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Beer Archaeologists Are Reviving Ancient Ales — With Some Strange Results
Patrick McGovern is scientific director of the Biomolecular Archaeology Project at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The author of Ancient Brews: Rediscovered and Re-Created, he is known as the "Indiana Jones of Ancient Ales."
McGovern took a swing at ancient chicha, too, with the brewery Dogfish Head in Delaware. "We chewed the red Peruvian corn for eight hours. The insides of our mouths were pretty cut up and our jaws were aching and so on, but it worked," he says. The final product involved peppercorns and wild strawberries. Dogfish Head has been making chicha ever since, both serving it to customers at the brewery and shipping it out.
The trouble with re-creating ancient brews is that it's actually an impossible task, even for McGovern, who uses techniques like mass spectrometry and gas chromatography to figure out what an ancient vessel once contained.
"You don't have 100% certainty by any means," says McGovern. "The basic ingredients I think we can be pretty sure of. What we don't know about is likely microorganisms, the bittering agents, or other additives that we might have missed." In a way, we will never truly be able to taste what King Midas was drinking, or the brews of Machu Picchu. Or even something much more recent, like George Washington's favorite porter.
Ancient chicha = chewed corn and quinoa partially fermented in spit.
Boston Dogfish Beer Head Company should patent all the ancient ales.
Related: Beer Domesticated Man
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(Score: 3, Informative) by MostCynical on Wednesday May 29 2019, @08:28AM (5 children)
Piss [oxforddictionaries.com] is Australian for beer (or any alcoholic beverage that gets someone pissed [oxforddictionaries.com]
Is "spit" a word for beer, or alcoholic beverage, anywhere in the world?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 5, Funny) by PiMuNu on Wednesday May 29 2019, @02:43PM (1 child)
> Piss is Australian for beer
Funnily enough, it's also English for Australian beer.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @02:58PM
That explains why my American girlfriend left me when I said I had a piss and a fag.
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Wednesday May 29 2019, @04:49PM (2 children)
they mean it literally. As in take a mouthful of maize and quinoa, chew it for a bit then spit it out into a container and let it ferment.
the enzymes in saliva help break down the starches into sugars and accelerate the fermentation process. Its a technique used by many cultures throughout the ages.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday May 29 2019, @07:39PM (1 child)
Yup.
Peruvian Masatao [nationalgeographic.com]
Amerindian Kasiri [wikipedia.org]
Chicha [wikipedia.org]
Nihamanchï [wikipedia.org]
There's a Pacific islands beverage too - might be kava, but I think not - at least I've read an account of a starchy food based fermented drink being prepared for a village feast by people chewing on the starchy food and spitting the masticated product into a common pot. After a short (few hour) fermentation the resultant beverage was passed around the feasters. Sounds utterly unhygienic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 31 2019, @06:35AM
Yeah. I've had true Chicha, not this boiled western version. The recipes aren't lost. This archaeologist is just applying a gross western-ivory-tower perspective. An ethnographer (western tradition but at least lip service to the living histories) would gather the existing recipes and perform something akin to genetic drift estimation to look for a common ancestor.