The Oldest Beer Recipe Is a Hymn to a Goddess

Written down in Sumer around 1800 BCE, the Hymn to Ninkasi worships the goddess of beer while quietly serving as one of the world’s earliest descriptions of how to brew it. As the Sumerologist Miguel Civil of the University of Chicago showed in his landmark 1964 translation, the poem is at once a song of praise and a walk through the brewing process.

“You are the one who spreads the roasted malt on a large mat.”

Earlier scholars, working from a shakier grasp of Sumerian, had mistranslated that same line as praise for a wielder of lightning. Civil’s reading instead reveals concrete steps: baking the grain into bappir bread, soaking malt, mashing, and fermenting in vats until the beer “flows like the Tigris and Euphrates.”

Devotion and instruction blur together because, in Mesopotamia, brewing was a sacred craft and beer a daily ration for laborers. Whether the hymn is a literal recipe is debated by scholars, but as a description of ancient technique woven into worship, it remains a remarkable fusion of the divine and the practical.