Max Miller of 'Tasting History' brewed a 3,800-year-old Sumerian beer based on a hymn.
Max Miller/Tasting History
A Utah man recently spent months collecting ingredients and brewing beer with an ancient strain of yeast to recreate a 3,000-year-old beer. But if you don't have the time to source Yemeni sidr honey, frankincense, and Egyptian balsam fruit, you can still get an idea of what ancient beer tasted like with a little help from Max Miller, the creator of the "Tasting History" series on YouTube.
Last year, Miller made a video showing how he brewed a 3,800-year-old Sumerian beer from a region of Mesopotamia. While he often follows historical recipes, for the ancient beverage he had to rely on a hymn about a brewer. In the video, he compared it to trying to bake a dessert based on the "Patty Cake" nursery rhyme.
While that meant there was a lot of guessing involved, there was less chance of getting it wrong.
"If you just follow the basic steps, you'll end up with something that might be correct," Miller told Business Insider.
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People have been making beer in various forms for thousands of years, all over the world. Archaeologists think they may have even found a 13,000-year-old brewery in Israel.
Since Miller isn't an expert in ancient beer, he relied on archaeologist Tate Paulette's research to figure out how to create a recipe from the "Hymn to Ninkasi," which dates to around 1,800 BCE, making it 3,800 years old.
Paulette found that most of the written descriptions and brewers' receipts included the same basic ingredients: malted barley, bappir, a mix of raw and roasted grains, date syrup, and aromatics. No one knows for sure what bappir is, but Paulette thinks it refers to a dried cake of something similar to a sourdough starter.
To make his version, Miller used water, barley, barley flour, a sourdough starter, coriander, cardamom, date syrup, and brewer's yeast.
Here are his instructions:
Exactly what Mesopotamian brewers used for aromatics is another mystery, but coriander, cardamom, fennel, and cumin are all possibilities, as are juniper berries, honey, figs, plums, and other fruits, herbs, and spices.
Mixing and matching those options will result in different outcomes. "Just the smallest change in what you're adding into it can really affect the flavor quite a bit," Miller said.
When you add the ingredients can impact its strength, too. Putting date syrup in early in the process will up the alcohol content, while adding it later will just make the end result sweeter. Some experts aren't sure if ancient beer was even alcoholic at all.
However strong they were, ancient brews came in several varieties. Texts from around 2,500 BCE describe golden, dark, sweet, dark red, and strained beers.
Don't expect your hymn-inspired homebrew to resemble anything you can buy at the store. Beers based on ancient recipes generally end up cloudy and chunky. That's pretty authentic to how it would have been thousands of years ago.
"It is so different from what we think of as beer today," Miller said. "It's drunk through a straw, for goodness sake." That was likely to help avoid some of the clumps of grain or cake.
Developments in microbiology and technology like thermometers changed brewing techniques over the last few centuries. Some ingredients have changed, too, like the types of yeast used. There's also no evidence that ancient beer makers used hops, which is a ubiquitous ingredient today.
Miller's main tip is to just try brewing your own version if you're curious because there's really no wrong way to do it. "Just be patient," he said, "because these older dishes, they do take more time. But they're fun, and it's a fun summer project."
