14 things you didn't know about the history of beer

You probably don't think about it every time you crack open a cold one, but beer is one of the oldest bedrocks of human civilization, brewed all over the world for longer than recorded history.

From the Agricultural Revolution to the American Revolution, beer has been around to quench the thirsts of virtually all classes of all societies. Here are some facts you may not have known about the history of beer.

Beer dates back to ancient Mesopotamia, and held an important dietary role.

Archaeologists have dated the practice of beer brewing as far back as 3500 to 3100 BCE, in what is today Iran.

It's believed to have been safer to drink than water, because harmful microorganisms were boiled out, and it contained nutrients absent from other drinks, according to the Ancient History Encyclopedia.

Brewing was also a religious practice, related to the Sumerian goddess Ninkasi.

Ninkasi was worshipped as the goddess of beer, and the "Hymn to Ninkasi" was a worship song-slash-beer recipe thought to be passed down orally.

In recent years, modern scholars have recreated the ancient brewing process based on a clay tablet that recorded the hymn – and apparently, it wasn't half bad.

AlphaBeta head brewer Michaela Charles who, along with beer and wine expert Susan Boyle, has spent the last six months trying to brew an accurate recreation of Ancient Egyptian beer told Vice's Munchies that "The Ancient Egyptian method is: you have grain in cold water. You have grain in hot water. You heat up the one in hot water. You mix the two together. You rinse into a vessel, and you ferment it." he continued. "There's no boiling, there's no sterilizing. You're really flying blind with the Egyptian process."

The straw was invented by the Sumerians for drinking beer.

As sophisticated as ancient brewing practices were, there was still a chance for sediment to end up in a drinker's pint, so Sumerians, Babylonians, and Egyptians were known to drink beer with straws made of reeds or gold, depending upon one's social class, according to Mercury News.