Worldbuilding Beverages: Beer

This is part one of my new "Worldbuilding Beverages" series. Click here to see the whole series!

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One of the final books that I read in 2024 was Tom Standage's History of the World in Six Glasses, a book which takes on a broad overview of the arc of human history from Ancient Mesopotamia to the modern, globalized world, through the lens of six important drinks that impacted human civilization over time. The book is a strong recommendation – it is broad, so we're not talking super nitty-gritty, academic history about one influential year here, but it contains a lot of good connections and ties a lot of interesting historical stories into his beverage-focused premise. I learned a lot about the evolution of cuneiform writing and ancient civilizational structures, for example, that I had never heard of before.

(The link I included is a link for Bookshop.org, which will let you purchase AND support independent bookstores!)

The book sparked my own thought process about drinks and the evolution of civilization in a fantasy setting and/or in my homebrew world. Standage's book talks about the important cultural and global developmental milestones that each of his chosen beverages mark: the development of beer, for example, marks the transition to agriculture and early city life; while Coca-Cola's spread marks the expansion of US influence and the rise of globalization in the 20th and 21st centuries. While my world is not globalized in the way that the real world is, it certainly does have complex cities. Should I safely assume that it has beer? If not, what other beverage should my world's cultures have developed instead that fills the cultural niche that Standage describes?

I was going to make this one article, spanning all of Standage's book that felt relevant (aka, not cola, but most of the stuff until that point). And then, in my first draft, I wrote 1500 words just covering beer, which is chapter 1. Rather than a 5000-word essay or trying to cram everything in, I'm going to instead make this a series.

So, for each part of this series, I'm going to go through the broad strokes of Standage's chapter: what the drink is, what the associated historical development is, and why the two are linked. Then, I'm going to talk about worldbuilding: what are the key elements of the event and the drink for adaptation purposes, and I'll also give some examples from my homebrew world as to how I'm using what I've learned from the book.

History: the Agricultural Transition

Most, if not all, peoples began as hunter-gatherers, meaning that they followed food as they could find it--following wild animal herds or moving regularly into areas that had not been foraged. The transition to agriculture was motivated by that being a more stable food source. Farming produced more food per acre than hunting did (at least, in fertile areas), and so in exchange for settling down into one area, people got excess food. Excess food could be given to people who did not produce food--such as artisans or priests--which is how cities first formed, because all of a sudden there could be a class of non-farmers. Standard notes that a farmer who worked eight-hour days for three weeks could gather enough grain for a year, but it meant staying in one place to avoid missing the best harvest time.

Excess food, particularly hardy cereal grains, could also be stored, to set aside during the good times in order to protect against the bad. The earliest beer, Standage writes, was a byproduct of this food storage. It was hard to make a perfectly watertight container, and so water would get into the grain stores. Moistened grain converts some of the grain's starch into "malt," a type of sugar. Standage writes, "at a time when few other sources of sugar were available, the sweetness of this 'malted' grain would have been highly valued." If this malted gruel was left for a few days, it would ferment, producing beer, as wild yeast from the air would ferment the malted sugar.

So the evolution of beer implies a few things: grain-based cereal crops, a transition to agriculture, and a sufficiently complex society to store this grain. Though Standage focuses on Mesopotamia and Egypt, he also touches on the fact that something similar to beer evolved in China and Japan, as well as with the Aztecs and Inca– just with a different base grain. And beer obviously persists right up to the present day, but those same basic requirements of cereal crops remain a requirement for beer's existence.

Standage's chapter on beer adds a whole bunch of extra details on the implications of this, but the main one of importance to us is how beer served as a form of currency. Because this early beer was so rich in grain, far more than present beer, it is calorie-dense, almost like liquid bread. As a result, giving someone "beer rations" as a form of pay is providing them with necessary sustenance. Beer also has the benefit of being easily divided and shared, because as a liquid, you can portion out any division without breaking it. As a result, beer acted as one of the first currencies.

Standage has a whole bunch of other cool information, like how beer influenced the development of writing to the fact that beer used to be drunk through a long straw (super weird to me)--it is definitely worth a read, I promise--but that is not really the focus of this article.

Worldbuilding

Are the people in your homebrew world project hunter-gatherers? Or have they undergone an agricultural transition? If they've started agriculture, you need something to fill this role--an easily divisible method of payment that would also act as sustenance.

