Really, Really Old Beer: They Excavated It, We Drank It

I’m all abuzz, from not only the six healthy pours of the most unique and storied beers I’ve ever tasted, but from the archaeological quests that sparked them. In two spirited sessions in the Eataly cooking classroom and rooftop birreria (Cheers to Science!), about sixty of us beer-and-science-loving souls got to drink as the ancients did—including a bright, honeyed facsimile of the brew buried with King Midas, a rice-based beer made after the first known fermented beverage (unearthed from 9,000-year-old Chinese tombs and dwellings), and an experimental pre-Roman Etruscan wort spiked with ground hazelnuts, pomegranate, and myrrh. Myrrh!

As we sipped deliberately, the brewer that dares to bottle (and moreover, sell) these ancestral ales, Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head, and Patrick McGovern, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, shared the extraordinary lengths they have gone to for more than a decade to identify and resurrect ultra-traditional recipes. Mostly, ingredient lists come straight from the source—chemical analysis of residues in ancient vessels excavated from archaeological sites around the world, such as the fermented cacao absorbed in shards of Honduran pottery that fueled Theobroma, the clean, sweet Mesoamerican-style brew that finished our tasting (paired with an exquisite Italian chocolate, it left us speechless). To fill in the gaps of the recipes, McGovern and Calagione research era-and-locale-appropriate ingredients—such as the annato, a fragrant crimson seed, added to Theobroma to evoke the blood that was stirred into the cacao-based “courage drinks” gulped by handsome young Aztec or Mayan men about to be sacrificed to the pre-Columbian gods. For one Middle Eastern concoction, McGovern and Calagione even wild-harvested a native Egyptian yeast deposited by the legs of fruit flies on sweet traps made from crushed dates. The effort resulted in only a 4.5% alcohol beer, but hey—it doesn’t get any more authentic.

But this brewer and scientist’s quests for the genuine demystify more than just a “true” glass of ale, and we, the buzzing masses, are apparently more than just happy imbibers. It’s about evolution, biological and cultural. As McGovern puts it, we are Homo imbibens, a species defined, actually, by our attraction to alcohol. It seems that 75 percent of primates are fruit-eaters (notably the Malaysian pen-tailed tree shrew, a primitive species that drinks the equivalent of nine glasses of wine a day in fermented nectar), and 10 percent of the enzymes of the human liver are entrusted with converting alcohol to energy. And few human civilizations are without evidence of fermented beverages. “Beer is perhaps the origin of civilization around the world,” McGovern said, and we raised our glasses to that.