Found an article about the oldest beer...escavations in Israel...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-45534133
And yes a beer of 13,000 years old...
The ancient brew, which was more porridge or gruel-like, is thought to have looked quite unlike what we know as beer today.
The research team has managed to recreate the ancient brew to compare it with the residue they found.
This involved first germinating the grain to produce malt, then heating the mash and fermenting it with wild yeast, the study said.
The ancient booze was fermented but probably weaker than modern beer.

And as I had heard from research of beer of the time of the Merovingians I started some researh but didn't find that much on the internet, both in Dutch and English.
But so I came on a detailed history of beer in Europe
https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1025&context=llcpub
This author mentions also the book of Nelson:
https://goo.gl/ipXHmF

As I can't copy from the links I will comment it tomorrow further. And it seems that the Christian Church changed the abhorrence of the Romans and the Greeks for beer, that low class beverage, that barbarian taste, into an acceptable drink and made it salonfähig even in the higher ranks of society. Just they? What do they use in the church? Wine!...or is that the ceremonial past of the Roman Church...? And outside they promoted beer?

Kind regrds from Paul.

People who required access to liquid intake that wouldn't necessarily poison them have tended to drink beer historically - purification of the water content being part of the process and its general alcoholic content in terms of volume being less than other beverages available. As communal living intensified in terms of population concentration reliance on this beverage grew. Histories of beer drinking often concentrate on how its constituents and methods of delivery evolved, however the basic appeal of using it rested in it being less likely to poison one than water might. Christianity played as much role in this as it did in many other of the social tropes it claimed over the years to having "invented" or "nurtured", namely little or none, though monasteries which were commercially planted deep within society's structure most definitely played a role in developing the product and therefore promoting its continued popularity.

Religion and alcohol have a complex relationship with each other, the product being probably very correctly viewed with some suspicion by religious types for its ability to emulate "spiritual transformations" quite literally "on tap". One example: Muslim prohibition on alcohol, incidentally, did not extend to beer for many centuries, which was considered healthy for its purified water quality. While this didn't matter much in the desert culture from which this religion originated (Egypt being one of the few early "acquisitions" with cereal crop enough to have incorporated beer into its daily diet to any significant extent), and therefore could be later reversed as intolerance towards alcohol grew with the understanding of the versatility of its manufacture, it did cause some theological conundrums as the Ottomans advanced into Europe and began to acquire beer drinkers. This led to some interesting compromises over the centuries of occupation, and anyone who has drunk Bulgarian beer can attest to the often novel solutions to this alcoholic equivalent to the equally thorny question of the exact spiritual nature of the immortal soul.

Oh yes, I remember learning about beer being used instead of water (which in those days could be of dubious provenance).  I hadn't known that the Christian church made it more "okay" to consume beer, though I do remember reading on another thread about the Buckfastleigh tonic wine made by monks.

When I was learning my secretarial skills one "old" typewriting test paper we had for practice had a speed test about medieval beer testers assessing the strength of beer by sitting in it but there seems to be some debate as to whether or not this was true (I can't definitely put it in the hoax thread or fakery thread because I'm not sure whether it's true or not.

http://hoaxes.org/weblog/comments/medieval_beer_test

(in the foregoing link the comments under the article are more informative than the article itself but they don't come down on one side or the other.  The next link (from zythophile.co.uk) became truncated so I don't know if it will post properly.  Zythophile also requested visitors to click on an acceptance for them to set "cookies" on the visitors' computers but I managed to scroll down the article without accepting.

zythophile.co.uk/...ale.../myth-3-medieval-ale-conners-wore-leather-breeches-and-test...

Editing this: when I posted it the links had not "taken" but when I am in typing or edit mode I only see the link and don't see any characters reading "url" they only show when I post the comment.

Your problem with when inserting links into your post is that you are not actually inserting them as links but merely adding the text of the URL into the body text of your comment. The text editor will helpfully show this as a potential link. However it will not insert it as such.

You need to use the button provided above the text box when you add a comment. It's the one between the picture insert button and the youtube button. Put the URL text in the field that's presented (and a "normal English" title for it if you wish) and click on ok. The URL is then inserted with all the correct switches etc and can be used by others.