Nothing else in our real world really fills this same niche. Payment in bread could work as the means of exchange--and Standage notes that it does, with bread and beer being seen as essentially the same thing--but bread goes bad far faster than beer and so would be less useful as a store.

Proper Beer's place in my world

So, for my world, beer is a given in any place where agriculture developed. Humans, elves, dwarves, kenku, lizardfolk? All have beer, because they all have agricultural practices oriented around some sort of staple cereal crop. Whether it is classical beer like in the real world (humans, elves), or a sort of rice-based sake (for my lizardfolk who dwell in the sort of flooded areas necessary for rice cultivation), there's a staple cereal option.

When thinking about whether it is "beer" as we know it or some other fermented staple crop, think about what your people eat. If they eat bread--if they're growing barley or wheat--then it would be beer. At first, my thought was that some people would have instead produced fruit wines or mead rather than beer (particularly as I had imagined my humans, who treat bees as a sacred animal of their god, as being mead drinkers), but Standage notes that berries do not last as long as wheat and are more seasonal (meaning that they're less likely to be stored in a place where they can be accidentally fermented in the same way), and that both mead and berry wine do not last as long as beer until after the development of higher-skill pottery crafts, which comes significantly after the invention of beer. So, for my humans, beer still fulfilled this base role.

A Non-Grain Beer for Carnivorous Creatures?

More uniquely though, I have my gnolls--hyena-people--as being obligate carnivores. While gnolls are settled agriculturalists in my world, rather than marauding scavengers (for a few reasons largely based on real hyena social structures), their inability to digest plants means that their agriculture looks very different. Gnolls in my world largely consume insects as their base "agriculture" or, I guess, insecticulture. Insects are high in protein, but do have less carbs than bread (bread is about 45% carbs, while the highest-carb-ratio insect is the cicada, at about 16%... though with selective breeding from an insectivore culture, that number would probably increase).

I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to research if you could make insect beer for this article. People have made fermented insect paste, which in theory could be the mash of our beer similar to the grain-based gruel of the ancient Mesopotamians, though that does contain some barley as well. Basically, after researching a lot about sake and non-barley-based "beers," my conclusion is that you'd need some sort of agent that helps turn insect carbs into sugar, for the yeast to then ferment. In reality, this would make a fully insect beer impossible (though some people are experimenting with using insects as a small part of their beer for extra flavor? Gross). For Mesoamerican corn beers like Chicha, the extra enzymes come from saliva--you'd chew the corn before letting it ferment. For Japanese sake, which is made of pure rice, this extra agent is a fungus (though there are some historical reports of "chewed" sake as well), so I'm stealing that idea. In my world, if you let some ground insects get moldy with a proper type of fungus, it can then ferment with the wild yeasts to create a sort of stable beer, which will be the foundational fermented beverage for my gnolls. Gross. Because there simply won't be that much for the yeast to ferment, however (due to the lower amount of carbs in insects compared to grain), it will be a pretty weak beer.

Still, I did want to have a foundational "food" beverage for all my agricultural societies because of the importance that Standage places on it as an important part of the medium of exchange. Tax revenues can be paid in beer when bread or grains themselves might rot in transit. It's not that agricultural civilization cannot develop without a beer equivalent, just that it is rare. So, Gnollish moldy insect juice weak beer, here we are.

Hunter-Gatherers and my Goblins

Contrast this with hunter-gatherer societies that do not develop agriculture. For these people, who rely less on stored food and instead on whatever they can forage or hunt, and who seasonally migrate to places that still have sustenance, there'd be no beer equivalent. That said, in a later section of the book, Standage describes koumiss, a beer that the Mongols produced by fermenting horse milk. The Mongols were nomadic, but they were pastoralists rather than hunter-gatherers.

My goblins are nomadic people, and while they do have mounts, they are far more hunter-gatherer than pastoral. Their mounts are only semi-domesticated, and so I don't imagine that they'd use worg milk for a beer. As a result, my goblins will not have a beer-equivalent beverage.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this first entry into worldbuilding based on beverages. Please share YOUR beer-equivalent beverage worldbuilding in the comments of the post. Remember that you can follow along with the series by subscribing to get the blog delivered weekly to your inbox (or get a roundup at the end of the month), and you can follow along with the actual book that I'm drawing this from by picking up Tom Standage's History of the World in Six Glasses on Bookshop.org (all while supporting independent bookstores and the blog!)

Next week, the journey through the book continues with the development of wine and the importance of wine to the Mediterranean world.