In the March 9, 2009 installment of my blog, I wrote about an attempt at recreating an ancient Sumerian beer, as described in "The Hymn to Ninkasi." Ninkasi was the Sumerian goddess of beer and the poem in her honor was found on 4,000 year old tablets written in cuniform. (See my previous blog entry for more info and a recipe.)

Joe Walton, Jim Michalk and I brewed this beer with wort made from smoked malt, bappir (or "beer bread") and honey. This wort was innoculated with fermenting date and grape wine. The dates and grapes were, in turn, innoculated with the dregs of a bottle of a Flander's red ale, a sour beer.

The resulting still beer was cloudy and had a nice honey aroma. It had a nice sweet/sour balance and was generally very tasty. I had expected the beer to be "interesting," and was shocked at how good it was. 

Joe entered a carbonated version of the beer in this year's Austin ZEALOTS Homebrew Inquisition and it won Second Runner Up to Best of Show.  The two Inquisitors gave it an 81 and an 83 out of a possible 100 and the comments focused on the beer being complex and balanced, with a clean sourness to it. (The judges did not detect any smoke character in the beer. It's so subtle that you really need to go hunting for it.)

You will occasionally hear people say that, in the past, beer was less pleasant than it is today. The usual reasons given are that the malt was smoky (due to the lack of modern malt drying methods), the beer was cloudy (because glass hadn't been invented yet, so brewers didn't focus on clarity) and that, in the absence of modern yeast handling techniques, fermentations were probably carried out with mixed microbes, resulting in sour beer.

This never made any sense to me, because why would people drink crappy beer? You can spontaneously ferment grape juice and yield a drinkable wine, so why would anyone bother with beer in the past if it wasn't up to modern standards and other alcoholic beverages were easy to make?

Given our results with this beer, I strongly suspect that ancient beer was as tasty as modern beer, but with a different flavor. I'm not an archaeologist, nor do have any historical evidence to back this up -- it's just a hunch, based on what I know of brewing and results of this historical recreation.

I'll grant that we did brew this beer with modern ingredients, equipment and with knowledge of modern brewing techniques. However, with the exception of carbonating it, nothing we did could not have been done by ancient Sumerians. (Joe also submitted a still version of this beer, and it scored fairly well.)

We're going to try brewing this beer again with malt made from the barley I grew this year. I may even use my smoker to kiln the grain. We're also going to make some adjustments on how we make the beer bread, based on our experiences the first time around. It should not only be fun to brew this beer almost entirely from scratch, but to see how good ancient Sumerians may have had it, when it came to beer.

Upcoming Blog Stuff

Tomorrow, I'm going to post the protocol for the second in our series of Brew Your Own/Basic Brewing Radio experiments. James (Spencer) and I hope a lot of you will join us in conducting this experiment, which tests the effects of pitching rate on fermentation characteristics and beer quality.

Also, sometime "soon," I hope to write a few blog entries on some scientific papers dealing with the evolution of Brewer's yeast. Lots of work has been done on this topic in the past 10 years and I want to hit the highlights and give interested brewers some further pointers to more information.