FEATURE // Beer. It’s What’s For Dinner

Writer Adrienne So examines the history of beer as food and dissects beer’s ingredients to prove why it may not be as troublesome to our health as some people believe

Illustration by Taylor Blackwell

Like a lot of stories, this one started at a party. And like most stories that start at a party, this one involved beer. On a Sunday afternoon, my husband and I invited some friends over, stocked the coolers, and prepped the grill. People milled through the kitchen and dining room or kicked back on the deck. As I stood in the kitchen, cutting up vegetables for a salad, someone walked in and opened the fridge. Then I heard a laugh.

“I think you guys might have a problem,” she said. “There’s nothing to drink in this house except milk and beer.”

For some reason, this comment stuck with me. Why is it more disturbing to find only milk and beer in the fridge instead of, say, milk and orange juice? Or milk and Diet Pepsi? I like to believe that my husband and I lead generally healthy lives. But is drinking beer really a minor vice? Something of which to be just a little bit ashamed, like the occasional Cup Noodles, or knowing whom Kim Kardashian is dating?

Why do so many people in the United States regard beer with such moral disdain? In most countries, beer is treated as a foodstuff. In Mexico, the mysterious tribesmen known as the Tarahumara guzzle tesgüino, or corn beer, to fuel themselves for their 100-mile runs. In Ireland, a dry stout and a glass of milk are rumored to provide all the vitamins and nutrients necessary for survival. Heck, in Russia, anything containing less than 10 percent alcohol was classified as a food as recently as 2011.

I decided to find out if beer really was part of a healthy, balanced diet, or if it’s better to relegate it to merely a weekend indulgence.

Many scientists believe that a taste for alcohol is an evolutionary adaptation. Organisms as far down the food chain as the common fruit fly, and as high up as the monkey, have been known to find ethanol alluring. And monkeys and birds have also been known to gorge themselves on fermenting fruit to the point of intoxication. That’s because ethanol is a sign that the fruit is ripe, or just barely over the edge of ripeness, and ready for consumption.

It’s not such a far leap from there to state that early forms of beer might have been the foundation of human civilization. According to Garrett Oliver’s The Oxford Companion to Beer (Oxford University Press, 2011), some anthropologists believe that mankind moved away from hunter-gatherer tribes and into more settled societies, mainly in order to produce grains in large enough quantities to brew beer.

While this may be a bit of an exaggeration, it is true that grains were one of the first cultivated plants. Unlike other plants, both the seeds and stalks of cereals were useful to early humans. The first domesticated animals could feed on the dried stalks, while humans ate the nutritive seeds. At some point, someone discovered that leaving a bowl of grains and water to ferment produced food, in the form of either bread or beer. It is uncertain which came first, but for centuries, beer was hydrating and nourishing—far safer and healthier than bacteria-laden water.

In fact, beer was the fuel that powered the mightiest of the ancient civilizations. First Sumerian peoples, then the Egyptians, regarded beer and bread as the very stuff of life. Several microbreweries, including Oregon’s own Ninkasi Brewing, pay tribute to the ancient gods and goddesses of beer. Powerful potentates even had beautiful beer-drinking straws made of gold and lapis lazuli. Beer was handed out as payment for physical labor.

The ancient Greeks and Romans didn’t take to beer. It was partly out of cultural revulsion; foamy zythos, as they called it, was the chosen drink of the nations that they’d conquered. Moreover, it was made from disgusting piles of rotted plants, and they didn’t need to cultivate beer for alcohol, because the Mediterranean climate more easily supported grape vines—and therefore, wine—than fields of waving grain.

But in most other countries, it was far easier, and more useful, to cultivate grains than grapes. As agriculture spread from the Middle East and beyond, brewing came with it. Pliny the Elder and Julius Caesar both noted that the fierce barbarians of Western Europe were distinguished both by their excellent brews and their extreme consumption of said brews. In his famed Conquest of Gaul, Caesar even correlates the bravery of the northern barbarians with their beer-drinking habit.

According to Ian Hornsey’s A History of Beer and Brewing (Royal Society of Chemistry, 2004), Caesar noted that the bravery of the Germanic people was correlated to how far away they were from the “enervating luxuries” of the South, like wine. The farther away you lived from wine, and the more beer you drank, the braver you were. Not only did beer quench your thirst, as many a young undergrad has realized, it also stiffened your courage.

For millennia people continued to drink beer as a vital part of their diets. Paulaner monks drank bockbier for sustenance during Lenten fasting. Henry III instituted the Assize of Bread and Ale in A.D. 1266 to protect the quality of his people’s most basic foods, which punished the brewer for shortchanging his customers with “the Tumbril or Flogging.” In the 18th century, beer was promoted as a healthier, family-oriented alternative to the thousands of English people getting drunk off gin, and the Victorian public house (or “pub”) was born.

So how did it transition from a healthy beverage into the suspect libation of today? A clue can be found as early as A.D. 1595 in William Bullein’s treatise The Governement of Health. Bullein, an Elizabethan physician and scholar, wrote that if ale is made from “good barly mault, and of wholesome water,” it was indeed very wholesome for the body, and especially for sick people. But sweet, strong ale brought about “inflammation of winde and choler in the belly.”

