The idea came to Dylan McDonnell early in the pandemic, when the sourdough baking craze swept the country. Mr. McDonell, an amateur brewer living outside Salt Lake City, saw video game designer Seamus Blackley bragging on social media about baking bread with 4,500-year-old Egyptian yeast.
Mr. McDonell recalled thinking, “I wonder if I could do that with beer.”
The answer recently arrived in the form of pumpkin beer, which Mr McDonnell believes is the closest approximation of what Rameses the Great drank between battles with the Hittites.
In recent years, there have been attempts to recreate the beer of the Vikings, China's late Shang and Western Zhou dynasties, and the Sumerians, who are credited with inventing beer. “These beers can be all over the map,” said Neil Witte, beer expert at Craft Quality Solutions in Kansas City, Missouri. “What was good 500 or 1,000 years ago is probably very different from what we think is good today.”
Nonetheless, the temptation to revive the powerful beverage and connect it to past civilizations appears to be surging.
As chief operating officer of a nonprofit organization that helps people with disabilities, Mr. McDonnell has no desire to compete with professional brewers or commercialize the cocktails he creates. But he believes he has gone further than others in finding the exact ingredients the ancient Egyptians would have used and fermenting them with ancient yeast.
Although wine is often associated with Greco-Roman civilization, “beer was integral to ancient societies in the Levant and the Ancient Near East,” said Marie Hopwood, an ancient beer scholar and university department chair at Vancouver Island University. . Department of Anthropology. “Everyone drank beer,” she said, especially since the water was often contaminated.
But only recently, says Dr Hopwood, has beer archeology gained the respect long accorded to wine studies, a discrepancy she adds stems from modern bias. Many 20th-century archaeologists “grew up thinking of wine as elite and beer as low-class,” she said.
But with archaeologists now unearthing breweries in Cyprus and Archival Brewing, a brewery in Belmont, Michigan, focusing on historical recreations such as 19th-century Mexican lagers, both academia and the brewing industry appear to have expunged long-standing favoritism.
Ancient beer would have had less alcohol content than ours and would have been served warm. Women typically brewed it, Dr. Hopwood said.
“We see evidence of this all over the world,” she said, including in Viking and Inca cultures. “They would have learned from their mother and been taught by her mother.”
Due to work and family constraints, it took Mr. McDonnell more than three years to implement his “stroke” idea. First, he consulted the Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical recipe text from 1500 BC. One recipe calls for “fierce-looking lion's fat” to treat male baldness, for example, while another suggests a mixture of salt, butterfat, and sweets. Beer and honey “poured on the buttocks” of a woman suffering from gynecological pain.
Mr. McDonnell eventually found about 75 beer recipes and organized the ingredients in a spreadsheet. In the end, he chose eight of the most frequently mentioned: desert dates, Yemeni seedr honey, sycamore figs, Israeli golden raisins, thorny juniper berries, carob berries, black cumin, and frankincense.
Sycamore figs were especially difficult to find. Mr. McDonnell apparently considered using a close plant relative, the black mission fig.
But luckily his friend, Marika Dalley Snider, an architectural historian at the University of Memphis, was working on a digital reconstruction of the Egyptian Temple of Karnak at the time. It turned out that the family of an archaeological director in Luxor had been caring for a sycamore fig grove for generations.
“We just celebrated,” Mr. McDonnell said.
Purple Egyptian wheat and emmer wheat were chosen as base grains. Then he turned to the yeast. Like Mr Blackley, Mr McDonnell wanted to use ancient breeds rather than common commercial varieties.
Here he was lucky again. In 2015, an Israeli team led by Itai Gutman, a veteran brewer living in Europe, extracted yeast from an amphora discovered in Israel that was most likely used for brewing by the Philistines around 850 B.C. It's high.
Yeast has an amazing ability to remain dormant for unusually long periods of time. The billions of cells in the dormant colony “are still talking to each other,” Gutman said. “They still have all the chemical signals between them. And they just wait. They said, ‘This is not a good time to breed.’”
Mr. Gutman is the founder of Primer's Yeast, a company that sells ancient microbial strains. He argues that the difference between ancient yeast and the yeast found on supermarket shelves is like the difference between a wolf and a golden retriever. While commercial yeasts produce a more predictable flavor profile, wild yeasts have come to be associated with what are now called “off-flavors.”
“What they did was remove a lot of the byproducts,” Gutman said. Traditional European breweries, such as those run by Belgian monks following centuries-old methods, retain the characteristics of fruity yeast in the form of untamed lupine, he said.
This was exactly what Mr. McDonnell wanted to know. “This was the most important part of the process,” he said, referring to Mr. Gutman’s yeast. “To me, this would have been another fun beer I made that wouldn’t be worth noting if it didn’t contain yeast.”
Some in the industry are skeptical that ancient yeast is a game changer. Beer expert Mr. “Modern science has taken nothing away from anyone,” Witte said. Modern microbiology allows brewers to use “pure cultures of a single yeast species,” he said. “This gives brewers more control over their finished beer than at any time in history.”
But Mr. McDonell is pleased with his historic blend, which starts off sour and then becomes more complex, reaching a rich, refreshing, cider-like quality. Like its color, its taste is reminiscent of apricot. Carbonation is low, as befits its history.
Mr McDonell said he was often asked what the beer was called. He said he didn't plan on selling his suds, so branding wasn't a big consideration. But the question came up often enough that Mr. McDonell settled on “Sinai Sour,” a name that reflects both the beer's flavor profile and its distant origins near the desert peninsula where ancient Egyptians mined turquoise.