You may not think of Greece as a bastion of beer, but it was once ruled by a Bavarian: His legacy persists

Greece may not have the beer-drinking culture of its counterparts in Northern Europe and, as far as life- enhancing libations are concerned, it may be more renowned for its wine and Ouzo, but to dismiss Greece as a brewing wilderness would be a quaffing crime.Beer was first introduced to Greece by the Egyptians in 332 BC. The Greek word for beer: zythos (beer is still called sythos in modern Greece) derives from the ancient Egyptian word for beer; zytum.

Initially, beer struggled to capture the imagination of the masses. The Greek climate and soil simply wasn’t playing ball. It was too hot, and the earth was better suited to growing grapes and olives than it was to cultivating grains. What’s more, grain was the fuel behind empire building and using what little there was for brewing was, quite frankly, not deemed as a particularly good idea by those in charge.
One of the few places where barley thrives ahead of grapes is in the province of Thrace and, historically, that’s been the epicentre of Greece’s modest brewing history. The Thracian god, Dionysus, may well be widely revered as the Greek god of wine, the sun and agriculture, but what a lot of people don’t know is that Dionysus was also the Greek god of beer.

Further, the philosophical scribblings of Aristotle (384-322 BC) contain deferential references to ale. He wrote that “those who get drunk from beer fall on their backs and lie with their faces up, while those who get drunk from wine fall down every which way.”

Sophocles (450 BC), meanwhile, championed a healthy lifestyle and suggested a diet of "bread, meat, green vegetables and zythos beer"; beer is also referred to in the writings of Xenophon and Herodotus; and Plato once wrote that "He was a wise man who invented beer."

Bavaria Meets Greece
Yet, it wasn’t until the 19th century, following Greece’s war of independence from the Ottoman Empire, that Hellenic brewing really established itself. In 1832, King Otto, a German prince from Bavaria – the spiritual home of brewing – was installed by the English and Germans as the ruler of Greece.

Otto’s 30 year reign was a disaster with one of the few highlights being his decision to appoint an official brewmaster, a Bavarian chap by the name of Johan Fix. When George I replaced Otto as the new king, he replaced Fix with his own brewer and the Bavarian brewer was left without a job.

Johan Fix, however, decided to stay in Greece rather than returning home. He set-up his own brewery with his son Charles and they unleashed “FIX” beer to the Greeks. While beer took time to take off in Greece, the family-run FIX dominated the modest beer scene for the best part of a century.

Then, in the 1960s, the big international brewers such as Carlsberg, Amstel and Heineken took their gloves off as they sought to expand their global brewing empires. Over the next three decades, a ferocious fight for market share ensued and imported beer flooded the Greek beer scene with Dutch breweries laying claim to more than 90% of the market.