The Nelson thesis link is very interesting, Paul. One of his first points is probably the most relevant of all - any history of beer-drinking is very much dependent on what one classifies as "beer". Ancient brews are incredibly flexible in that regard, and of course our old pal religion has also had a rather major say in how it has been defined over the years. He overdoes the Greek and Roman "snobbery" against beer, though this is forgivable as he's basing this on the recorded utterances of the plutocratic, literary and political elites who tended to write stuff down, and as we know any assessment of how people actually live and behave based solely on what those people say, even today, would lead any Martian anthropologist to come to some very damning conclusions about our species. In fact it is even credible that such an alien given such limited source material (in terms of content and viewpoint) might erroneously conclude that no such thing as beer in fact existed at all.

I did use the button, nordmann.  I wonder if it's something to do with being on a macbook and a somewhat older one at that.

Ok, then maybe it's the way you're copying the URL. It has to include the http bit, and this may not always show in the browser field displaying the URL.

For example if you see hoaxes.org/weblog/comments/medieval_beer_test this will not work when copied. The correct format is http://hoaxes.org/weblog/comments/medieval_beer_test

I have changed your original post to this and it works.

Or else you're drinking the wrong beer before typing!

nordmann thank you for your interesting comments, but too late this evening to reply in detail, as on the Nelson book...

Kind regards from Paul.

nordmann,

a "big" sorry again to not hold my promise...spent my evening with "Louis" and the Dutch Saxon genetive...
Hope tomorrow I will succeed with Nelson's beer drinking book...

Kind regards from Paul.

Reading the interesting work I mentioned about beer drinking in Europe:
"But so I came on a detailed history of beer in Europe
https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1025&context=llcpub
"The Barbarian's Beverage: A history of Beer in Ancient Europe" by Max Nelson University of Windsor 2005"

I came this evening till page 50.
Some remarks why beer was demonized among Greeks and Romans...
Wine seen as manly: hot and dry
Beer seen as effeminate: cold and wet
Just reminded me how myths influenced society, myths of course founded on wrong views and even ignorance of the true processes unknown on that time and leading to all kind of misconceptions...the Year Thousand hysteria came to mind...
Also a lot of misconceptions as described in Peter Brown's work that I fully commented earlier on some boards, as the old BBC forum...
The Body and Society (in the early Roman Christianity) Attitudes adopted by Saint Paul to make Christianity (in fact a Jewish religion) more digestible for the Romans in the first century.
https://www.amazon.com/Body-Society-Renunciation-Christianity-Columbia/dp/0231144075

Another misconception from the Romans to beer: they thought that beer was a rotting process and wine became the famous liquid without such inferior methods...
But to point to the irrelevance of all this: When Caesar invaded Belgica: The Belgians (those of the time of 57 BC) saw wine together with other Roman luxury as effeminate and their beer culture and their style of living as manly and preferable...
Saw also that the hop beer region (monasteries) lay originally South of nowadays Belgium in nowadays Northern France (on a map in that book)

Kind regards from Paul.

Thanks Paul - and indeed all who have contributed to this thread - for the above information.  When I and some of my school fellows made our journey (only partially through former Lotharingaria) fifty and odd years ago to Mulhouse, there were loads of adverts for "Stella Artois"!  I found something in the Torygraph sorry Telegraph about the site of a Shepherd's Neame brewery possibly being historically related with brewing beer down in Kent since the time of King Stephen.  "Our company has been here for more than 300 years and there is strong historical evidence to suggest that there has been a brewery on this site since 1147, when King Stephen founded Faversham Abbey".  Reference was made on another thread to working holidays when “hopping” down in Kent.  https://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/3325348/Where-alls-ale-and-hearty.html 

I was somewhat running out of space on my post above.  Did people leave cities in Belgium (and other hop-growing countries) I wonder to work on harvesting the crop before machinery became the order of the day, or was the work done by people who lived locally to the hop fields?

LadyinRetirement wrote:

I was somewhat running out of space on my post above.  Did people leave cities in Belgium (and other hop-growing countries) I wonder to work on harvesting the crop before machinery became the order of the day, or was the work done by people who lived locally to the hop fields?

Lady,

lost an elaborated message to you about the "hop plukken" in Poperinge and indeed with foreign pickers.
And photos also from Britain...as I see it it was the same evolution and picture as in Belgium...but tomorrow more..
If I hesitate a tenth of a second on the return tab, it goes to the former window and immediatly to the black window...only recently since I have removed my 200 or 300 favourites?



Kind regards from Paul.

Lady,

my elaborated message (one hour work, even a translation of a paragraph on the foreign workers) is gone again the same way as yesterday...when I clicked on the link
http://users.skynet.be/olo3000/vroeger.htm
already available in my preview as I always do to see my total preview again, the message is gone and I have no connection with RH anymore...black window...
But now I see with this short message what it is...I did a trial...and if you cllick in the preview on the skynet link, you are disconnected from your site...will ask nordmann...

