Coincidentally, three months ago Nautral History published a half whimsical article that commented on the difficulty of originally inventing beer. The more I learned about the chemistry and biology of winemaking and brewing, the more I was amazed at their history. Making wine, in fact, is easy , even inevitable. Put a bunch of grapes in a container and, chances are, some yeast cells will settle in and you'll wind up with wine. The same for mead, made from honey water.
Beer is another matter .
At first blush this procedure doesn't appear to be the kind of thing one would stumble on by accident. Artistic depictions and written sources attest to beer's popularity in early Egypt. The elite and hoi polloi alike enjoyed beers with names like Joy Bringer, the Beautiful and Heavenly . They drank through tubes from ceramic cups and sometimes did not know when to say when. Scholars have not been sure how the Egyptians brewed their beer.