This Sunday, I went over to the house of a fellow Austin ZEALOT, Joe Walton, to brew a "really old beer." The beer we brewed was our interpretation of BYO's interpretation of the Hymn to Ninkasi, a poem about brewing that appears on 4,000-year-old cuniform tablets. It's the same beer that Anchor took a stab at back in 1989. The link to the BYO recipe can be found at:

http://www.byo.com/component/resource/article/145-archaeobeer.  

Before I describe our brewday, here's a picture of Joe with a can of Jamaican Irish Moss peanut drink. Jim Michalk, another ZEALOT, found it at an Asian market, despite it being from Jamaica. It tasted like a peanut milk shake . . . and it really did contain Irish moss (carrageenan).

(For any non-brewers reading this blog, Irish moss is a fining agent that is frequently used in brewing.)

Jim brought a bunch of beers, too, including a smoked Norwegian ale with juniper berries from the Haand Brewery and a couple beers from Nøgne Ø.

The brewday was fairly uneventful, as most of the interesting aspects of brewing this "beer" occur a few days before. I put "beer" in quotes because what do you call a beverage that has aspects of beer, mead and wine to it? 

In preparation for brewing, I made a date wine, which was to serve as the yeast starter for the batch. I improvised a bit and made a wine from dates and grapes. I just crushed them up with a potato masher in a crock from one of my slow cookers, then added a little yeast and a dose of beer from a Flander's red ale (a sour beer).

The BYO recipe called for the date wine to be spontaneously fermented, but I pitched some yeast because both the dates and grapes looked light-colored and fresh and I suspected they might have had sulfite added to them, which would have inhibited the wild yeast on them.

Here's a pic of the wine in the crock: 

Joe and Jim made bappir, or "beer bread," the night before. Joe said that, if he had it to do over again, he would make the bread into "cookies," rather than a flat pan bread, cut into biscotti-like strips as the recipes calls for. 

The brewday went smoothly. The bappir dissolved quickly when the strike water was added and we skipped adding the rice hulls called for in the recipe, but had no problems lautering. 

The wort itself tasted good. We sampled a little bit of it, mixed with a dash of Maker's Mark. Joe was slightly worried that the bread had been scorched in a few places and this would add burnt notes to the beer, but we didn't taste any off flavors.

All the malt in the bread and added to the mash was Weyermann rauchmalz, but the wort really didn't taste very smoky. We discussed maybe using pale malt next time we tried this, because maybe the Sumerians had a way of drying their malt without making overtly smoky. 

We ended up adding a little more honey than the recipe called for, but we didn't think the ancient Sumerians would mind. 

Here is a picture of Joe (left) and Jim (right) recirculating the wort: 

When the wort was chilled and it came time to pitch the date wine, we took a potato masher and mashed up the fruit. The dates pretty much disintegrated, but the grapes were still mostly intact. We, of course, tasted the wine and were surprised at how good it was -- it was still sweet (from not being completely fermented), but also had a nice sourness to it (from the Flanders Red).

I should add that, when I say "wine" here, I really mean "still fermenting fruit mush." The wine is meant to innoculate the grain and honey wort with actively fermenting yeast, so it isn't finished wine.

We ended up pitching everything in the crock into the wort, instead of separating the bits of fruit and only pitching the liquid. The skins of white (or green) grapes can add some "interesting" notes to a fermented beverage, but there weren't that many grapes compared to the total volume of brew. We yielded about 10 gallons of wort, at an SG around 1.072, before we pitched the wine. 

Here's our two carboys of ancient Sumerian happy juice, just before we put the fermentation locks on: 

I'm very excited to try this beer. Every component -- from the bread to the wort to the date wine -- tasted good. The smell of honey in the wort was also nice. We discussed possibly brewing this again, with a few tweaks: making "cookies" instead of bread and not using rauchmalz as the base. But, we'll wait to see how this turns out before revamping our recipe.