He Brewed Egyptian Beer In His Backyard Using Nearly 3,000-Year-Old Yeast And An Ancient Recipe From 3,500 Years Ago
Drawing from ancient beer-brewing techniques and ingredients, a man from Utah was able to bring flavors of the past to the modern palate.
He recreated a beverage that once flowed freely in the courts of pharaohs and was consumed daily by average ancient Egyptians.
The beer he made was from yeast that was almost 3,000 years old. The recipe for it was from a 3,500-year-old Egyptian papyrus.
The man who created the brew is Dylan McDonnell, a homebrewer and an operations manager at a nonprofit organization.
He has a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies and lives in Millcreek, Utah. So, how did McDonnell resurrect the drink in the first place?
Well, during the pandemic, he heard about a man who baked sourdough with a yeast strain that was 4,500-years-old.
He wondered if he could do something similar with beer. McDonnell researched the phenomenon for three years.
He started by reading the Ebers Papyrus, which was an Egyptian text from around 1550 B.C.E. It contained hundreds of recipes that promised to treat or cure various ailments, such as crocodile bites and male baldness.
He noted that there were approximately 75 recipes involving beer. Then, he was able to narrow down the most common ingredients.
hiddenhallow – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only
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There were eight items, including Egyptian balsam fruit, Yemeni Sidr honey, Israeli golden raisins, black cumin, sycamore figs, juniper berries, carob fruit, and frankincense.
With the help of a friend conducting research in Egypt, McDonnell obtained the rare sycamore figs from a 1,400-year-old grove. For the base grains, he used purple Egyptian barley and emmer wheat.
He also reached out to a German company called Primer’s Yeast for a strain of ancient yeast. The yeast strain he received had been extracted from a piece of pottery in Israel. It dates back to 850 B.C.E. and was likely used by the Philistines to make beer.
Once McDonnell gathered all the necessary ingredients, he began brewing the beer in his backyard, using a three-vessel system.
He managed to produce about 10 gallons of beer for about $1,000, which was five times more expensive than a regular batch of home-brewed beer.
The beer he created tasted similar to gose, a German-style beverage with a slightly salty, tart flavor. It is five percent alcohol by volume and has notes of apricot. It also has a floral aftertaste.
The drink’s flavor resembles mead or cider more closely than actual beer because there aren’t any hops in it. Hops are green flowers shaped like pinecones, and they are what give beer its bitterness.
McDonnell does not plan to sell his brew, but he is open to hosting private tastings. He ended up naming it “Sinai Sour,” a reference to the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. His next project will be a beer with 25 percent alcohol by volume.
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