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: 4, Funny) by aclarke on Wednesday May 29 2019, @05:01PM (1 child)
My high school guidance counsellor did NOT tell me that becoming a "beer archeologist" was a viable career option. Now all I have is this engineering degree.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 30 2019, @01:52AM
Why not become a Beer Engineer?