Here’s what it tastes like

Beer is the second most popular alcoholic drink in the world, after tea. In modern times, beer is not given much thought as to its development in terms of taste. It is also less understood why beer is viewed in the way it is.

Canada is experiencing a beer revival. The relative explosion in craft breweries is causing a renewed interest in different beer recipes and different brewing methods.

This has led to an interest in historical brewing methods. It’s a romantic notion that very old brewing methods are somehow superior to modern ones. Although the majority of beer sold today is qualitatively and quantitatively superior to that produced in ancient times, recent attempts by historians and breweries have yielded some positive results.

In the case of the collaboration of University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Patrick McGovern and Dogfish Head Brewery, which resulted in “Midas Touch,” based upon the sediments found in vessels in the Tomb of Midas, central Turkey, and Sleepy Giant Brewing Company’s ancient beers, created as part of Lakehead University’s Research and Innovation Week.

In Winnipeg, in March 2018, the Barn Hammer Brewing Company showed how beer is made in an old-fashioned 

Why recreate ancient mead and beer?

Researchers have discovered that eating and drinking is an important social, political, and economic activity. Food, drink, and consumption was a major indicator of class, culture, and ethnicity in ancient times. Romans and non-Romans were distinguished in many ways. For example, the Romans lived in cities, while non-Romans did not. They also differed in terms of whether they farmed or moved about.

This distinction was also made in terms of what people ate and the liquids that they drank. The ancient Graeco-Roman debate about those who drank alcohol and those who drank water is a good example.

The Romans believed that you are what you drink, not what you eat. They drank wine and non-Romans, beer.

There are still indicators of this (real or fake) today. The English consume tea, Americans consume coffee, Canadians drink Rye and the Scots drink Scotch.

The re-creation of ancient mead and beer (an alcoholic drink made from fermenting honey or other liquids) gives us the opportunity to look at many different things. These cultural and ethnic concerns are important, but we can also answer other interesting and important questions. How has the brewing method changed? How has our taste changed?

Mead Beaker. Matt Gibbs Author provided (no re-use).

Roman recipes and their recreation

The Romans have left us with a wide variety of recipes for food, drink and other items. Two of these recipes are the basis for an ongoing research project that I am conducting with the co-owners Barn Hammer Brewing Company, Tyler Birch and Brian Westcott.

It is an ancient recipe for beer from the Common Era (4th century CE). The recipe appears in Zosimus’s work, a Roman alchemist who lived in Panopolis in Egypt during the Roman Empire. Second, a Roman Senator named Columella wrote a recipe of a mead that was probably made in Italy during the first century C.E.

Beer mash. Matt Gibbs is the author (no reuse).

The ingredients are clear in both recipes, except for yeast. The dough from which a day’s worth of baking was saved is often used to make yeast, or more accurately a culture of yeast. You could also leave the mixtures in the open. The measurements and processes are harder to reproduce.

For example, the brewing of beer required barley bread with a sourdough sourdough: basically a lump of sourdough left uncovered. The culture had to be kept alive by baking at low temperatures for 18 hours.

Zosimus did not specify how much bread or water was required for one batch. This was left up to the interpretation of the brewers. Three parts of water and one part of bread were brewed and then left to ferment over nearly three weeks.

Brewing the mead proved to be a simpler process. We followed Columella’s instructions and mixed must with honey. We were given some measurements in the recipe, and we were able to extrapolate from that a mix of approximately three parts wine must to one part cane sugar.

Then, we added wine yeast to the containers and sealed them. They were then placed in Barn Hammer’s furnace room for 31 days to try and mimic the conditions in a Roman loft.

What have we learned?

It’s important to note that the principles behind brewing beer and mead haven’t changed much. The process is fundamentally the same today as it was two thousand years ago. Even though this may be true, the production of Zosimus’ beer was labor-intensive.

Mead is decanting.

This led to a second question: did the link between baking, brewing, and archaeology that was so evident in ancient Egyptian Material Culture and Archaeology continue even centuries later?

We recreated the beer and mead of the Roman Empire to the best of our ability. All the data suggest that the mead and beer are the same, even down to the pH levels: the beer, for example, is at pH 4.3, which is the expected pH of a beer following fermentation.