Just discovered: A 2,500-year-old recipe for Celtic beer [Archeology]

An archeobotanist has discovered how they made beer in 500 BC. With a ditch inside the back yard, some barley seeds, and some henbane, you can even drink up like the ancient Celts.

Like me, a lot of you missed Oktoberfest this year, and every other year, for the last two and a half thousand years. We’ve plenty of drinking to make up for. Fortunately, archeobotanist Hans-Peter Stika, of the University of Hohenheim has been doing research that lets us understand how to start out. Stika has been spending time at ancient Celtic sites, working out how the local groups made their beer.

The first step to drinking like the Celts is to dig an oblong ditch. Pour in water and barley, and leave them there until the barley sprouts. After they have, they must be dried. Light a hearth at each end of the ditch and keep it going until the barley is dried. This may darken the beer and give it a smokey flavor. It would also dry the grains slowly enough that they’ll secrete something called lactic acid. Like other acids, it tastes sour. Sourness and smoke; delicious. Many of the grains will char. Leave those within the ditch for future archeobotanists to uncover. Mash up the grains to maximize the volume of sugar that the yeast, which gets added later, has to feed on.

Most beers are now flavored with hops, the flowers from the hop plant, but the first use of them wasn’t documented until 800 AD, well after the time frame we’re staring at. Before that, beer was flavored with a distinct mix of plants referred to as gruit. Gruit contains yarrow, carrot seeds, mugwort, and henbane – otherwise called stinking nightshade. The last is related to increase the intoxicating properties of alcohol, that’s the simplest reason was something with that combination of names can be added to food. To simply be safe – don’t add that. Just imagine what this may taste like. Boil these ingredients with the mashed grains, either towards the commencing to flavor the beer. Separate out the lumpiest bits of grain. You don’t need them anymore.

Next comes the heating and the yeasts. The yeasts must be alive to make alcohol, so the beer would need to have been heated slowly. It’s possible this was done by heating stones and dropping them into the aggregate, but more likely that didn’t come until later. Instead, just keep the beer over an overly low fire and add yeast. There’s little need to get brewer’s yeast from a store. The cloudy stuff that accumulates on fruits like grapes, and on nuts, is wild yeast. Dropping some fruits or nuts into the slowly heating mixture, and letting it continue to stay lukewarm for ages should brew up all of the yeast that’s needed. Keeping it somewhere between 50 and 70 degrees fahrenheit. When the yeast is completed, most of it is going to settle to the bottom. Cool the beer and luxuriate in.

Or, at the least try and enjoy. Ancient beer was served room temperature to warm, and typically had an effective bit of the yeast still in it. All that and mugwort, too!

[Via Science News , Gruit Ale , Botanical.com , and Wise Geek ]

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This post is tagged: barley sprouts, doing research, properties of alcohol, spending time, university of hohenheim