I’ll confess. I’m not much of a beer person. I occasionally enjoy a very fruity beer or a wheat ale. I simply don’t like the taste of hops. No, the citrus style ones are even worse.

But I find the process of making beer fascinating for a simple reason: It’s very possible we developed civilization because of beer. Not bread. Beer.

We think beer started in Mesopotamia, and the oldest recipe we have uses stale bread. It may even have been made, first, by accident, but once we got the taste for it (present company excluded).

But alcohol has always been somewhat controversial. It reduces inhibitions, resulting in some people becoming unpleasant or even violent when intoxicated. It can be physically addictive to some (but not others) and it can be behaviorally addictive.

Arguments about who should be allowed to drink and when have flowed back and forth across the world.

And they came to their head with the temperance movement and the notorious years of Prohibition