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If you’re into wine or beer, you’ve likely come across a few “wine snobs” or “beer geeks.” While they might seem like a modern phenomenon, millennia of evidence proves otherwise. But like everything in history, it depends on where you look.
Take Pliny the Elder, a 1st-century general and author during the Roman Empire. During his military campaigns, he recorded what soldiers from different regions drank the night before battle. It was often beer, according to Travis Rupp, a beer archaeologist who teaches courses on Greek and Roman history at the University of Colorado’s Boulder campus.