120 beer facts

Babylon's Code of Hammurabi (c. 1750 BC) included laws regulating tavern keepers and the beer they sold.

The workers who built Egypt's pyramids at Giza received daily rations of beer as part of their wages.

The Sumerian 'Hymn to Ninkasi' (c. 1800 BC) praises the goddess of beer and doubles as one of the oldest surviving descriptions of brewing.

The famous Bavarian beer purity law, the Reinheitsgebot, was issued in Ingolstadt in 1516.

The original 1516 Reinheitsgebot listed only water, barley and hops. Yeast wasn't mentioned because nobody yet understood what it did.

US Prohibition ended when the 21st Amendment was ratified on December 5, 1933.

Beer came back before Prohibition fully ended: from April 7, 1933, Americans could legally buy 3.2% beer, a date now marked as National Beer Day.

The first pale golden Pilsner was brewed in Plzeň (Pilsen), Bohemia, in 1842 by the Bavarian brewer Josef Groll.

Louis Pasteur published 'Études sur la bière' in 1876, a study of beer spoilage and the microbes behind it.

In 1883 Emil Christian Hansen at the Carlsberg Laboratory isolated a pure lager yeast culture, and it changed brewing forever.

Oktoberfest started in 1810 as a party for the wedding of Bavarian Crown Prince Ludwig and Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen.

In the London Beer Flood of 1814, a vat burst at the Horse Shoe Brewery and a wave of porter swept through nearby streets, killing eight people.

Homebrewing only became federally legal in the US after President Jimmy Carter signed a bill in 1978 that took effect in 1979.

Porter is generally thought to take its name from the street and river porters of 18th-century London who loved it.

In 1759 Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000-year lease on the St. James's Gate brewery in Dublin.

The first canned beer went on sale in 1935, when the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company tested cans in Richmond, Virginia.

William Shakespeare's father, John, was appointed an official ale taster in Stratford-upon-Avon in the 1550s.

Hops belong to the Cannabaceae family, which makes cannabis their botanical cousin.

Hop bitterness comes mostly from alpha acids, which boiling turns into more soluble and more bitter iso-alpha acids.

'Skunked' beer is real chemistry: light breaks down hop compounds into a thiol that's very similar to the one in skunk spray.

Brown glass blocks far more of the light that skunks beer than green or clear glass does.

Nitrogen dissolves much less readily than CO2, which is why nitro beers have tiny bubbles and a creamy, cascading head.

Lager yeast is a hybrid of ale yeast and Saccharomyces eubayanus, a cold-loving wild yeast that scientists identified in Patagonia in 2011.

Ale yeasts usually ferment warm and rise to the top, while lager yeasts work cooler and settle toward the bottom.

The bubbles in a poured Guinness seem to sink because liquid flows downward along the walls of the glass and drags them along.

Beer is mostly water. In a typical beer it makes up well over 90% of what's in the glass.

Hops fight some bacteria, which is a big part of why brewers adopted them as a preservative centuries ago.

Chill haze forms when proteins and polyphenols bind together at cold temperatures, and it often clears again as the beer warms.

Diacetyl tastes like butter or butterscotch, and yeast will reabsorb much of it if the beer gets a warm 'diacetyl rest' late in fermentation.

Mash temperature matters: cooler mashes favor enzymes that make more fermentable sugar, which gives a drier beer, while warmer mashes leave more body.

Malting sprouts the grain just enough to build up enzymes that later turn its starches into fermentable sugars.

Some cases of 'gushing', where beer erupts when opened, are caused by proteins from Fusarium fungus on infected grain.

Very cold serving temperatures dull your perception of aroma and flavor, which is why many beers taste better slightly warmer.

A beer's foam is held together largely by proteins from barley working with bitter hop compounds.

Belgian beer culture was added to UNESCO's list of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2016.

Only a small number of monasteries worldwide may use the 'Authentic Trappist Product' label, and brewing must happen under monks' supervision.

Official Oktoberfest beer may only come from Munich's six big breweries: Augustiner, Hacker-Pschorr, Hofbräu, Löwenbräu, Paulaner and Spaten.

At Oktoberfest beer is served by the Maß, a one-liter mug.

In Cologne, Kölsch comes in slim 0.2-liter 'Stange' glasses, and waiters keep bringing fresh ones until you put your beer mat on top of the glass.

