A fresh sparkling water to satisfy the desire and satisfy the heart

Cultural events

Chiara Chi@ra
A fresh sparkling water to satisfy the desire and satisfy the heart

«Ninkasi, you are the one who cooks the bappir in the great oven,

Who tidies up the piles of peeled grains,

You are the one who wets the malt placed on the ground...

You are the one who holds the great sweet wort with both hands...

Ninkasi, you are the one who pours the filtered beer from the collecting vat,

It is like the impetuous advance of the Tigris and the Euphrates ».


Today we want to celebrate (in the noblest sense of the word) this day by remembering the constant struggle that women of all ages have had to face to be someone, despite their gender.

It is with this hymn that we begin today a series of articles, news, anecdotes and information that perfectly link two worlds, women and beer.

As is well known, the first beer was certainly produced by a woman. Scholars and archaeologists have amply demonstrated that production was certainly a female task linked to the wheat harvest and making of bread. Let's go back to the hymn ... who is Ninkasi? For those unfamiliar with her… I present her, Ninkasi, from the Sumerian language “lady who prepares beer”, is the patroness of beer, an ancient Sumerian deity. It is said that it was born from "a fresh sparkling water" to "satisfy the desire and satisfy the heart".

So think how long this story is!

We have historical evidence as early as Mesopotamia and then in subsequent civilizations. From the Sumerians to the Egyptians and beyond, the woman was an active protagonist, and often the only one, in the production first and then in the marketing of beer. It is also said that Queen Cleopatra offered cups of Cevrin beer to the gods, because relations with the Romans allowed her to export this drink beyond the Mediterranean. Despite the initial distrust, thanks to the divine support of the goddess Ceres, beer gradually appeared more and more often on festive tables and it is from this divinity that the Latin name of beer was born: cerevisia.

In later times, women have had to resist discrimination and a spanner in the works set by the male world .. perhaps envious of the success of women's recipes?

Who knows?!

Famous in the brewing world we find, in more recent times Susannah Oland, an English woman who immigrated to Canada who had to found her own brewery omitting the fact of being a woman .. but I will tell you about this in a future article!

Cheers!

Here you can find some Women brewers and their work place, do you know them?

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