Not in the mood to start today for a third time...sigh...

Kind regards from Paul.

There are various free translation programs on the internet, Paul, so I could possibly try a converting the linked page a little at a time. Sometimes the translations can be quirky - like the time I mentioned before where the translation for the bust part of some ladies wear was translated as the measurements (from Dutch I think) for "udders".  To imply that a lady's chest was like a cow's udder or udders would not be considered polite in English.  But thanks for your efforts and I'm sorry if the whole message did not transfer over successfully.

PaulRyckier wrote:

Lady,

my elaborated message (one hour work, even a translation of a paragraph on the foreign workers) is gone again the same way as yesterday...when I clicked on the link
http://users.skynet.be/olo3000/vroeger.htm
already available in my preview as I always do to see my total preview again, the message is gone and I have no connection with RH anymore...black window...
But now I see with this short message what it is...I did a trial...and if you cllick in the preview on the skynet link, you are disconnected from your site...will ask nordmann...

Not in the mood to start today for a third time...sigh...

Kind regards from Paul.

Lady,

the day before yesterday on Historum fro Pétain and the Vichy régime and the French monarchists, meeting of Pétain and the count of Paris, murder of Darlan and so on, and yesterday again before my disaster overhere and now entered just after ten o'clock (9 chez vous)

And yes overhere they came also from everywhere to help in the hop picking.

De hoppepluk vereiste zeer veel plukkers (vrimde plokkers in het dialect) die uit andere streken kwamen om een centje bij te verdienen. De plokkers konden bij de boer blijven slapen in de stallen op een strozak De maaltijden bestonden vooral uit aardappelen met de 'pele', suikerbonen en een 'schelle van de zeuge'.
Voor vele plukkers was dit eten beter dan wat ze gewoon waren.
Er kwamen ook zigeuners meehelpen aan de pluk. Zij werden de karremannen genoemd omdat ze hun woonwagens meebrachten. De karremannen waren goede plukkers, maar hadden toch -al dan niet terecht- een niet al te beste reputatie in het Poperingse.

(The hop picking needed a lot of people, also foreign pickers (dialect: vrimde plokkers) to earn an additional dime. The pickers could sleep in the stalls of the farmer on a straw sack. The meals consisted mostly of potatoes with the "skin?" (the "pele" Dutch: de schil), sugar beans and a slice meat from the porc (dialect: a "schelle van de zeuge"). For most pickers that food was better than at home.
Also gypsies. They were called: "karremannen" men from the carts (trailers, but not the modern ones, for fear to lose my message I don't add a picture of a real "zigeunerwoonwagen". Although they were good pickers they had right or worong a bad reputation




But such systems for picking existed even till recently before the mechanisation, and as mentioned in the Dutch language article it all decreased after WWII with the mechanical picker machines as with the harvesting (I worked in such a factory) the self propelled combine).
But in that same factory, that I just mentioned, the Sixties, we had still people (for instance among the spray painters) who went to the beet harvesting campaign in the North of France.
And in the link I provided there is also information about English hop picking (if I recall it well in English)

And when I went together with my father to Calgary Canada, there was a nice pretty girl in the seat next to me. And she went from England (we had a stop over in London) to help in  some picking as an exchange student and we discussed Britain, the US and Canada, Belgium during the long ten or was it eleven hours flight over the North pole.

Additional information about the hop picking history in Belgium in Dutch. if Dirk can summarize some high lights..? I suppose he can better speak English than I (due to his years long exposure and practice I suppose)


http://www.ascania.be/documenten/ascania-varia/hopteelt-asse-19de-eeuw-1

Kind regards from Paul.

PaulRyckier wrote:

When Caesar invaded Belgica: The Belgians (those of the time of 57 BC) saw wine together with other Roman luxury as effeminate and their beer culture and their style of living as manly and preferable...

Maybe so but their close kin, the Gauls, loved wine (and nobody ever called Vercingetorix effeminate - at least not to his face). Diodorus Siculus in his great universal history, the Bibliotheca historica (written in the first century BC at about the time of Caesar's conquest of Gaul, although there's no evidence Diodorus ever went there himself), said that they drank huge quantities of it, and, shockingly to his refined Greek palate, they drank it without diluting it with water. At the time most of this wine was imported from Spain and Italy through Roman Narbonne and Marseilles (Massalia), as, according to Diodorus, Gaul itself was too cold to grow grapes and so their usual drink was beer, which he reckoned was probably why they liked imported wine so much.

