Beer, Corn and Maple

Pre-Classic Maya farmers were probably the first people to brew beer from maize, doing so around 2600 BCE. The Maya used fermentation as one method of releasing vital amino acids stored in the grain. Other indigenous North American peoples fermented maize to make it more nutritious and used it as leavening and flavoring for maize breads, gruels, “soft” drinks, and broths. In 1587, English colonists at Roanoke made beer from maize, most likely the first brewed in what is now the United States. Beer was the beverage of choice in seventeenth-century America, a habit and technology inherited from a mother country whose drinking water supply was chronically contaminated. By 1620, Virginia boasted European brewhouses, which produced maize beer for local consumption.