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 Beer is a compromise.  It's not completely wild, but then neither is it
 fully tame... That's why it is the the world's third most popular drink [w]
 (after water and tea) - sales of beer are four times that of wine (http://nosco.blogspot.com/2007/04/just-beer.html)

In analyses such as the above, what is beer remains a little murky.
The OED says:
    At present 'beer' is in the trade the generic name for all malt liquors,
    'ale' being specifically applied to the paler coloured kinds, the malt
    for which has not been roasted or burnt; but the popular application of
    the two words varies in different localities.

Beer today comes primarily in two varieties, the bottom-fermented lager beer,
and the (mostly) top-fermented ale.

Chewing bread to make beer

The term "malt" in beer refers to a processing whereby starch (from many
kinds of cereals) is converted into a sugar-rich variety (the complex
carbohydrates are broken down into soluble glucoses) - ultimately it is these
sugar monomers that ferment.  This can be done with enzymes which can come
from

a) chewing the grain; human saliva has the enzyme pyalin - mastication was a
   popular method in ancient times.  See the 17th c. image on p. 9 of tribal
   women in Amazon making beer by chewing and spitting into a vat.

b) germinating (sprouting) the grain, when the enzyme diastase is formed.  At
   this point, germination is halted by baking the sprouts in a kiln; this is
   the process called malting, and the end result is the malt.

So Beer can be made from all sorts of starch, even bread!  But cereals differ
in the amount of diastase that they form while malting; Barley is often
preferred because of the high diastatic power of its malt.

Wine, Beer, and Spirit

Wine doesn't need malting because it is made
from fruits which are already rich in simpler sugars (monosaccharides
like glucose and disaccharides like sucrose).

Traditional fermentation processes tend to produce weaker alcohols,
(beer: 5% wine: 10%).  Stronger alcohol, produced by distillation, (mentioned
in Aristotle) are spirits - rum, vodka, whisky are variants based on
ingredients and geo-cultural origin.

Wine can form when fruit on the ground is fermented by natural yeast - when
this happens, animals are specially attracted to it.  Thus, wine may have
arisen naturally, and its antecedents go too far into antiquity to be
traceable.  Certainly it is much older than beer in the archaeological
record.

On the other hand, beer needs more processing.  Though beer can arise
naturally from germinated cereal that is dried in the sun etc, this is less
common.

Alewifes in Alehouses

 
Zambian woman making beer outside her home.  It will be poured out into the
calabashes. p. 42

In primitive societies and in earlier times, women used to spend
considerable time making the brew for home consumption, and the better ones
were often sold for income.  Eventually some of these places became
ale-houses run by alewifes (Etymology: "ale-wife" was a woman who kept an
ale-house though it might also refer to the fat tummy of a barrel (see
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ale). In Chaucer, we find that
"alestake" was the sign posted outside an alehouse.

 
"eala-huse": the Old English (c.450-1100) word for ale-house. From a page in
an 1898
dictionary of Old English, by Joseph Bosworth and
 T. Northcote Toller.

Ancient Eurasian Beer

But beer is much older than that.

Wine is much older than beer, In the neolithic settlement of Hajji Firuz Tepe
(in the Zagros mountains of N. Iran), there are vessels dating to 5000 BCE
with traces that appear to be wine.  Within a thousand years, at Godin Tepe
in western Iran, we find high traces of oxalate ion[1] in the grooves of a
ceramic shard which may have been a vessel for fermenting or transporting
drinks [1].  Oxalates (possibly calcium oxalate) are consistent with beer.

Beer drinking was known in Egypt from the 5th millenium (see Ian Hornsey's
 A History of Beer and Brewing (2003).

Much evidence of a beer drinking culture have also been found in
Mesopotamia.

 
The king of Ur raising glasses with his nobles at a banquet (p.8)

At the Sumerian city of Lagash (near Basra in Southern Iraq, may have been on
the Euphrates or the the Shat-al-Arab in 4000BCE) a complete brewery has
been excavated dating to around 2500 BCE.  The brewery
     included tanks for the making of beer-bread (bappir), a mixture of
     dough and aromatic herbs, and a large oven in which, according to the
     hymns to the beer-goddess Ninkasi, the beer bread would have been
     baked.  [2]
Another shard from a pottery jar contains the Sumerian cuneiform signs for
"beer" and "jar".  Sumerian cylinder seals also depict beer drinking at
banquets and during sexual intercourse [2].

In much of the ancient civilization, beer was such a sought after drink
that there is considerable surmise that the main impetus behind the rise of
agriculture around the tenth millennium BCE may have come from the need to
grow grains for beer.  Also, the idea of baking is closely tied to the
kilning process by which germination was halted in malting; indeed, that
the first breads were baked for beer.  Such is the preponderance of beer,
that there is a strong argument that the transition from nomadic life to
agriculture may have arisen because of beer.  The impetus for early grain
cultivation  may have come from the need to have a stable source of beer;
eventually groups of people settled down around the land.

from notes:
[1] Homan, M.M., 2004, Beer and its drinkers: A ancient near eastern love
    siory Near Eastern archaeology, 2004, v. 67(2), p, 84-95:
	Some have even argued that it was humanity's thirst for beer rather
	than a hunger for bread that motivated the domestication of cereals
	ca. 9500-8000 BCE.

[2] RL Zettler and NF Miller, 1995, Searching for Wine in the archaeological
   record of ancient Mesopotamia in the Third and Second Millenia BC, in
   McGovern, PE and Mitchel, RH (ed.), The analytical and archaeological
   challenge of detecting ancient wine, Gordon & Breach 1995.

Hops

In ancient cultures, beer was a perishable, and hops was first
added to preserve it, possibly around the 9th c.  Monasteries were
where the stuff was traditionally brewed, it helped communion with God
perhaps...

In the 16th c. some Bavarian monks trying to store beer longer were
fermenting it in a cool cellar, and they observed that the yeast, instead
of frothing at the top and promoting bacteria, were fermenting at the
bottom.  This was the birth of the bottom-fermented beer, used in all beers
today, and the process came to be called lagering, (Etymology: lagern
is german for storing).

But beer remained muddy for three more centuries, while its production was
being rapidly mechanized along with everything else - one of Watt's first
steam engines was used to mash the malt.  In the mid-19th c., at a brewery
in the Czech town of Pilsen, the beer turned out clear and golden -
possibly by accident helped by the fact that the local water was very soft,
and the barley was lower in proteins.  In any event, this coincided with
the mass-production of glass which made the clean look of the Pilsner beer
a sensation, spreading Pils style lager around the globe. Until
recently the Pilsner Urquell brewery used to make their beer the
old-fashioned way, in large open vats in the cellar.

---
For more on the American history of yeast, see
http://www.beerhistory.com/library/holdings/busch.shtml

This large format colourful book is a quick and delightful read, especially
on a summer evening on the balcony with a glass of the iciest.

This book is a condensed version of the larger volume, The world
encyclopedia of  beer, also by Glover.