Cheers for the beers

Compared to the ancient history of beer in the Middle East, Lebanon’s small craft breweries are extremely new on the scene. The earliest evidence of beer brewing was found in Mesopotamia some 6,000 years ago, while the world’s oldest brewery, which was located in Egypt, dates to around 3400 BC. Beer eventually made it to Europe in the Middle Ages, where consumption of the brew flourished among the masses. Beer’s popularity has showed no sign of fading since, with global beer production reaching 1.96 billion hectoliters (hl) in 2016. China leads in beer production (460 million hl produced in 2016) followed by the US, which produced 221.25 million hl of beer in 2016. In the last few years, the demand for craft beer—defined by the US Brewers Association as beers produced by small, independent, breweries in a traditional or innovative way—has increased significantly, both in Europe, and in the US.