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Daily Fact: Women were the first beer brewers

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Original photo by Mafer Benitez/ Unsplash

Women were the first beer brewers.

On the list of things women don't get enough credit for, being the first to brew beer might not seem like the most important. But fermented beverages have played a vital role in human culture for perhaps almost as long as society has existed, providing nutrients, enjoyment, and often a safer alternative to drinking water before the advent of modern sanitation. Scholars disagree over exactly when beer was first introduced — although the earliest hard evidence for barley beer comes from 5,400-year-old Sumerian vessels that were still sticky with beer when archaeologists found them — but one thing has never been in question: "Women absolutely have, in all societies, throughout world history, been primarily responsible for brewing beer," says Theresa McCulla, who curates the Smithsonian's American Brewing History Initiative.

Just look to the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, a set of 282 laws written in 1750 BCE that gave women exclusive jurisdiction over brewing and even tavern ownership. Among the societies likely governed by those rules was ancient Sumer (modern-day southern Iraq), where The Hymn to Ninkasi (the Sumerian goddess of brewing) was composed approximately 50 years before the Code of Hammurabi. Including lines such as "Ninkasi, you are the one who pours out the filtered beer of the collector vat; it is [like] the onrush of the Tigris and Euphrates," as well as a beer recipe, the song of praise is the first — but far from last — known text devoted to the praise of beer.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Beer breweries in the U.S. as of 2020

8,884

ABV of Snake Venom, the world's most alcoholic beer

67.5%

Barrels of beer sold in the U.S. in 2020

204.8 million

eBay sale price of an 1852 bottle of Allsopp's Arctic Ale

$503,300

The world's bestselling beer is almost exclusively sold in one country.

And that country is China, the world's largest beer market by far — the nation accounts for about a quarter of global beer sales, which is why the bestselling beer there is also the bestselling beer in the world. Snow, which costs as little as 49 cents U.S. per can, is made by SABMiller and China Resources Enterprise. Some 101 million hectoliters (about 86 million U.S. beer barrels) of the inexpensive brew were sold in 2017, more than twice as many as its closest competitor for global beer dominance: Budweiser, which sold 49.2 million hectoliters (nearly 42 million U.S. beer barrels) the same year. Despite — or perhaps because of — its ubiquity, Snow isn't highly regarded among beer aficionados, scoring just 1.77 out of 5 on RateBeer.com.

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Why earwax is good — and more facts about your ears

Daily Fact: Women were the first beer brewers