We don’t know their names, but 6000-10,000 years ago in Egypt and Mesopotamia there were people making home brew. These ancient beer-lovers didn’t have much in the way of modern equipment, and their mud huts didn’t look like today’s breweries, so we know their brewing must have been a very simple process – and it still is.

Take natural grain, preferably barley but wheat will do, and just before it sprouts, roast it to make malt. Boil this with water to extract the starch, let it ferment, add a handful of hops for a pleasant bitterness, and there’s your beer. Cheers.

The speculation is that all those thousands of years ago, a bit of wheat or barley was left in a jar in the sun. Perhaps rainwater and a touch of wild yeast got in, and it brewed itself. A brave person took a swig and had such a good time he or she decided to make more.

In Australia, the first beers made by English settlers, would have been heavy ales. However, our hot climate and the arrival of brewers from other countries, together with advances in refrigeration in the late 18o0s, soon moved us towards lighter, more refreshing lager- and pilsener-style beers.

Draft or bottled?

The best beer is fresh beer. It should be a crime to drink bottled beer in a pub, but hey, it’s your choice. Beer on tap should be less than three weeks old; in a high-turnover pub or club it could be only a few days. Packaged beer, especially from overseas, could be much older. If your favourite tastes a bit stale, sticky and sweet, and you can crack the code on the can or bottle, you may find it’s more than six months since it was brewed.

Purists insist beer tastes better from a bottle poured into a chilled glass, but in the heat of summer a can snatched from the Esky can be just what you need.

Three ways to go

There are three main styles of beer in this country. Most are lagers, which use a bottom-fermenting yeast and medium hops. These ingredients give a pale-gold beer, that’s gently fizzy with a crisp bitterness that’s genuinely refreshing.

Another type is ale, which uses the old-style top-fermenting yeast, giving a richer, maltier flavour. Ales are coppery coloured and should be less fizzy, and may be served slightly warmer.

Stout or porter is made with barley toasted brown or black, resulting in a dark brew. This style of beer may be softer, like Tooheys Old, or more bitter, like Ireland’s famous Guinness.

What’s in a name?

Today’s beers have a range of labels. After the brand name you may see the word ale, pale ale, new, old, bitter, lager, pilsener, dry, extra dry, special dry, light, lite, mid, gold, blonde, stout or porter. Not all are correctly used. Most beers from the major breweries in Australia are lager or pilsener style.

Lager is a German word meaning ‘to store’. Before refrigeration, the Germans discovered that beers stored and matured in icy mountain caves for a couple of months became finer in flavour.

Authentic pilseners come from the town of Plzen in the Czech Republic, but the style, similar to lager, has spread worldwide.

The beer names most of us recognise include Tooheys New, Heineken, Hahn, VB, Carlton, Reschs, XXXX, West End, Cascade and Boags. They’re all lager style, gold in colour, with medium hops and fine bubbles, and are served icy-cold.

For parched Aussie throats, these beers are uncomplicated, reliable refreshment.

Big boys and boutiques

When it comes to buying beer, the big companies supply about 90 per cent of what’s on the shelves. The remaining 10 per cent are world-class beers made by boutique brewers.

These brewers use real malted barley or wheat, and local and imported hops, shunning the cheaper cane sugar which the big boys sometimes use to pad their beer.

Adelaide’s Coopers beer is now almost too big to be called boutique, but it’s still superbly unique. And Sydney’s Malt Shovel brewery, with its James Squire pilsener, ale and stout, sets a cracking pace. Matilda Bay, with its legendary Redback, must be thanked for kicking off craft brewing in Fremantle in 1984, although the original team is now serving up the delicious Little Creatures beers. Matilda Bay also brings us the honeyish Beez Neez and Pepperjack, which are wonderfully complex, made with a dash of Barossa shiraz! Other gems well worth seeking out include St Arnou, Bluetongue, Murray’s, Scharers and Gage Roads.