A Toast To Health

Though vilified by modern science, alcoholic beverages were historically made for good and was once considered a healthier option than good ‘ol H2O.

- Dannon Har

We’re sipping on a pint of Civilization Brewing Co. milk stout at a taproom in Bukit Timah as we wait eagerly for Zachary Smith, a history professor, to show up. When he’s not busy teaching at the Singapore University of Social Sciences, he’s busy with his other undertaking in life—running local craft beer label launched this year, Civilization Brewing Co. As an academic and brewer, he’s just the right person to talk to for a lesson on the origins of alcohol.

His beer brand is unabashedly proud of the beverage’s initial purpose as a source of nourishment for ancient civilisations, thus the name. On their social pages are historical references of how beer not only started as a health food, but even was a reason that agricultural civilisations flourished.

“Early farmers ate far less meat than hunter-gatherers,” he begins. “It’s generally a plant-based diet and it’s a challenge to get all the vitamins they needed from that narrow selection of plants they had access to.” They found out that fermenting their harvest into beer gave them a source of nutrition that could last longer, was hydrating, could be used as a disinfectant and produced vitamins the body needed.

Not that they knew exactly what they were doing. These early people didn’t know how or why beer was good for them. They had no idea what fermentation truly was. They simply allowed natural, wild fermentation to take place, consumed the end-product, and through sheer trial and error over an extended period of time, found that those who drank beer were healthier than those who didn’t. It’s correlation at work, observed and acted upon.