From the Archives: Scientists are partnering with brewers to taste test ancient recipes and sip a long-lost past.
Sara Toth StubAncient artwork, such as this relief in the Israel Beer Breweries museum in Ashkelon, Israel, offers clues to past beer production.May 2019, a crowd of journalists gathered around the Biratenu bar in Jerusalem, snapping photos as a bartender poured golden, frothy beer into plastic cups. The story of the beer was both new and very old: The yeast that fermented it came from a 3,000-year-old jug found at a nearby archaeological site.
To investigate further, Maeir joined a team of biologists, other archaeologists, and a brewer who isolated yeasts from several ancient yeast colonies discovered within jugs from Tell es-Safi and three other sites in Israel that ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians had inhabited or controlled. They then used these microorganisms to make different types of beer and mead, a few of which they unveiled during a press conference at the Biratenu bar.
Indeed, multiple breweries are now making beer inspired by ancient beverages, often in cooperation with archaeologists who want to learn more about how people used various ingredients centuries ago. In the process, these efforts may illuminate big questions about shifts in human societies and cultures.drinking beer for thousands of years for nutritional, social, medicinal, and religious reasons.
Beer has a relatively short shelf life compared with wine, so people did not trade or transport it as often, nor did they write about it as much. It wasn’t until the 1990s, with the advent of new technologies and methods for chemical analyses, that researchers managed to more exactly identify the microstructure and chemical composition of residue on vessels. These advances opened the door for re-creating ancient beer—and collaborating with brewers.
“Beer is telling us about everything from gender roles to agriculture,” says archaeologist Marie Hopwood. These ancient Chinese amphorae contained yeast cells and molds that may have been part of the starter for an ancient fermented beverage.“We will probably never find out which was first, beer or bread,” Liu says. In fact, some scholars ascribe to, first put forward in 1953, that beer—not bread—drove the advent of farming. Bread is a source of food, whereas beer’s alcoholic content may point toward more social or cultural practices rather than purely nutritional purposes.
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