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.