"Furthermore, since temperateness of climate is destroyed by the excessive cold, the land produces neither wine nor oil, and as a consequence those Gauls who are deprived of these fruits make a drink out of barley which they call zythos or beer, and they also drink the water with which they cleanse their honeycombs. The Gauls are exceedingly addicted to the use of wine and fill themselves with the wine which is brought into their country by merchants, drinking it unmixed, and since they partake of this drink without moderation by reason of their craving for it, when they are drunken they fall into a stupor or a state of madness. Consequently many of the Italian traders, induced by the love of money which characterises them, believe that the love of wine of these Gauls is their own godsend. The wine is transported on the navigable rivers by means of boats and through the level plain on wagons, and they receive for it an incredible price; for in exchange for a jar of wine they receive a slave, getting a servant in return for the drink."

Bibliotheca historica, Book 5

His comments about Gaul being too cold for viniculture are particularly ironic as what he referred to as Gaul was basically the south-western area of modern France from Provence, through the Côtes de Rhône, up to Burgundy - nowadays all famous wine-producing regions and indeed ones that were well-known for producing good wines almost immediately after Roman presence was established (ie within just a decade or so after Diodorus's writings).

PaulRyckier wrote:

When Caesar invaded Belgica: The Belgians (those of the time of 57 BC) saw wine together with other Roman luxury as effeminate and their beer culture and their style of living as manly and preferable.

The wine v beer dichotomy was still evident in the 20th Century when in the 1940s, 50s and 60s the West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer made a point of being seen to be a wine-drinker thus emphasising his urbane, Romanised, western-orientated credentials as he attempted to re-habilitate Germany following the Second World War. Being from Cologne this served to contrast him with the previous image of Germany having hitherto been dominated by beer-drinking, eastern-orientated Prussian junker types. He even has a quote popular with wine producers:


This has sometimes been erroneously translated as “a good glass of wine is the best thing to wake up to”. This would seem to echo poet Dylan Thomas’ dream of “beer for breakfast” - in other words a drunkard’s manifesto. It is, however, better translated as “a good glass of wine is the best thing to spark one’s thinking”.

Wine v beer? One could always have both! Ah but then which one first?

My Belgian friends - who drink a fair bit of both wine and beer - always swear by the Flemish saying, "Bier na wijn geeft venijn. Wijn na bier geeft veel plezier." (roughly: beer after wine is poison, wine after beer gives lots of jolliness.

In English there's the rhyme:

"Wine before beer, you'll feel queer. Beer before wine, you'll be fine."

Meles meles,

I had it again as two days ago. An elaborated message of one hour vanished. But now with a Wiki link of the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgae
in the preview and copying a map from this link and when returning to the preview the window became black and everything gone...and now I do just the same thing and now it works...



Can it be the mouse which don't work correctly anymore? Will ask my computer expert...

"Maybe so but their close kin, the Gauls, loved wine (and nobody ever called Vercingetorix effeminate - at least not to his face). Diodorus Siculus in his great universal history, the Bibliotheca historica (written in the first century BC at about the time of Caesar's conquest of Gaul, although there's no evidence Diodorus ever went there himself), said that they drank huge quantities of it, and, shockingly to his refined Greek palate, they drank it without diluting it with water. At the time most of this wine was imported from Spain and Italy through Roman Narbonne and Marseilles (Massalia), as, according to Diodorus, Gaul itself was too cold to grow grapes and so their usual drink was beer, which he reckoned was probably why they liked imported wine so much."

"Maybe so but their close kin, the Gauls,"

But not the Nervii:
In my search I came always at the same book of Max Nelson already mentioned overhere:
from page 55 and further:
"What exactly these luxurious commodities were Caesar does not explicitly say here, though he elsewhere specifies that an item believed by the Belgian Nervii as well as Germans to cause effiminacy was imported wine"
I read here or somewhere else that the wine merchants weren't allowed to enter those regions..

And yes Vercingetorix was a "Gaulois"

And even today in that same Belgium wine production...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_wine


I will add another time the other parts of my former lost message...

Kind regards from Paul.

PS: I had on wiki a picture which I had to archive and to add the author if I wanted to publish the picture...

Further reading in the Max Nelson book:
https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1025&context=llcpub


From page 50 till 92.

page 65
Vindolanda (I was there due to the recommendations of Dirk Marinus on the Hadrianus wall
And there from the tablets of the soldiers: more beer than wine consumption...

read once on page 69
a kind of Nazi doctrine about race supremacy from the Roman scholar Vitruvius...

