Tally's Beer Archive

The Archive · Beer history, preserved

The Eras

Nine thousand years is the figure everyone repeats. The evidence supports about five — for beer; the older ferments are here too, and named for what they were. Twelve eras follow what can actually be sourced, from the first ration tablets to the breweries that started the craft revival and were bought or closed by it. Nine have their boards; three wait for theirs.

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4 Ingredients That Changed the World

12
Eras
9 of 12
Boards placed
2
Style files
c. 3400 BCE
Earliest evidence

China, the Andes, Africa · c. 7000 BCE onward

Beer Was Invented More Than Once

Era 10

Board not yet made

This era is written but unillustrated. The sequence shows it rather than closing the gap quietly.

Cereal fermentation arose separately wherever there was a staple grain — rice and millet on the Yellow River, maize in the Andes, sorghum and millet across Africa. None of it descends from Mesopotamia.

The oldest chemically proven fermented drink — Jiahu, c. 7000 BCE — was rice, honey and fruit together. It is the earliest alcohol anyone can point to, and it is not a beer. The archive counts it here and says so.

The Grain Register — what the archive holds on barley, and what it does not →

Sources on the board

  • McGovern et al., Fermented beverages of pre- and proto-historic China, PNAS 101 (2004) — Jiahu residue analysis, 7th millennium BCE
  • Moseley et al., Burning down the brewery, PNAS 102 (2005) — Wari chicha brewery at Cerro Baúl, Peru, AD 600–1000, 1,800-litre batches
  • Hamid A. Dirar, The Indigenous Fermented Foods of the Sudan (Cambridge, 1993) — merissa and the sorghum beers
  • John W. Arthur, Brewing beer: status, wealth and ceramic use alteration among the Gamo, World Archaeology 34 (2003)
  • Liu et al., Fermented beverage and food storage in 13,000 y-old stone mortars at Raqefet Cave, J. Archaeological Science: Reports 21 (2018) — Natufian, contested

Early Mesopotamia · c. 3400–1800 BCE

Beer Enters the Written Record

Era 1
Artist's reconstruction: Tally and Pixie in the setting of Beer Enters the Written Record. Illustration in Tally's style, not a historical image.
Era 1 board — Beer Enters the Written Record, early Mesopotamian beer culture c. 3400–1800 BCE

Administrative tablets, ration records and literary texts preserve some of the earliest written evidence connected with beer.

No specific excavated structure is securely identified as a brewery. Everything here is inferred from what people wrote down about it.

Read the full board — built as a page, not a picture →

Sources on the board

  • Late Uruk administrative tablets, c. 3400–3000 BCE
  • Jemdet Nasr administrative records, c. 3100–2900 BCE
  • Early Dynastic ration tablets, c. 2600–2350 BCE
  • Hymn to Ninkasi (Old Babylonian copy), c. 1800 BCE — ETCSL 4.23.1

Egypt · c. 3500–1300 BCE

Henqet — Ancient Egyptian Beer

Era 2
Artist's reconstruction: Tally and Pixie in the setting of Henqet — Ancient Egyptian Beer. Illustration in Tally's style, not a historical image.
Era 2 board — Henqet, ancient Egyptian beer, c. 3500–1300 BCE

Beer as daily nourishment, temple offering and part of workers' rations, from Predynastic contexts through the New Kingdom.

There is no evidence beer was used as currency. It was provided as payment in kind — a distinction almost every popular account gets wrong.

Sources on the board

  • Hierakonpolis brewing installations, Predynastic, c. 3500 BCE
  • Abydos evidence, Early Dynastic, c. 3150–2613 BCE
  • Old Kingdom tomb reliefs, c. 2686–2181 BCE
  • Tell el-Dab'a brewing context, c. 1650 BCE
  • Amarna remains, c. 1350 BCE

Europe · c. 800–1300

Medieval Monastic Brewing

Era 3
Artist's reconstruction: Tally and Pixie in the setting of Medieval Monastic Brewing. Illustration in Tally's style, not a historical image.
Era 3 board — Medieval monastic brewing, c. 800–1300

Monasteries brewed a range of everyday and stronger ales — not the modern dubbel and tripel styles their names are now attached to.

The famous abbey styles developed centuries after this period. The influence is real; the continuity is not.

