It is also said to have been introduced into Egypt by the god Osiris or his divine spouse Isis in 2017 BC. Beer was an important part of Egyptian diet

Neither is it known whether the inhabitants of Britain brewed ale before the Roman invasion but they were certainly doing so when the Romans left, and it was not long before there were several kinds being brewed as is confirm by a very early manuscript which says:-

"Ne non half-penny ale in non wyse drynk Bote of the Beste and Brouneste the Brewsters sullen".

During the Roman occupation glass beakers and bowls were used for drinking but later, the art of glass making was lost, so earthenware pots and drinking horns were used.

Mazers or wooden drinking cups were also in use as were "tumblers" - leather cups that had a rounded bottom and so tumbled over when they were put down.

There were also peg-tankards which held about two quarts. Pegs inside the tankard divided the contents into eight parts so that each drinker, as the tankard was passed from hand to hand, had only his fair share. Hence comes the express "To have a peg".

There were also, in the middle Ages leather blackjacks. These were leather containers, of one-pint size, the insides of which had been treated with pitch.

Mention must also be made of the bombard, a vessel made for the really mighty drinker, which could hold anything up to fifteen quarts!

Of course, wealthy people drank from magnificently ornamented and jeweled cups and goblets of silver and gold.

In the year 1266 it was decided to regulate the price of ale by that of barley, and it is recorded that when barley was 2s. For 512 pounds ale was a farthing a quart. This was at a time when a laborer earned about nine-pence a day.

It is interesting to note that in those days beer was the general drink, being drunk at all times by young and old alike. Servants for instance, both male and female, usually had a piece of bread and a quart of ale for breakfast. In fact is is recorded, just after the Norman invasion, that the Canons of St. Paul's had a personal ration of 30 gallons of ale each week.

This great consumption of ale may seem rather odd today, but it should be remembered that in those days there was nothing else to drink. Tea, coffee and cocoa were unknown and very little ordinary water was fit to drink unless one were fortunate enough to live near a natural spring or a small country stream. In addition it should be remembered that food was neither so plentiful nor varied as it is today, and as ale is a great source of nourishment as well as energy it was naturally a staple part of living.

It was not until the reign of Charles I that ale was taxed and his son Charles II further increased the tax in 1660 until it was 1s.3d a barrel on small beer.

It is not known when beer was brewed - you will have noticed that up till now the word ale has been exclusively used. The difference between the two is that ale was brewed only from malt, whereas beer was brewed from malt and hops. Be that as it may, the word beer was in common use by the year 1524 so it must have been some considerable time before that.

New taxes were continually added to this indispensable beverage until they reached 4.1/2d. a gallon before being repealed in 1830.

The first bottled beer was produced in the 17th century and it was an exceptionally strong beer, which was called stout.

Porter was also first brewed about this time and was a cross between stout and small beer.

Until the middle of the 15th century the majority of brewing was done in the home.

In "The English Housewife" published early in the 17th century the following passage occurs: "It is most requisite and fit that the Housewife be experienced and well practiced in the well making of malt... for as from it is made the drink by which the household is nourished and sustained".

As a result of this home brewing very little was done on a commercial scale and in 1585 there were on 26 brewers in London and its surroundings. When however, early in the 17th century tea arrived in England from the Far East and rapidly became a favorite drink among all classes, home brewing started to wane so that by 1685 there were 200 brewers in London and nearly 700 in the rest of the country.

It is interesting to note that Trumans and Whitbread’s were among the well-known early London brewers as were Bass and Worthington among the Burton brewers.

As time passed the commercial brewers grew larger and many of them amalgamated and, with the advance of science, the art of brewing became exact instead of being, as it had for hundreds of years, merely a matter of rule of thumb.

For over a thousand years ale or beer was the staple drink of all the inhabitants of the British Isles but gradually this deep-rooted habit gave way before the onslaught of cheaper tea coffee and cocoa, while the growth of many temperance societies banished it from numerous homes.

There are, naturally, many arguments for and against beer but most of those against it seem to stem from ignorance or prejudice and possibly the excesses of the few.

The plain and truthful fact is that beer is, as our forefathers well knew, a health-giving and invigorating beverage and one that even today, with its high taxation and comparatively low gravity, is still cheap.