It seems that as beer became more commercialized, its quality began to decline. Nevertheless, Europeans remained firmly devoted to their beer. It was when beer crossed the ocean to America that things began to take a turn for the worse for our favorite beverage. Americans had long been in the process of modifying lager, brewing it with our ample supplies of rice and corn to replace the harder-to-grow barley and wheat.

Then came the Industrial Revolution. Civil unrest in a rapidly changing world—and with it, a rise in destructive drinking—hit American shores. Drinkers were looked at with such disgust that the Volstead Act was passed in 1919. Prohibition lasted 13 years and ignited the debate that lasts to this day—a debate that I, not coincidentally, still linger over nearly a century afterwards. Beer isn’t that bad for you, is it?

Many Americans still hold Prohibition-era attitudes towards alcohol. As of July 2012, the annual United States Gallup poll indicates that nearly 35 percent of the American population doesn’t drink alcohol at all. Half of those cite religious reasons for their abstinence. Compare that number to Britain. In 2011, The Telegraph griped that the United Kingdom is “turning teetotal,” just because a mere 15 percent of the population had sworn off alcohol.

Okay, fine. Maybe Bullein hit the nail on the head when he said that cheap beer “fretteth and nippeth the guts.” It’s not hard to argue that overconsumption of alcohol can be destructive. Still, it hardly seems fair to disqualify beer from being a part of our diet for those reasons. However disgusting some of us find Wonder Bread, no one goes so far as to claim that it’s not edible.

Moreover, the recent return to craft brewing with quality ingredients should mean healthier and more nutritious beer—even without taking into account breweries like Dogfish Head, which pride themselves on replicating ancient recipes. Midas Touch is one famous example, which brewer and founder Sam Calagione claims was created from the sediment in drinking vessels found in Midas’ tomb in Turkey.

As it turns out, beer—even sweet, strong, modern-day beer—has far more health benefits than most people could suspect. Consider a beer’s ingredients: sprouted grains, hops, yeast, and water. Taken separately, each ingredient is healthy. Why should fermented milk be lauded as a healthful food when fermented grains are not?

It’s likely that beer became a part of an ancient person’s daily diet when it was discovered that germinated grains have more nutritive value than un-germinated ones. Although they didn’t have the tools necessary to determine exactly why, ancient peoples observed that communities that ate sprouted grains were healthier and stronger than those who didn’t. Modern science has given us the answer: sprouts are rich in vitamins, minerals, and proteins.

Most of the vitamins in sprouted grains are lost during the heat treatments involved in brewing. A few, however, manage to hang in there—mostly the water-soluble B vitamins, which, fortunately for beer lovers, happen to be very medicinally useful. Beer is also said to contain folate, dietary fiber, silicon, and polyphenols, which have been shown to be antimicrobial and anticarcinogenic, and help regulate blood pressure.

Taking all of these impressive nutrients and micronutrients into account, it seems increasingly unfair that beer’s place on the beverage hierarchy is a lot lower than red wine’s. There are a couple of reasons for that as well. Generally speaking, beer drinkers tend to be less wealthy than red wine drinkers, which means that their lifestyle and diet choices might be confounding factors in any study trying to evaluate their health.

That’s beside the fact that any drinker, of any kind, has a tendency to lie when asked survey questions on how much they drink. And pretty much all of beer’s benefits are negated by overconsumption. “Moderate drinking” means one or two drinks a day. That means 14 drinks a week, at most, and consumed over a period of time. Fourteen drinks in one night is never healthy.

Like white sugar, red meat, or even water, the key to adding beer to your daily diet is moderate consumption. And like white sugar and red meat, it seems clear at this point that beer is a food. Trying to talk to brewers, cooks, and beer drinkers about the differences between beer and food is like trying to talk to my husband about the differences between “lipstick” and “lip stain.” Surely there are minor differences, but they are so infinitesimal as to be negligible.

One of the first clues that beer and food have the same origins is the fact that brewing has traditionally been a woman’s job. From the goddess Ninkasi, throughout ancient civilizations, women have been the traditional brewers. Just as it was her job to cook, clean, and maintain the hearth, it was also a common household task for a woman to keep her family well stocked with beer—that most necessary of foodstuffs.

And as long as women have been brewing in the home, they’ve been adding food to their beers. In medieval times, women hung flowers and herbs outside their window to advertise the extra ingredients in their personalized brews. Colonial women exercised a touch of immigrant ingenuity and brewed from whatever materials they had on hand. Contrary to belief, a sweet pumpkin and ginger porter is not a modern invention. Pumpkin is a New World ingredient, easily grown and found, and its starches can be easily broken down into sugars in a mash.

Oysters aren’t sugary or starchy. But at the beginning of the 20th century they were the most popular pub food. They were as salty as peanuts, and went well with the pub’s traditional creamy black beers. In fact, at one point Guinness’s slogan was “Makes the oysters come out of their shells.” In 1929, a New Zealand brewery cut out the middleman and simply began adding the briny shellfish directly to the beer.

