In terms of value of labor in the growing, harvesting and production of the end product; in terms of yield per hectare; in terms of net benefit to the consumers’ health; and all manner of other considerations, are wine and beer both equal? Equally beneficial to the consumers, to the economy; least impactful to the environment; easiest to transport and store, etc. Most pest-resistent crops, most drought-resistent crops, etc.?
I know that H sapiens on the European continent have been growing both for thousands of years, all across the continent, I’m assuming both at the same time since time immemorial. Would any people group in that place and time have benefitted, in the final analysis, with less of one and more of the other?
I’m no expert but my guess is that the answer is beer hands down. This cite suggests that agriculture was invented to fulfill a desire for beer. It is certainly much efficient to grow grain than grapes, and nutritionally small beer is akin to liquid bread.
But as I said I’m willing to be corrected by someone more authoritative.
The producers knew what they were doing, insofar as they knew their local crop conditions. If the crop mix was wildly off, it would have to be because of something the ancients didn’t know (aka imperfect information), or some sort of ancillary benefit of one crop or the other that wasn’t captured in the market price (aka an externality).
I’m going to agree on the whole that beer is better for ancient civilizations as others have already mentioned.
I strongly suspect that narrowly, wine had a greater influence on regional and long-distance trade, since a great deal of wine’s development is tied to growing regions and beer was almost always a brew-at-home/locally sort of thing.
But it’s a small subset of the value of the two. And an issue that developed muuuuuuch later than the initial acceptance of both beverages.
However, there will be localized exceptions for specific cases due to geographic and climatic conditions. When I was recently in Türkiye, we explored an ancient cave community which had winemaking facilities extensively integrated into their carved-out architecture. The surrounding terrain is hilly and relatively dry with no major water sources for irrigation, so unsuitable for grain cultivation; however, it’s fairly accommodating for a distribution of small vineyards. Being Byzantine Christians, they would have seen wine as having religious value as well as being a tradeable commodity, so evidently they made a lot of it, while there’s little evidence of beermaking.
So, yes, beer is the general answer, but by no means the universal one.
I’ll agree with this. People are divded over whether beer or bread came first, but the two are closer than you’d think. The early Sumerian beer was apparently a really thick mixture, and the reason they used a sort of straw to drink it was to filter out the liquid from the solid parts. Think of it as pulling the liquid beer out of realkly soggy bread mixture.
In any event, growing grain in bulk was a lot easier than grapes, and it was probably easier to turn into drink even after the beer got more refined.
It’s also the subject of my very first story published in Analog – Putting Down Roots.
So many variables. How it was stored, where it was stored, how strong was the beer. Also hops use is part of the equation. More hops generally means stores longer.
The ancient Egyptian beer was estimated to about 7%. Not really high enough to make a big difference, it generally takes 20% to make a major difference.
Storing the beer in a cellar or a cave will help.
Beer meant to last longer would have been stored in a clean baked clay vessel and sealed with wax or the like.
All this adds up to anywhere from a couple of months to a little over a year at best.
In theory a lot of weak beer was made for many thousands of years as it was often safer to drink than water. But I recall some holes knock in this old theory more recently.
Boiled water is going to be safer than non-boiled water, so that gives beer a leg up regardless of its final alcohol content. In longer-term storage I suspect the question gets more murky.
Beer brewing also produces yeast (barm) that was used for leavening bread. Apparently wine creates barm too, but I don’t know how much or if it was used for anything. What are some of the other spinoff products, if any, from beer and wine making?
Beer and wine don’t keep as well as the alcohol distilled from them. Friends and neighbors are still a problem, but mice and rats, along with spoilage become less of an issue. Apple Jack freeze distilled from apple cider was an excellent way to preserve the value of excess apple production in American colonial days.
None after spoilage. It’s not like every farmer is producing fine wine and beer. They also are greater volume that must be stored without infiltration of critters or air. High alcohol content should also be worth more since not everyone can distill or had as much beverage at lower alcohol content to begin with. Probably just as now where per unit of volume distilled liquor costs so much more than non-distilled (outside of high end wines).
An unintended benefit occurred when the Little Ice Age wiped out English vinyards so the national thirst had to be quenched with beer. This meant they had skills for making pressurized vats that came in handy at the outset of the Industrial Revolution. (unrelated social conditions also put them ahead of the French and Spanish, but it was still a plus).
It’s more about economic value than nutritional value.
Look at it this way- if you’ve got a bushel of grain, that’s good for some period. If you brew it into beer, you get about a barrel of beer (31 gallons), and that potentially can keep longer.
But that bushel of grain distills down to about 5 gallons of whiskey, and that’ll keep indefinitely in a bottle, and decades in a barrel. And I’m guessing you can sell 5 gallons of whiskey for a lot more than you could a bushel of grain or a barrel of beer. (haven’t done the math).