In the American state of New York (NYS) recent legislation promotes breweries that use local ingredients. They are defined as farm breweries and within a year 60% of their ingredients (apart from water, so barley and hops) will have to come from NYS agriculture.
The first producers of beer of around 2500 B.C. were farms in Mesopotamia which put cereals in a vessel of water and let it ferment spontaneously and casually. There followed in the next 3000 years craft brewers of great number and small dimensions up till the Middle Ages, when there arose more disciplined production, often in monasteries. From around 1500 breweries of a certain dimension appeared, particularly in England, Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Then in 1800-1900 large industrial breweries were organized which used ever more advanced techniques. Unfortunately in the twentieth century, many of these consolidated and began to produce uniform beers without character and with little taste. From the 1970’s, to contest this unhappy tendency there arose the Craft Beer Movement in the United States, which would then spread around the world. Today there are many tens of thousands of craft breweries, microbreweries, and brew pubs.
Now there have arrived (as always thanks to the Americans) the farm breweries to take us back to the dawn of beer in ancient Mesopotamia.
