Beer's origins date back to the dawn of civilisation, and it has always remained an ingredient of human sociability. The ancients drank beer as daily fare, gave offerings of beer to their gods, accepted beer as wages and enjoyed sharing beer during special occasions and festivals. So central was beer to ancient life, that some archaeologists think that beer brewing stimulated the development of agriculture about 10 000 years ago.
The earliest known evidence of the beverage is a beer-drinking scene carved on a 6 000-year-old clay tablet from Mesopotamia, the region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers now known as Iraq. The beer was a sweet, thick brew made from malted barley, dates and honey. It was unfiltered and drinkers used straws to sip it through the layer of solids that floated on its surface.
Egyptians, like many early civilisations, believed beer was created by the gods. They revered the goddess Hathor as 'the inventress of beer' and associated her with singing, dancing, love and good times. Every year, they danced and drank beer at festivals in her honour. Sweet and strained, the beer was the staple of life, and because Egyptian beer was made from fermented malted barley or wheat bread, breweries often had their own bakeries.
The most detailed ancient brewing scenes are from an Old Kingdom wall painting in the tomb of Ti, a high official in the pharaoh's court, who was buried in the royal city of Saqquara. About 4 000 years ago, when Nubia was a sophisticated civilisation in what is today southern Egypt and northern Sudan, the riches of Africa - gold, ebony, ivory and leopard skins - were traded through Nubia into Egypt, and Nubia's bitter-tasting beer, brewed along the Nile, was highly prized by Egyptian pharaohs.
From these beginnings, the enjoyment of barley beer and its refreshing qualities spread all over the world and down through Africa. Beer accompanied the emergence of civilisation through Europe, and brewing was done on a large scale in the monasteries and the courts of royalty.
European clear beer came to South Africa with Jan van Riebeeck, long before the first wine. The streams of the Cape watered a fledgling brewing industry which was to follow the course of South African history.
Beer went with the fortune hunters to the diamond diggings of Kimberley, soothed the throats of miners on the Witwatersrand goldfields, and brought solace to the troops in the Anglo-Boer War. Breweries were established in Kimberley, Pietermaritzburg and Johannesburg and pioneers such as Anders Ohlsson, Frederick Mead and Charles Glass (as famed nowadays as he was when he brewed Castle Lager at the turn of the century) were household names.
Glass sold his brewery in Johannesburg to Mead, the Natal pioneer, and Mead convinced landlords like Sammy Marks and Barney Barnato of the lucrative opportunities that brewing offered. The result was the registration of The South African Breweries Limited in London in 1895, heralding the birth of an organisation that since that day has never failed to pay its shareholders a dividend. The fledgling company was registered on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in 1897 as the first industrial share.
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