Drink the beer!

Sing with joy!

About 10 million years ago a mutation in some of our ancestors repurposed an enzyme that previously metabolized compounds found in leaves into one that efficiently broke down ethanol.

This proved handy when certain of those ancestors hopped down out of trees to forage on the ground, among the fallen fruit there. Fruit falls when it gets overripe, loaded with sugar that often ferments. The ethanol so produced is toxic, but the new enzyme allowed the favored hominids to neutralize it. They got the benefit of the sugary fruit without the toxicity of the ethanol. They also got access to the calories contained in the ethanol itself.

They got another bonus. Before being broken down, the ethanol set off a chain of events in brain chemistry that elevated dopamine levels and reduced inhibitions, making our social ancestors more sociable.

The human branch of the family tree has been imbibing ever since. Hardly a culture has arisen that hasn’t included alcoholic beverages in its rituals and quotidian practices. So appealing and prevalent has been alcohol been that various cultures have felt obliged to restrain or forbid its use. Muslim countries often outlaw alcohol. The United States tried to in the first third of the 20th century but gave up due to noncompliance.

Demand for alcohol seems to have contributed to the agricultural revolution of the Neolithic era. Archeologists have discovered evidence of brewing in what is now Israel dating back to 13 thousand years ago. This evidence is almost as old as evidence of baking, from 14 thousand years ago. And both predate the adoption of agriculture, which yielded grains like barley and wheat that were raw materials for both beer and bread.

Sumerians sang a hymn to Ninkasi, their goddess of beer and fertility. The hymn doubled as a recipe: “It is you who handles the . . .”—a fragment is missing here—“and dough with a big shovel, mixing, in a pit, the beerbread with sweet aromatics. It is you who bakes the beerbread in the big oven, and puts in order the piles of hulled grain.” And so on through the malting and the soaking, to bumpers of the finished beverage. “Ninkasi, you place the fermenting vat, which makes a pleasant sound, appropriately on top of a large collector vat. It is you who pours out the filtered beer of the collector vat; it is like the onrush of the Tigris and the Euphrates.”

In the epic of Gilgamesh, the wild man Enkidu is introduced to beer and civilization simultaneously: “‘Eat the food, Enkidu, it is the way one lives. Drink the beer, as is the custom of the land.’ Enkidu ate the food until he was sated, he drank the beer—seven jugs!—and became expansive and sang with joy!”

Grapes grew better than barley in Greece, and wine drove Greek trade throughout the Mediterranean. Athens was a center of wine production, consumption and commerce. The spread of Greek influence has been traced by archeologists through the shards of amphoras, the ceramic containers in which the wine was transported. These are found in ruins from Iberia to the Black Sea.

The Greeks coined a phrase, ἐν οἴνῳ ἀλήθεια, which became better known in the West through its Latin translation: In vino veritas. It was often a warning. Pliny the Elder described the tongue-loosening effect of wine: “Then it is that greedy eyes bid a price for a married woman, and their heavy glances betray it to her husband; then it is that the secrets of the heart are published abroad: some men specify the provisions of their wills, others let out facts of fatal import, and do not keep to themselves words that will come back to them through a slit in their throat—how many men having lost their lives in that way!”

Part of the problem is that humans inherited different versions of the genes that facilitate the metabolism of ethanol. In some people the metabolism is faulty, and they get sick. In some people it is too efficient, and they can drink and drink without becoming incapacitated. They wind up with damage to the liver, the organ where the metabolism takes place. Many people experience hangovers from ethanol byproducts.

For all the ill effects and all the efforts to constrain its use, alcohol is something most human societies haven’t managed to live without. Thank, and blame, that mutation from way back when.