For instance, as a drink taken at any time, it has double the calorie value of the same quantity of tea or coffee. It also greatly enhances the value of any meal. Compare the average meal of today consisting of soup, beef, potatoes, cabbage, gravy and coffee with the old fashioned lunch of a pint of beer, three or four slices of buttered bread with cheese and a bit of lettuce, and two very startling facts emerge. The first is that is is an incontrovertible medical fact that the latter is a perfectly balanced meal in every way, which is more than can be said for the stodgy cooked meal.

To put it in its simplest possible form, a pint of beer has the same energy giving value as four eggs or more than half a pound of meat!

Burton-on-Trent has been famous for ale and beer for many centuries. This is because, among other things, the water in this district has a high gypsum content, which renders it ideal for brewing.

Burton ale was known in the time of Richard Coeur de Lion and the ale brewed in Burton Abbey was famed for its excellence. Indeed it was the ale from this Abbey that was supplied to Mary, Queen of Scots, when she was imprisoned in Tutbury Castle in 1580.

It was not until the reign of George III however that the first commercial brewery was established at Burton by one Benjamin Printon.

A few years later the owner of a cartage business decided that he would sooner make beer than cart it and so in 1777 he took over the brewery of Benjamin Printon. The carter's name was William Bass.

It is very interesting to note that the present-day "Bottle of Bass" largely owes its origin to an accident.

In 1797 twenty years after the inception of the firm, the annual trade amounted to 2,000 barrels, a good proportion of which was exported to Russia, Finland and Poland, for in those days it was cheaper to send the beer by sea to Russia than by road to London!

This export trade, however, was practically eliminated in 1822 by a prohibitive tariff and so, looking round for other suitable markets Mr. Bass decided to produce a pale ale suitable for the Far East.

Unfortunately - or should it be fortunately?  - a shipment on its way to India was wrecked in the Irish Channel and some of the salvaged casks of beer were sold in Liverpool. The quality of this special beer was so appreciated that the fame of "East India Pale Ale" spread rapidly, with the result that it was soon put on the home market.

"Bass" is made using the finest quality barley soaked in cold water in steeping tanks for about 3 days. The water is then drained off and the barley is spread out in the malthouse floor to allow germination to begin. When germination has progressed to the required degree the barley is moved to a kiln. This is a large room with a floor of finely perforated tiles through which heat can be brought to bear so arresting germination and at the same time drying the barley, which at this stage becomes known as malt.

The malt is then sent to the brewery and fed into crushing mills.

The grist, as it is now called, is then mixed with hot water and run into mash tuns. Here it is allowed to infuse in exactly the same way that tea is made. Unlike tea, however, certain natural changes take place at this stage such as the starches being turned into malt sugars. When the infusion is completed the resultant clear liquid, known as wort, is run off. This process can be repeated; using the same grist in exactly the same way that a second pot of tea can be made from the first lot of tea leaves with exactly the same result that the second infusion is weaker than the first. It is, in fact, this second brew that was, in mediaeval times, known as "small beer".

After the wort has been run off, the mash tun is sprayed with water, or "sparged" until all the extract is taken from the malt. And here it might be said the basic difference in brewing between the various grades and qualities of beer is purely a question of gravity. The stronger the beer and more malt and less water is used, and, conversely, for weaker beers, less malt and more water.

Hops have no effect on gravity and are added in the proportions to the different brews as is required to attain the quality desired.

From the mash tun the wort is run off into a large vessel known as an underback from which it is run into coppers where it is mixed with hops and boiled. The hops, until wanted, are stored in huge cold stores in which the temperature is kept a 2° of frost.

On leaving the coppers the wort passes through a large vessel called a hope back which is, in effect, a giant strainer which strains off the spent hops leaving the liquid clear again. The wort then runs into a cooler and through various refrigerators whereby it is cooled as rapidly as possible. Some aeration also takes place at this stage. From the refrigerators the wort flows into the fermentation vessels.

Here, yeast is added and fermentation takes place, the yeast breaking down the malt sugars in the wort and converting them into alcohol.

Although many bottled beers are aerated with carbonic acid gas to give a sparkling drink with a good head, the effervescence found in a bottle of Bass is a completely natural process.

Such is the story of ale and beer, a story over 6,000 years old, a story, which is still being told and sung the world over.