JoseB:
Sorry for resurrecting a zombie thread, but I thought I’d share a bit more of my adventures in beer-brewing.
I have become a member of the “hopblossom club” at my office (yes, we have a club dedicated to the appreciation, making and drinking of beer – my office is awesome ^.^). With the help of a semi-professional brewer, tomorrow we are going to carry out an interesting experiment: We intend to brew beer according to a Sumerian recipe thousands and thousands of years old! The recipe (well, more like a list of steps in rather flowery and poetic language) appears in a clay tablet that contains a “hymn to the goddess Ninkasi”.
Of course, there is actually no guarantee that we are going to follow the exact same procedure the Sumerians had! To begin with, we are going to be using modern equipment. Also, the recipe is going to be as exact and as accurate as the assyriologists who translated it in the first place are.
But it should, nonetheless, be an interesting endeavour. The ingredients are kinda “different” (instead of malted barley you use a special kind of barley bread called “bappir”), and to kick-start the fermentation you use date wine (ideally fermented from the natural yeast present on the skin of the fruit; in practice we’ve given it a bit of help in the form of a bit of powdered yeast).
I will keep you informed about the results, and will let you know how the brewing went
Also, I want to thank silenus here for graciously sending me a few of his favourite recipes for me to try
Also, thanks to everybody here for encouraging me and setting me on my path of beer-brewiness!
All the best,
JoseB
Try find the Anchor Steam Sumerian Beer Project. The Anchor Steam page has been taken down and all my searches are just turning up links or references to the page and I can’t find the actual page. Charles “relax, don’t worry, have a homebrew” Papazian was part of the project. I remember reading about it and you should try to find it…
De nada. That beer won Best of Show in Las Vegas a few years ago. Glad to see it works overseas as well.