Munich's traditional beer gardens let guests bring their own food, and a Bavarian regulation protects the custom.

In Japan it's polite to pour drinks for others instead of yourself, and people keep an eye on each other's glasses.

In Germany, toasting without eye contact is said to bring seven years of bad luck in the bedroom.

Traditional Andean chicha is a maize beer, and some versions start with the grain being chewed so enzymes in saliva can convert the starch.

Kvass is a traditional Eastern European drink fermented from bread, usually with very little alcohol.

A 1393 law under King Richard II required English alehouses to display a sign, which helped create the tradition of pub signs.

Buying 'a round', where each person takes a turn paying for the whole group's drinks, is a classic British and Irish pub custom.

Australian beer glass names like schooner, middy and pot change from state to state, so ordering can be confusing.

Many Belgian beers have their own branded glass, designed to show off that beer's aroma, head and color.

Westvleteren, one of the Trappist abbeys, is famous for doing almost no marketing and selling its beer in limited quantities directly from the abbey.

Bamberg's Aecht Schlenkerla serves its famous smoked beer straight from wooden casks in a historic tavern.

Beer is the world's most widely consumed alcoholic drink, and it's one of the most widely consumed drinks of any kind after water and tea.

The Czech Republic has topped the world in beer drunk per person for decades.

By total volume, China has been the world's largest beer market since the early 2000s.

Weihenstephan in Bavaria says it's the world's oldest continuously operating brewery, tracing its roots to 1040.

Yuengling of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, founded in 1829, is America's oldest operating brewery.

AB InBev is the world's largest brewing company by volume.

In the 2010s, a 'strongest beer' race between brewers like BrewDog and Schorschbräu used freeze concentration to push beers past 40% ABV.

Residue found in Raqefet Cave in Israel suggests people may have been brewing beer-like drinks about 13,000 years ago.

Jars from Godin Tepe in Iran, dated to around 3500 BC, hold some of the earliest chemical evidence of barley beer.

Oktoberfest draws around six million visitors a year, making it the world's largest beer festival.

The US had fewer than 100 breweries in the late 1970s. Today it has more than 9,000.

Samuel Adams Utopias is a barrel-aged beer that reaches about 28% ABV, strong enough that it can't be sold in some US states.

Brussels' Delirium Café once set a Guinness World Record for offering the most beers, with more than 2,000 on its list.

The trademark fight over the name 'Budweiser' between Czech Budvar and Anheuser-Busch has gone on for more than a century.

Divers found bottles of beer in an 1840s shipwreck near Finland's Åland Islands in 2010, making them some of the oldest surviving beers ever found.

The Coors brewery in Golden, Colorado, has long been called the largest single-site brewery in the world.

The World Beer Cup, run by the Brewers Association, is often called the 'Olympics of Beer'.

Franconia in northern Bavaria has one of the highest densities of breweries anywhere on Earth.

Myth: dark beer is always stronger. Reality: the color comes from roasted malt. Guinness Draught is black and only about 4.2% ABV.

Myth: 'beer before liquor, never been sicker.' Reality: a 2019 study found that the order of drinks made no real difference to hangovers. Total alcohol is what counts.

Myth: Vikings drank from their enemies' skulls. Reality: that idea comes from a 17th-century mistranslation of an Old Norse poem about drinking horns.

Myth: the British drink warm beer. Reality: cask ale is served at cellar temperature, around 11 to 13°C, which is cool but not fridge-cold.

Myth: canned beer is worse than bottled. Reality: cans block all light and limit oxygen, and their lining keeps the beer from touching metal.

Myth: letting cold beer warm up and then chilling it again ruins it. Reality: light is what skunks beer. Temperature cycling does little harm in the short term.

Myth: the Reinheitsgebot was only about purity. Reality: it also kept wheat and rye for bakers and set beer prices.

Myth: IPA was invented in one go to survive the trip to India. Reality: well-hopped beers were already being shipped there, and the style developed gradually.

Myth: monks invented beer. Reality: beer is thousands of years older than Christianity. Monasteries refined it, but they didn't create it.

Myth: a drink warms you up in the cold. Reality: alcohol widens blood vessels near the skin, so you feel warm while your body loses heat faster.

Myth: hops make beer strong. Reality: alcohol comes from yeast fermenting malt sugars. Hops add bitterness, aroma and stability.

