P Joule

James Prescott Joule was born in Salford, he was the son of a renowned local brewer and grew up fascinated by all things scientific. He became particularly interested in electricity and was fortunate enough to be tutored by John Dalton, one of the leading chemists of the day. This expert tutelage, combined with Joule's personal obsession as well as access to some specialised beer-making equipment would ultimately lead to one of the most ground-breaking (and at the time, controversial) discoveries in the history of science: that heat is a form of energy.

In 1841 he discovered what became known as Joule's First Law. This defined the relationship between the amount of heat produced and the current flowing through a conductor. At this time things seemed to be going well, he was still an amateur scientist but had been accepted as a member of the London Electrical Society. He decided to look into the wider question of how much work can be extracted from a given source and soon found that the scientific establishment was strongly opposed to his ideas.

In 1843 Joule presented his results to a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in Cambridge, but contemporary anecdotes claim that he was met by a stony silence. Undeterred, he continued his experiments. In 1844, believing he had compelling evidence, he submitted his paper to the most prestigious scientific group of all, the Royal Society… who refused to publish his work.

One reason was that Joule said he could measure temperatures to within 1/200 of a degree Fahrenheit, something that was simply unthinkable with the majority of scientific equipment available at the time. However, Joule had two advantages. One was his background as a brewer, which meant he had ways to measure much more precisely, as the finely tuned measurement of temperatures is critical to the brewing process. The other was John Benjamin Dancer, an exceptionally talented instrument-maker who created custom equipment for him.

instrument made by J B Dancer

In 1847 Joule once again presented his ideas, this time to the British Association at Oxford, which was attended by both Faraday and Kelvin. Eventually his ideas would become the cornerstone of one of the most fundamental scientific laws ever discovered, the First Law of Thermodynamics. In 1850, he was made a fellow of the Royal Society, in 1852 he was awarded the Royal Medal, and in 1872 he was named President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the same group that had rejected his ideas back in 1843.

Mario Petrucci is a poet, educator and broadcaster. He was born in Lambeth, London and trained as a physicist at Selwyn College in the University of Cambridge and later completed a PhD in vacuum crystal growth at University College London. He is also an ecologist, having a BA in Environmental Science from Middlesex University. Petrucci was the first poet to be resident at the Imperial War Museum and with BBC Radio 3.

Orders of Magnitude

One hundred thousand trillion joules
to turn an ice cap into mush
One hundred thousand billion joules
to erase a major Eastern city
A hundred thousand million joules
to run a car to death
One hundred million of the same
for Fire Brigades to reach the kitten
Ten million just to keep
December from cold feet
A hundred thousand joules for a mug
of tea – A hundred joules
for a second’s worth of War and Peace
Ten to raise a hand – to lift
an average apple to the lips
A single joule to shout the command
Half a joule to pull the trigger
Just one tenth to push the button
Almost zero to have the thought.

Mario Petrucci, from Flowers of Sulphur, Enitharmon, 2007

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

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