Late to the party... but the plant cultivated in more places on earth is the grape. And I don't think you make beer from it. I also do not think beer is mentioned in the bible, though wine certainly is.
Yeah, northern Europeans drank beer as food and because the water in their "cities" was unfit to drink. But that wasn't the case in southern Europe. Truth be told, northern Europe became civilized only after their marauding hordes destroyed what was left of the Roman empire and absorbed some of the culture. In Vino Veritas, beer not so much.