Beer

A fermented beverage brewed from a starch source, most often a cereal grain such as barley or wheat, malted and mashed to release fermentable sugar and then fermented with yeast. Clear written evidence of organized brewing comes from Sumerian Mesopotamia, including the Hymn to Ninkasi, a hymn to the Sumerian goddess of beer that also functions as a brewing record. Far older, more contested residue evidence from a Natufian site in the southern Levant has been read by some researchers as ritual beer brewing among hunter-gatherers many thousands of years before settled agriculture, a claim not universally accepted.