The fact that a man in Utah spent three years and about a thousand dollars replicating a beer that ancient Egyptians drank before the Iron Age really got underway is truly bizarre. Odd, but not unexpected. It’s difficult not to want to know what was in the glass once you learn about a 3,500-year-old medical scroll that serves as a brewing guide.
The scroll in question is the Ebers Papyrus, which dates to approximately 1550 BC and is among the best-preserved medical texts from ancient Egypt. You can learn something about the everyday dangers of living along the Nile from its hundreds of remedies for conditions ranging from crocodile bites to hair loss. It is always filled with beer. Homebrewer Dylan McDonnell, who holds a Master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies, became fixated on cataloging that pattern.
After creating a spreadsheet of frequently used ingredients and identifying about 75 recipes that mentioned beer, he discovered eight items that frequently appeared: desert dates, Yemeni Sidr honey, sycamore figs, black cumin, juniper berries, golden raisins, carob, and frankincense. These decisions were not made at random. They served as the foundation for something therapeutic, possibly spiritual, and most likely delicious in a way that is wholly unfamiliar to the palate of today.
Obtaining the ingredients was a form of archaeology in and of itself. The sycamore figs were obtained through a research contact from a 1,400-year-old grove in Egypt. The grains, emmer wheat and purple Egyptian barley (the same farro you might find in a Whole Foods salad bowl), needed their own hunt. The most amazing discovery, however, was the yeast.
McDonnell got in touch with Primer’s Yeast, a German business that collaborates with microbiologists and archaeologists to bring back old microbial strains. They sent him an 850 BC culture that was taken from a piece of pottery in Israel. It turns out that the Philistines were fermenting their own beer with the same yeast. There is a certain weight to that detail: borders change, empires disappear, civilizations rise and fall, and the yeast simply continues to ferment.
The actual brewing took place in his backyard using a three-vessel system, and each ten-gallon batch cost about $1,000, which is five times what the average homebrewer would pay for a standard recipe. It’s actually difficult to say whether the finished product tasted anything like what might have been served in a pharaoh’s court. Unlike modern production, ancient brewing did not optimize for consistency or shelf life. The outcome might have been fruity, murky, and sour in ways that most people accustomed to hazy IPAs or pale lagers would find confusing.
This obsession is not unique to McDonnell. Across the Atlantic, scientists at Eurac Research in Italy recently used yeast strains taken from Ötzi the Iceman, the remarkably preserved 5,300-year-old mummy discovered frozen close to the border between Italy and Austria, to bake sourdough bread. Mohamed Sarhan, a microbiologist, described baking the bread in almost shy terms, pointing out that he had never baked before and that there was much space for improvement. Considering that the yeast had been dormant in a frozen body for more than five millennia, it is astounding that the dough rose in less than a day. According to reports, the same team is currently in talks with Weihenstephan, a German brewery, about using Ötzi’s yeast strains to make beer.
There’s a sense that we’re in the midst of something unique—a time when food history isn’t just being researched but also tasted, reconstituted, extracted from scrolls, broken pottery, and frozen corpses, and transformed into something you can actually eat.
The desire to bridge the gap between the past and present as literally as possible appears to be the same whether a Utah homebrewer is reading papyrus recipes or scientists are working with mummy microbes in a lab. Whether or not these recreations accurately depict the experiences of ancient people is still up for debate. But as this develops, it’s difficult to ignore the possibility that there’s more going on here than just gastronomic curiosity—a desire to restore the authenticity of the ancient world, one drink at a time.