Pliny about the beers of Gaul, Hispania and Egypt: The foam of all these nourishes the skin in the faces of women...( from me)

page 75
first in the Christian Church in the 4th century was vilifying beer, even using the Bible as source...

on page 76 I learn about the start of the Irish Church...
And that St. Brigit (is that our Brigitte?) could turn suddenly water into beer...

Page 91
But it would seen that the wide spread acceptance of beer within the religous tradition of the European mainland would be due to the activity of British and Irish missionaries...

I also learned for the first time in my life about Grendel...British or have I have to say English people, overestimate generally the knowledge of continental people about their "local" stories. But to be honest I read about king Arthur, because at least that legend is better know in the world...I know there is a neverending thread on Historum about Grendel, but I readn't one single paragraph as I am as nordmann only interested in real facts and logic...only looking on Historum for the myths that have influenced real history...
And for me the word "Grendel" evoke some odd connotation as the word "grendel" in Dutch is in English I see translated by "a bolt?" Is that than a closing device with a bolt entering in a fastener, lock, clasp?
I will show in an addendum for fear to lose my message a picture of what a "grendel" is in Dutch...

Kind regards from Paul.

Addendum:
https://www.schippers.be/nl/--4005036.html?gclid=Cj0KCQjwlqLdBRCKARIsAPxTGaV4voaeHEEZq21XfZFNsRbAEQarGahfPUPA_ji0x94M_2iMwKYwpNQaApiiEALw_wcB



Regards from Paul.

nordmann wrote:

People who required access to liquid intake that wouldn't necessarily poison them have tended to drink beer historically - purification of the water content being part of the process and its general alcoholic content in terms of volume being less than other beverages available. As communal living intensified in terms of population concentration reliance on this beverage grew. Histories of beer drinking often concentrate on how its constituents and methods of delivery evolved, however the basic appeal of using it rested in it being less likely to poison one than water might. Christianity played as much role in this as it did in many other of the social tropes it claimed over the years to having "invented" or "nurtured", namely little or none, though monasteries which were commercially planted deep within society's structure most definitely played a role in developing the product and therefore promoting its continued popularity.

Religion and alcohol have a complex relationship with each other, the product being probably very correctly viewed with some suspicion by religious types for its ability to emulate "spiritual transformations" quite literally "on tap". One example: Muslim prohibition on alcohol, incidentally, did not extend to beer for many centuries, which was considered healthy for its purified water quality. While this didn't matter much in the desert culture from which this religion originated (Egypt being one of the few early "acquisitions" with cereal crop enough to have incorporated beer into its daily diet to any significant extent), and therefore could be later reversed as intolerance towards alcohol grew with the understanding of the versatility of its manufacture, it did cause some theological conundrums as the Ottomans advanced into Europe and began to acquire beer drinkers. This led to some interesting compromises over the centuries of occupation, and anyone who has drunk Bulgarian beer can attest to the often novel solutions to this alcoholic equivalent to the equally thorny question of the exact spiritual nature of the immortal soul.

nordmann,

I read now the whole Nelson book and wanted to ask you on page 91 about the British native Church as opposed to the Roman Church.

But first about the acceptance of the Church of the customs of beer drinking.They played it clever in my opinion. As they had to gain the souls of the beer drinking pagans, as they nearly couldn't do otherwise, while this custom was too enshrined to destroy. As I understand it, they first let it be brewed in the abbeys and then they made it "sacred" as opposed to the "pagan" beer. From time to time a wonder, if one dared to consume pagan, not blessed beer...the same for wine...a wonder, miracle, that pamphlet of the middle ages, this public relations utility of the Church...once one tried to tap from the non blessed barrels and they all suddenly bursted...and change water suddenly into beer is also handy as a convincing tool...

But now again about the native British church...
On page 91:
"Gildas, unlike the original invading Anglo-Saxons, was a Christian of the native British Church (as opposed to the Roman Church) and he was said to have succesfully converted many of the pagans..."
nordmann, I remember to have had a conversation with you about all this. And if I recall it well, you said that that native Church was already strongly embedded among the pagans and were close to these pagans in that way that they had found a modus vivendi with them, adapting their customs with the new Christianity...and then came the Roman Church destroying? all this and dictating "their" new rules?
And another question, was it then this new Roman Church who christianized mainland Europe,or was it the native Church or was it both in cooperation?

Kind regards from Paul.