The Monastic Register — 14 breweries, five categories →

Sources on the board

  • Plan of Saint Gall, c. 820
  • Hildegard of Bingen, Physica, 12th century
  • Hildegard of Bingen, Causae et Curae, 12th century

Europe · 822–c. 1600

The Hop Revolution

Era 11

Board not yet made

This era is written but unillustrated. The sequence shows it rather than closing the gap quietly.

Hops replaced gruit slowly, town by town, over eight centuries — first as one bittering herb among several, then as the preservative that let beer keep and travel.

In England, for two hundred years, ale and beer were different drinks: ale had no hops, beer did. The first documented hopped beer in England was a Dutch import paying toll at Great Yarmouth in 1362.

The Hop Register — growers, merchants and varieties the archive can evidence →

Sources on the board

  • Statutes of Abbot Adalhard of Corbie, 822 — a tithe of hops to the monastery porter; the earliest document linking hops to brewing
  • Hildegard of Bingen, Physica, c. 1150 — hops as a preservative in drink
  • Great Yarmouth customs, 1362/63 — toll paid on imported beer by James Dodynessone of Amsterdam
  • Colchester, 1412 — Agnes Smyth, the first documented beer brewer in England
  • Reynolde Scot, A Perfite Platform of a Hoppe Garden, 1574 — the first English hop manual; Kent cultivation from the 1520s
  • Richard W. Unger, Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Pennsylvania, 2004)

Colonial North America · c. 1700–1900

Spruce Beer

Era 4
Artist's reconstruction: Tally and Pixie in the setting of Spruce Beer. Illustration in Tally's style, not a historical image.
Era 4 board — Spruce beer in colonial North America, c. 1700–1900

When imported ale, hops or malt ran short, settlers and sailors brewed from what the forest supplied.

It was widely believed to prevent scurvy and carried for that reason — but brewing usually involved boiling, which reduces any vitamin C benefit.

Sources on the board

  • James Lind, A Treatise of the Scurvy (1753)
  • Peter Kalm, Travels into North America (1770–1771)
  • James Cook, A Voyage Towards the South Pole (1777)
  • Amelia Simmons, American Cookery (1796)
  • Lydia Maria Child, The American Frugal Housewife (1832)

Britain and its trade · c. 1720–1900

Empire and Cask

Era 12

Board not yet made

This era is written but unillustrated. The sequence shows it rather than closing the gap quietly.

Porter, stout and pale ale were the first beers brewed at industrial scale and shipped across oceans — and the cask culture they left behind is the one CAMRA set out to save in 1971.

Nobody invented IPA. Pale ale was going to India by 1784, Hodgson's Bow brewery was shipping it from at least 1790, and the name East India Pale Ale first appears in print in a Sydney newspaper in 1829 — forty years later.

The London Beer Flood — what a porter vat could do in 1814 →

Sources on the board

  • Letter of “Obadiah Poundage”, London Chronicle, 1760 — the account of porter's origin in the London of 1722
  • Sydney Gazette, 29 August 1829 — earliest found use of the name East India Pale Ale
  • Export records, Bow Brewery (Hodgson), pale ale and porter to India from 1790; pale ale to India, brewer unknown, from 1784
  • Samuel Allsopp & Sons, Burton upon Trent — first Burton pale ale brewed for the India trade, 1822
  • Martyn Cornell, Amber, Gold & Black (History Press, 2010)
  • Campaign for Real Ale, founded 1971

c. 1800–1900

Industrialisation and the Lager Revolution

Era 5
Artist's reconstruction: Tally and Pixie in the setting of Industrialisation and the Lager Revolution. Illustration in Tally's style, not a historical image.
Era 5 board — Industrialisation and the lager revolution, c. 1800–1900

Refrigeration, pure yeast culture, cheap glass and rail freight turned a local craft into an industry.

In sixty years brewing went from a craft governed by season and luck to one governed by measurement. Every later era runs on the infrastructure built here.

Sources on the board

  • Louis Pasteur, Études sur la Bière, 1876
  • Emil Christian Hansen, pure yeast culture, Carlsberg Laboratory, 1883
  • Carl von Linde, refrigeration machine patents, 1870s
  • Josef Groll, first pale lager brewed at Plzeň, 1842

c. 1800–1980

The Styles That Nearly Died

Era 6
Artist's reconstruction: Tally and Pixie in the setting of The Styles That Nearly Died. Illustration in Tally's style, not a historical image.
Era 6 board — The styles that nearly died: gose, Berliner Weisse and sahti

Gose, Berliner Weisse and sahti all came close to disappearing — two of them down to almost nothing before anyone thought to rebuild them.

