AMA: I'm Lars Marius Garshol, beer historian 🍻. I just published "The Power of Beer". Ask me anything!

I mainly work on traditional farmhouse brewing in Europe, but I recently published "The Power of Beer", which covers the whole history of beer, from the beginning until now. It looks at how our relationship with beer has evolved over time, and how beer brewing has changed over time.

The scope is pretty wide: the Incas, prehistoric Europe, women and men as brewers, the introduction of hops, the rise of craft beer, history of lager, etc etc. As the title implies it also describes how rulers and states used beer to build real political power.

One of the things I wanted to do with the book was to dispel a lot of the myths about beer history, because a lot of what people have been told, and what is commonly written, is just not true. I'm hoping maybe I can do some of the same here.

I'll be answering questions from, roughly, 0900 CET on Wed Oct 21 onwards. I'll keep going all day and evening, or until questions run out.

So, ask me anything!

I felt like this was maybe more than enough text, but the subreddit apparently requires more text, so I'll go on listing subjects covered in the book that you might want to ask questions about:

• How and when our relationship with alcohol began
• How, when, and where beer brewing was invented (multiple times)
• How Asian, European, African, and South American native beers differ
• How the relationship between wine and beer got started
• The role of mead and cider
• The use of beer in the cult of the dead worldwide
• Prehistoric rulers in Europe using opulent drinkware to impress allies and rivals
• Roman beer brewing
• Beer and brewing in Egypt and Mesopotamia
• How beer brewing became a business, as opposed to something people did at home for themselves
• How hop use began, and spread
• The history of gruit (a spice mix effectively used as a form of tax)
• How lager brewing began, then spread a little, before freezing for a few centuries
• How beer created the Netherlands
• The rise of porter and IPA (in the UK)
• How IPA eventually "failed", turning into a very different beer
• Lager exploding onto the world scene from the 1840s
• The technological and scientific improvements made by breweries
• Modern Japan being built on sake taxes
• Japanese government getting too eager for sake taxes and almost killing sake entirely
• Prohibition (not an expert on that)
• How drinkers eventually revolted against the sameness of modern beer
• The rise of craft beer (including a craft sake revival), not just in the US, but elsewhere, too
• How, while brewers were modernizing beer for centuries, the farmers kept brewing their own beers in much the same way they'd done in the Middle Ages
• Tiny glimpses of farmhouse brewing on different continents
• The future

That is really a lot of detail required. I can't believe any Reddit user is actually going to skim through all this. Surely they have other things to do than read this very, very long list of stuff? I mean, they could just ask any question that comes to mind, instead of reading an entire book pasted into Reddit, right? Quite frankly I think this detail limit is a bit excessive. Okay, looks like I can finally post now.

(Note for anyone doing an AMA in the future: looks like what you need is not a long post, but a long paragraph in that post. Looks like a bug.)