Racing Turtles

please, please unmute this.

Some crimes can never be forgiven

please, please unmute this.

Some crimes can never be forgiven

sure as gods got sandals hes gonna sip that modelo

as a gay man who's into watersports i know all about the taste of piss, that's why this month i'm partnering with coors light

happy pride to y'all only I'm in love with all of you

She's right and I'm scared

This implies a liquid form of bread

Beer

FUCK

beer came first. bread was first invented as a way of storing beer ingredients. bread is a brick of beer.

Invention of bread is weird bc it’s like some Neolithic ppl were like “hey you know that tall grass thing that’s sorta edible but not really how about we take it and grind it into a very very fine powder which is extra backbreaking right now bc the wheel won’t be invented for awhile and then we mix it with water and heat it up and you know what let’s also toss some mold in there just to see what happens”

there are a number of distinct steps though, each of which can be observed in isolation. “grind tough seeds to make them edible” is practiced with other foods besides grains (like acorns). the natural next step after that is to add water, which gives you porridge: a common ancient roman meal was puls, very similar to modern cream of wheat. once you have that you also have a simple dough, and baking it to preserve it is a logical experiment (as is baking some you forgot about and left out for a few days, just so you don’t waste it... voila, leavened bread)

there could have been, and probably was (though i’m not an archaeologist) a substantial time between each of these innovations. it’s not too hard to imagine people being chill with “grind seeds for soup, select plants for bigger seeds” for a good while

Do you ever wonder how many amazing things are fated to go forever uninvented because each step necessary to invent them is a completely unintuitive thing to do?

Okay, that's not how bread was invented. I wrote a potted history, I could try to dig that out if anyone is interested?

Please do

I'm putting this on my bread blog, because of course I am. Also tagging @appendingfic who I think expressed interest.

Tens of thousands of years ago people foraged and hunted for their food and ate whatever they could. Among their forage were wild cereals, which included the ancestors of modern cultivated wheat, barley and others.

People like sweet things. Grains are starchy, but if sprouted they start converting those starches to sugars, so people would've left grains in water to sprout. These sprouts are also easier to digest, thus more nutritious, which bestowed an invisible advantage on those sprouting their grains.

If grains are left in water too long, however, they begin to ferment. Alcohol is produced. People like alcohol.

In ancient Mesopotamia the fermented grains were experimented with, resulting in an early form of beer. The process of making that beer was quite complicated and involved a combination of sprouted and mashed grains.

People wanted beer all year round, but early beers did not have long shelf lives and the grain could only be harvested at certain times. So the ancient Mesopotamians invented a way of storing the ingredients for beer.

It was made of the grain mash, honey, dates and spices that were fermented to make beer. For storage, prior to fermentation, the mixture was baked dry, cut into smaller pieces and baked again to remove all water. This produced bapir, a product very much like biscotti, which could be stored for later rehydration and fermentation. Sometimes it was eaten instead.

I've made bapir, and I've eaten it. It is brittle but delicious. It's also a form of unleavened bread.

Bread was invented as a way to store the ingredients for beer, which was most likely a development from a chance discovery. Leavened bread (that is, with bubbles) may well have been discovered when a mixture like that for bapir was accidentally allowed to ferment before baking. Yeast is responsible for both alcohol production and leavening.

There's a lot more to it, in terms of the cultivation of grains and the development of milling, than I've written here. It's been a process of millennia to go from chewing sprouts to eating soft white bread like that pictured. But every step along the way was small and simple.

I never would have guessed that beer pre-existed bread. I've always just assumed that beer was an accidental discovery by breadmakers.

But now I want a recipe for bapir

My foster kitten

is trying

to steal

my beer.

Guys… 

Please… 

turn the sound on and watch my friends foster kitten yell at her because she won’t let her develop an alcohol addiction. 

I love Jocelyn the kitten. 

Omg precios baby 😭

SHE SCREM FOR BEERS <3

@sharkfinshuffle say stuff

FINE I’ll just do your homework for you. Trust me, it’s not just “what we think”, we have ample evidence and it’s pretty much unanimously agreed upon among brewers that women were traditionally the ones brewing and often drinking the beer. So long long story short: yes, brewing was very much a women’s craft in the majority of cultures worldwide pre-industrialisation. A couple of popular brewing textbooks state:

“Initially, brewing was carried out as home brewing by women for domestic use only. It was part of the daily housework next to cooking and baking bread.” (Handbook of Brewing, Priest and Stewart, 2006)

“Traditionally, [African] beers are made by women brewsters, as was the case medieval Europe, and they may be consumed with some ceremony.” (Brewing, Briggs, Brookes, and Stevens, 2003)

And here are some articles:

A (Very) Brief History of Women in Beer

http://growlermag.com/women-in-beer/

Honestly though, just google “women brewing history”.

lol wow thank you!!! i will spread this information in the world

also will use it to shut down Manly Beer Drinker of all sorts

THIS IS USEFUL! I SHALL BE TAKING THIS INTO MY LOCAL MICROBREWERY AND BEING OBNOXIOUSLY FEMINIST. I LOVE YOU FOR THIS SO MUCH!

Fun fact: men (specifically, monks) started adding hops to beer. Hops makes beer taste bitter - the tast men today insist is the “true” tast of beer which makes it a masculine drink. The fun part of it is that hops is a phytoestrogen which is (according to some sources - there are disproving articles so I won’t say it’s absolutely true) responsible for low sex drive, lower energy, man boobs, and abdominal fat. Actually, monks started using hops in beer in order to lower libido of men in the monastery. 

This came up just now in the Irish Times in regards to a brewery in Mechelen in Belgium. (Yet another reason to get back there.)

This data’s been on my radar for a while now. I remember being in one of our favorite places in Dublin, Porterhouse Central, and spotting a sign hanging up above one of the aisles that said BEERS BREWED BY MEN, NOT MACHINES. A nice enough sentiment, but unfortunately / unnecessarily gendered.

I was in a bit of a mischievous mood and said to the barman, “No women?” “Nope,” he said. I said, “You should really get at least one woman brewer in here. For historical reasons if nothing else. Didn’t you know that until a couple of centuries ago it was illegal for men to brew in Dublin?”

He was kind of stunned. True, though. It was traditional in the city since Viking times. In fact there was a sense that it was unlucky for men to brew, that the beer would fail, that it didn’t like them.

My bartender was a little bemused by this. “But why would that be?”

I just kind of laughed. “Women,” I said. “Yeast. We have a relationship.”

I wish I could describe the series of expressions that went across his face. :)