Milk stouts and cream stouts also caught on in popularity in Britain, particularly between and after the two catastrophic world wars. The British people were chronically underfed, and nourishing stouts, containing oysters or oatmeal, were rumored to contain all the vitamins and minerals necessary to sustain life. Although we now know they contain a lot of them, we are also relatively certain that it’s not possible to live entirely off Guinness—any more than it’s possible to live entirely off broccoli or bananas.

Nevertheless, cream stouts were prescribed as a healthy drink, despite the fact that they didn’t contain any milk or cream (the beer was, instead, sweetened with lactose). Both athletes and new mothers consumed pints of it—even today, Maltese mothers drink Lacto Traditional Stout when they start nursing.

“The line between beer and food has always been crossed,” says Portlander Lisa Morrison, Beer Goddess, experienced beer cook, and host of the weekly radio show “Beer O’Clock” on 101 FM Portland, as well as co-founder of Oregon Craft Beer Month and Portland Beer Week. “Or maybe it’s never been crossed because beer has always been food… I’ve seen people make beer out of loaves upon loaves of pumpernickel bread. Or grain that’s been chewed up and spit out.

It would seem the only people making real distinctions between beer and food would be regulatory agencies, whose sometimes draconian policies concerning the production and sale of alcohol seem to be a hangover (pun intended) from the days of Prohibition. Earlier this year, a furor was ignited in the city of Portland, Oregon, when the Oregon Liquor Control Commission granted a liquor license to a food cart. Portland’s city council cited the possible consequences as “increased crime, traffic accidents, fatalities, public nuisances, or other harms to the public safety.”

Threat to public safety? Not exactly. Food carts have been serving beer alongside their food—or, according to our views, food alongside their food—for years, albeit with only temporary or extended licenses. As of today, the ordinary Portlander is at far more risk from thousands of naked bike riders than it is from the occasional beer on a sunny porch.

Even professional cooks and brewers don’t seem to draw the line very firmly. For example, Alan Sprints started his career as a chef before becoming the founder of one of Portland’s most beloved local breweries, Hair of the Dog. “The two are quite similar,” he says about his two professions. “Cooking and brewing are both about knowing your ingredients, and methods of preparation. For me, brewing is a more relaxed way of making a living. The kitchen is harder and more stressful, but you eat better.”

Merriam-Webster’s defines food as a material consisting of protein, carbohydrate, and fat that an organism uses to sustain its vital processes. Beer’s nutrients and micronutrients—many of which are still in the process of being studied—make it one of the most ancient and revered foods on the planet.

But to consider beer as solely a sum of its parts is perhaps to miss the point. Yes, mankind has sought to feed himself throughout the ages, and beer was part of that process. But beer serves another, equally important, purpose.

It made the unknown terrors of the prehistoric world just a little more bearable. Beer fueled the imagination, as well as the body, and lubricated the hundreds of small, sometimes stressful interactions that allowed humans to live in tight communities and become one of the most successful species on the planet. By that definition, beer is most definitely a food—it nourishes the body, but also the heart and mind.

The only way a bottle of orange juice would do the same would be if you let it sit out for a couple of months. The next time we have a party, I’ll be sure to demonstrate how beer has benefited both my physical and spiritual prowess. Maybe I’ll do some push-ups. Or just pop another bottle.

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Is someone on your back about your fondness for a few cold ones? Don’t worry. We’ve created a quick-reference guide for you. Just tear it out and hand it over.

Dietary fiber

Put down the Quaker Oats, stat! Beer is made from those same whole grains that lower blood cholesterol and discourage colon cancer. And the more alcoholic the beer, the more fiber it contains.

Folate

Not only is beer made from whole grains—those grains have sprouted. Sprouts are a significant source of vitamins and minerals, particularly water-soluble B vitamins like riboflavin and niacin. Of these, folate (folic acid) is probably the most important. Folate deficiency has been linked to cardiovascular disorders and increased incidence of Alzheimer’s, as well as colon and cervical cancer.

Silicon

This usually indigestible element can be found
in barley’s husk. The mash process breaks it down and renders it soluble. Silicon is important for maintaining bone density, and beer contains an impressive amount of it.

Polyphenols

These molecules have antimicrobial, anticarcinogenic, and antioxidant properties. Guess what plant has a lot of them? Hops do. Time for a six-pack of double IPA.

Ethanol

Countless books have been written about French people and their life-affirming, slenderizing, wine-drinking ways. But the same ethanol that combats atherosclerosis in red wine is present in beer and in about the same quantity.

Nicotinamide riboside

Earlier this year, scientists discovered that this “miracle molecule” influences cell metabolism. A preliminary study shows that mice fed high-NR diets were slimmer, healthier, fitter, and faster than untreated mice. And this tiny super molecule likes to call your favorite beverage “home.”

Moderation is key, of course. High concentrations of alcohol make it difficult for the body to absorb any of these nutrients. But that doesn’t mean you should put down the bottle for good. New studies come out every year, and with each one, more of beer’s extraordinary health benefits come to light. We’re only just beginning to understand why beer was a venerated beverage in so many cultures for so long.

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