Survival is not continuity. The style that came through intact is the one industry never bothered to scale.

Sources on the board

  • Leipzig municipal and brewing records on gose production and revival
  • Berlin brewing trade records on Berliner Weisse producer numbers
  • European Commission eAmbrosia register — Sahti, Traditional Speciality Guaranteed
  • BJCP Beer Style Guidelines — Gose, Berliner Weisse, Sahti

United States · 1920–1933

Prohibition

Era 7
Artist's reconstruction: Tally and Pixie in the setting of Prohibition. Illustration in Tally's style, not a historical image.
Era 7 board — Prohibition era United States, 1920–1933

Thirteen years in which brewing beer was a crime, and the breweries that survived did it by selling almost anything else.

Breweries sold malt syrup labelled “do not add yeast or permit fermentation,” then watched it sell by the ton. The most successful wink in American business.

The Closed Ledger — breweries that stopped →

Sources on the board

  • National Prohibition Act (Volstead Act), in force 17 Jan 1920
  • Federal definition of intoxicating liquor: more than 0.5% ABV
  • Beer-Wine Revenue Act (Cullen–Harrison Act), effective 7 Apr 1933
  • Twenty-First Amendment, ratified 5 Dec 1933

1950s–1970s

The Post-War Macro Era

Era 8
Artist's reconstruction: Tally and Pixie in the setting of The Post-War Macro Era. Illustration in Tally's style, not a historical image.
Era 8 board — The post-war macro era, 1950s–1970s

Consolidation, national distribution and television advertising favoured scale and consistency over local variation.

Both of the breweries that started the revival were eventually killed by the industry they started. New Albion closed in 1982. Anchor closed in 2023.

The Acquired — every dated change of ownership →

Sources on the board

  • Brewers Digest, 1957–1977
  • Modern Brewery Age, 1965–1977
  • U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1968 and 1977
  • Statistics Canada, brewing industry reports, 1961 and 1976

1965–present

The Craft Revival

Era 9
Artist's reconstruction: Tally and Pixie in the setting of The Craft Revival. Illustration in Tally's style, not a historical image.
Era 9 board — The craft revival, 1965 to present, and the second wave of consolidation

Out of uniformity came the demand for variety — and then the industry uniformity built began buying the variety up. It spread from the US and UK to every continent; by volume the world's beer is Chinese, by the glass it is Czech.

147 of the archive's 166 dated acquisitions — 89% — happened in 2000 or later. The revival is now the thing being consolidated.

The Acquired — every dated change of ownership →

Sources on the board

  • Tally's Beer Universe archive — ownership ledger and closed register
  • Campaign for Real Ale, founded 1971
  • Anchor Brewing, founded 1896, closed 2023
  • New Albion Brewing, founded 1976, closed 1982
  • H.R. 1337, signed 14 October 1978 — homebrewing legal in the United States from February 1979
  • Kirin Holdings, Global Beer Consumption by Country in 2024 (Dec 2025) — China the largest market for the 22nd consecutive year; Czechia first per head (148.8 litres) for the 32nd, every year since 1993

Outside the sequence

Style files

Some subjects span too many centuries to sit in one slot. Sahti runs from the 1500s to this afternoon; a Belgian tradition rebuilt in British Columbia covers 1366 to now. Numbering them as eras would break the sequence, so they get their own shelf.

Finland · c. 1500s–present

Traditional Finnish Sahti

Style file board — Traditional Finnish sahti, a Nordic farmhouse ale

A Nordic farmhouse ale that never went industrial, and survived intact because of it.

The wort is never boiled. Sahti is a raw ale — after lautering the wort goes straight to fermentation, which separates it from almost every other beer on earth.

British Columbia · 1366–2026

Western Canada — Keepers of the Belgian Tradition

Style file board — Western Canada, keepers of the Belgian tradition

Six centuries of Belgian brewing, reinterpreted on the other side of the world.

The theme is influence, not continuity. The historical record begins in Belgium; the breweries here opened in 2013 and 2014.

Dageraad Brewing — Burnaby, British Columbia →

Every board names its sources on its face. Where an image is a reconstruction rather than a photograph, it says so — and where the archive holds no record for something shown, it says that too. Three eras have no board yet. They are listed anyway, because a gap you can see is worth more than one you have to discover.