The millennial monks of Bavaria and Bohemia were the founders of brewing science around 1050 AD, evolving wine making into brewing beer

So it seems there was a lot going on in the decades following the turn of the 1000 AD first millennium (for those doing the maths thats one thousand years prior to the recent second millennium 2000 which spawned the current generation of apparaently lazy, narcissistic, tech absorbed, echo boomers).

Viking raider Leif Eriksson discovered North America and called it Vinland. It's a shame that name never really stuck, could almost envisage Vinland as as a vast country of wine grapes, from Maine to Mexico, as opposed to the mad jungle the USA is now.

They started building the tower at Pisa in Italy, although the guy who signed off on the geo tech report on the footings clearly was also buried in the fermented juices from these same grapes.

The Orthodox and Roman churches separated, and ultimately the first crusade was launched by the Pope of the time, Pope Urban II, who wanted to take back control of Jeruselum from Muslims. Would be handy to send back Rick and Morty to sort the Pope out before he made that fateful decision too, perhaps also introducing him to the benefits of wine over war too. With a genre defining name like Urban you'd expect him to be more into street art and spitting conscious raps from the pulpit, or some soulful rnb, rather than spilling blood over real estate.

But anyway, back onto the grapes, and ultimately the beer.

These early religious themes are somewhat important in the spiritual foundations of todays cult of the craft brewery.

St. Benedict himself, the man often credited with dragging Europe out of the dark ages following the fall of the Roman Empire and onto the path to modern living, who lived 500 years prior to 1000AD, drew inspiration from Jesus' time spent in the wilderness and fathered modern monasticism on a principle that monks must support themselves. DIY food, drink, spiritual enlightenment, that sort of thing.

As a result the early Italian abbeys grew grapes and made wine, and with all the time they had on their hands in between interpreting their gospels and testaments, and picking up the pieces of Rome, the monks became very good at fermentation. These monasteries were the early seats of study and learning, so they naturally became the birthplaces of brewing science.

When the monks spread north from Italy across the Alps, the cooler climates suited fermenting barley into beer rather than grapes into wine, and so we saw the origins of barrel fermented ale around 1050 AD in the regions of Bavaria and Bohemia.

These regions today are still proudly producing some of the finest ales on the planet, and some of the best beer festivals ... so lets always remember to raise a quiet glass to the millennial monks