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posted by martyb on Wednesday May 29 2019, @06:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the curing-what-ales-you dept.

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
Archaeologists Unearth 5,000-Year-Old Brewery in China
5,000-Year-Old Chinese Beer Recipe Recreated by Students
13,000-Year-Old Beer Residue Found in Prehistoric Cave in Israel


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by PinkyGigglebrain on Wednesday May 29 2019, @04:42PM (3 children)

    by PinkyGigglebrain (4458) on Wednesday May 29 2019, @04:42PM (#848976)

    The basic ingredients I think we can be pretty sure of.

    Good place to start.

    What we don't know about is likely microorganisms, the bittering agents, or other additives that we might have missed.

    So pretty much everything that really give beer/ale/etc its character and distinctive flavor. It doesn't matter if you have start with the same ingredients unless you use the same yeasts and additives you will get a completely different flavor.
    Like what happens if you make Sour Dough bread in Brazil and Sour Dough from San Fransisco, they will taste completely different unless you use the exact same starter.

     

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @05:15PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @05:15PM (#848985)

    Actually, the starter will change to adapt to the local conditions within a few weeks time, so it's pretty much impossible to make the exact same bread in two different places.

  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday May 30 2019, @07:00AM (1 child)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday May 30 2019, @07:00AM (#849207) Homepage
    And the tech used will have an effect too. Of course, they didn't "use" yeast back then, it just kinda happened - it was growing on fruit/berry skins, and just floating in the air.

    There are still some father-to-son recipes still being made even in the western world, and there's no reason to believe they've changed particularly much, mostly as many are still using ancient tech in the places where it's important. For example, some Finns and Estonians are still using a traditional wooden kuurna and juniper twigs for lautering their brews. http://www.posbeer.org/oppaat/sahti/equipment.php . And if you're worried that it's not the same juniper any more, don't worry, we've now got gene banks of all the local varieties, and it's clear that they've barely varied at all over thousands of years of separation. The yeast, of course, is a concern, but the brewers still use bog-standard Finnish (Estonian) bread yeast, which as several labs have proved is as dirty as fuck, not refined at all, but makes a good loaf to the ugri-mugri tastes. Doesn't mean it's the same, of course, but just demonstrates that it's not been deliberately cleaned up, and not selected for anything in particular (flocculation is arguable, but if the barm always comes from the top, the evolutionary pressure has always been to just select for the lower flocculators, again, no particular change in selection criteria over time).

    Hygiene? Get out of here! When the new vat appears, you still wanna drink it as goddamn fast as possible. (Though of course deliberately ignoring all we know about bugs would be dumb, but you won't see a drop of sodium hydroxide in any of these sheds.)
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    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday May 30 2019, @07:03AM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday May 30 2019, @07:03AM (#849210) Homepage
      > growing on fruit/berry skins, and just floating in the air

      And of course dried onto the besom from cleaning up after the previous batch was made.
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