Not the Sumerians, surprise! It was the Iranians about 5000 BCE (7,000 years ago). These pre-persian early inhabitants of ancient Iran are generally referred to as the early inhabitants of the Zagros Mountains.
The earliest written “recipe” for grain-based beer or ale does come from the Sumerians. They called it “sikaru,” meaning “barley wine,” and they etched it in cuneiform tablets starting around 1800 BCE.
A wiser perspective on this story recognizes the proximity of Sumer and the Zagros Mountains, where beer residue in pottery was found, at approximately 400 kilometers apart. This closeness suggests that beer might have been invented somewhere in that part of Earth long before surviving evidence. Concurrently, Europeans were brewing grain-based beer-ales 4,000 kilometers away, indicating that diverse brewing methods emerged independently across different cultures. This pattern of convergent invention reveals a shared human tendency to ferment grains, fruits, and other substances into alcoholic beverages. The earliest evidence comes from the Jiahu site in Henan province, China, dating back to around 7000 BCE (9,000 years ago) and a long way from Sumer. However, it’s also possible that basic fermenting skills started a very long time before this. While we’ll likely never know when and where the first hominins purposely made a fermented drink to get a buzz on, this story does raise intriguing questions: Could we have been making fermented beverages 30,000 years ago? If neanderthals and our common ancestors had similar intelligence, might our hominins predecessors have brewed beverages 700,000 years ago? Without evidence, we don’t know, but let’s keep an open mind as archaeologists dig up our past.
For more on what lead up to the invention of beer, explore the deep dive timeline: Culture: The Pre-Sumer Cognitive Timeline.