History
The Hymn to Ninkasi is written down
A Sumerian hymn to the goddess of beer, dating to roughly 1800 BCE, describing stages that appear to correspond to brewing in poetic language.
-1800 · also called Ninkasi, oldest beer recipe, Sumerian beer hymn
The version you have probably heard
“The Hymn to Ninkasi is the world’s oldest beer recipe, and you can brew from it.”
It is a hymn, not a recipe. Specialists disagree substantially about how key words and lines should be translated, and several technical terms have no agreed meaning, so a process cannot be reconstructed from it. Peter Damerow, working through the Sumerian corpus, concluded that too much remains open for the ingredients or process to be considered known — and went as far as noting we cannot be sure the product contained alcohol. Modern beers brewed "from the hymn" follow a translator’s interpretation.
The hymn praises Ninkasi and describes what look like brewing stages — something resembling malting, mixing, baking and fermenting — in an order that is not clearly sequential and in terms whose technical meaning is disputed among specialists.
It is one of the oldest surviving pieces of writing about beer anywhere, and it is genuinely remarkable. It is simply not what it is usually said to be.
Why it matters
The best-known ancient text about beer, and the clearest case of a document being asked a question it was not written to answer.
How well this is established
| Certainty | Documented. Supported by contemporary records that survive and are agreed on. |
|---|---|
| When | -1800. Known to the year rather than to the day. |
Evidence
What BeerHQ knows about this, and how. Every statement carries the state of the evidence behind it rather than being presented flatly as fact.
The Hymn to Ninkasi is a hymn rather than a recipe: it describes stages resembling brewing in poetic language, and specialists disagree substantially about how key terms should be translated, so a process cannot reliably be reconstructed from it.
Checked against the source
Source: Damerow, "Sumerian Beer: The Origins of Brewing Technology in Ancient Mesopotamia" (2012), discussion of the Hymn to Ninkasi (CDLJ 2012(2))
Either side of this
← -11000: The oldest evidence of a fermented cereal drink · 1100: Hopped beer spreads across northern Europe →
See the whole sequence on the beer history timeline.
Last reviewed 2026-08-16.