Myth: medieval people drank beer because all water was unsafe. Reality: they drank plenty of water. Beer was valued for its calories, taste and shelf life.

Myth: 'mind your Ps and Qs' comes from pub landlords counting pints and quarts. Reality: nobody has proven where the phrase comes from.

Myth: a big head of foam means you got shortchanged. Reality: foam carries aroma, and many European pours expect a generous head.

Myth: every beer should be served ice-cold. Reality: many ales, stouts and Belgian styles taste best at cellar temperature.

Myth: 'beechwood aging' gives Budweiser a woody taste. Reality: the brewery says the chips just give the yeast more surface to work on and add no flavor.

Myth: the 'beer belly' comes from something special in beer. Reality: it comes from excess calories in general, and where fat ends up depends a lot on genetics.

Most beer is made from just four ingredients: water, malted grain, hops and yeast.

The water in Burton upon Trent is rich in gypsum, which sharpens hop bitterness. Brewers who add minerals to copy it call this 'Burtonisation'.

Pilsen's unusually soft water is a big reason the original Pilsner tasted so clean and delicate.

Dry hopping means adding hops after the boil, so you get lots of aroma without much extra bitterness.

'Lager' comes from the German 'lagern', meaning to store. Traditionally the beer is aged cold for weeks.

Decoction mashing means pulling out part of the mash, boiling it, and returning it. It's a traditional method in Czech and German brewing.

Traditional lambic brewers brew only in the cooler months and leave the wort overnight in a shallow coolship so wild microbes can move in.

Bottle-conditioned beers are carbonated in the bottle by a small dose of sugar and live yeast, which is why they often have sediment.

Eisbock is made by freezing beer and removing some of the ice, which concentrates the flavor and alcohol.

To make Steinbier ('stone beer'), brewers drop red-hot rocks into the wort to boil it, and the sugars caramelize on the stones.

Bamberg's famous Rauchbier gets its smoky taste from malt dried over beechwood fires.

Brewers like to say that brewers make wort and yeast makes beer.

Norwegian farmhouse kveik yeast can ferment cleanly at temperatures that would stress most ale yeasts, sometimes above 30°C.

Fresh-hop (wet-hop) beers are brewed with hops that go straight from the field to the kettle, often within a day of harvest.

Traditional Gose is a slightly salty, tart wheat beer seasoned with coriander, and it's linked to Goslar and Leipzig in Germany.

Wort has to be chilled fast after the boil to keep out infection and limit off-flavors like DMS.

Cold crashing means dropping a fermented beer close to freezing so that yeast and haze settle out and the beer clears.

Cenosillicaphobia is the (tongue-in-cheek) name for the fear of an empty glass.

BrewDog's 55% ABV 'The End of History' came in bottles stuffed inside taxidermied stoats and squirrels.

The prize in Finland's Wife Carrying World Championships includes the wife's weight in beer.

Rogue Ales once made a beer fermented with yeast cultured from brewmaster John Maier's beard.

Brewers have made beer with yeast rescued from bottles aboard the Sydney Cove, a ship that sank off Tasmania in 1797.

Sapporo once brewed a limited 'Space Barley' beer from barley descended from seeds grown aboard the International Space Station.

Several brewers have made beer from highly purified recycled wastewater to show that it's safe to drink.

Toast Ale brews beer with surplus bread in place of some of the malt, turning food waste into pints.

Auto-brewery syndrome is a rare condition in which gut yeast turns carbohydrates into alcohol, so people can get drunk without drinking.

Hops are toxic to dogs, so 'dog beers' are alcohol-free and hop-free broths.

Wynkoop's Rocky Mountain Oyster Stout started as an April Fools' joke and was then really brewed, with bull testicles.

In a beer mile, runners drink a beer before each of four laps of a track.

Someone who loves beer is a zythophile, and someone who studies it is a zythologist.

Collecting beer mats is called tegestology, and collecting beer labels is labeorphily.

Dogfish Head once brewed a beer with powdered lunar meteorite.

Some oyster stouts are brewed with real oysters, sometimes whole shells and all, in the boil.

Some spas in the Czech Republic offer 'beer baths', where you soak in a tub of beer ingredients, often with a tap nearby.

Researchers have measured the 'beer goggles' effect: in several studies, people who had been drinking rated faces as more attractive.