How to make 5,000 year old beer I Pleasant Vices episode 3 

For everyone looking for the recipe, you can find out the ingredients and more about the vessel here: blog.britishmuseum.org/a-sip-of-history-ancient-egyptian-beer/

The British Museum should negotiate with a brewer to make and bottle these! The Museum's financial needs would be satisfied and then some!

Brewing starts at 5:33 Tasting starts at 9:29

The woman on the right looks like her sweater textures didn't load in LOL

Dogfish Head Brewery in Delaware has a line of ancient beers that are interesting and very tasty. They teamed up with a biomolecular archaeologist to determine ingredients used in ancient recipes from around the world. Theoborma is by far my favorite and it was made by analyzing pottery fragments found in Honduras.

I suspect rather than just throwing the hot mash and the cold mash together they would add the hot mash to the cold mash slowly, bit by bit, to bring the temperature up slowly. This is effectively what modern brewers do, and it makes the sacharification process much more efficient.

As a home Brewer I love how simple this recipe is. Can't wait to try it out!

I drank with the Pharaohs - indeed I have - and I must say, these Egyptian beer reconstructions are pretty bang on!

Hi all, thank you all so much for viewing our video and sharing it with us. we had a blast. Yes, we would love to share a recipe with you. we have one written out and we WILL be putting a link up to it, watch this space!

After years of homebrewing with commercial yeast I got a Kveik (centuries old re-used mixture of yeast from Norway) to ferment with. I used the raw ale method of a maximum temperature of 75 degrees Celsius. The Kveik ferments in less then 36 hours at 30-39 C. The taste of this beer is very good at this stage. Even without carbonation. This Kveik can be dried for storage and used over and over again. In the past when someone had one that turned sour they would get some from their neighbours to start over. The taste of these beers is easier to get used to because there is no or almost no hops involved.

The British Museum needs to make an ancient boardgames and beer day. 😍

watching this while drinking a nice glass of home brew see making Egyptian brew as a interesting winter project, thank you

A small brewery near San Francisco made a batch of beer by the Sumerian recipe awhile back. I've always regretted not being there for it. But I did get to try homemade Eritrean beer at one point, and it was probably very similar to this. They used different flavors, but it was also made from a multigrain mash. I'm more familiar with the Sumerian style, but from the description I figured their beer could have been invented by accident during one unusually rainy summer. It's made from cakes, themselves made from malted barley. So suppose it's normally dry in the summer and one night you forget to put the cover back onto the pot where you store your barley. Normally that's not a big deal in the summer; it's dry. But then it rains. Maybe you don't notice for a few days, and by the time you do the barley has sprouted. "[Sumerian swear word]!" you say. But you can't let it go to waste, so you dry it out over a fire so it becomes hard enough to grind, and make your barley cakes as usual. But what happens when you set them out to cool? It rains again? Now your cakes are soaked. At a loss for what else to do with them, you toss them into a pot, that maybe has more water in the bottom. A few days later: Beer. Turns out to be not so bad. Not great, but not bad. Plus, being slightly alcoholic, you find you don't feel so terrible about the wasted food anymore. But you want it to taste better, so you work on it until you find a more complete method that results in something more palatable. A complicated hypothesis, but I always thought it a bit odd that they started with cakes they'd have to bake first, rather than the malted barley directly.

Whiskey is medicinal; wine is aphrodisiac; beer is a food!!

When shall we three meet again? When the beer is done, of course!

This was giving me Hocus Pocus vibes when they were mixing the ingredients. So cool.

Thank you for posting this! I don't even like beer, but I am so keen on making something like this. So interesting - a real way of connecting with past cultures.

"In heaven there is no beer. That's why we drink it here." - Frankie Yankovic

Really enjoyed this episode! And I'll join the other commenters in asking for the recipe! :) Also, more information about the terra cotta vessel please. Would love to try making this.

I seek ancient sumerian beer.

Excellent episode, I've brewed regular modern beer twice now, and I think it might be time to challenge myself with something new.

What an excellent job of translating archæological research into an ancient practice. What must be clearly understood by a contemporary viewer is that references such as “enzymes,” “starch,” “sugar,” and “yeast” have no referents to those who brewed using these methods. The people making this “BC. beer” were operating from methods deduced experientially.

“What are you doing @quarantine?” Me: Drinking and Brewing Ancient Egypt’s BEER 𓃟𓃟𓃟

Golf clap with the greatest respect! Very well played! Super excited to play with this method. Thank you.

What an excellent video! It left me better informed and thirstier. Well done to all concerned.

Recipe? Not seeing it on Tasha's blog or on the BM's blog. I'd love to try making this at home, although I doubt I could find a handy terracotta fermenting pot. :D

I'm loving this series!

Nice upload. I would have been interested to know a bit more about the brewer's opinion and technical insight.

"Peasant Vices"? Lol. Those are my favorites!

Good stuff, as a homebrewer I love the connection with 5k ago

Love these ladies!! More like this pls!

Thank you very much for this, I am a fan of ancient beers and brewing methods, mostly because I don't like hops at all. The thought of what the spice packet added to the taste is tantalizing!! I'm glad to know that some of the beer was brewed in steel, as that is much easier to locate than a terracotta amphora LOL. I may also just use glass, which I already have. This certainly inspiring!!

truly thank you. That was a great joy to watch. I know I want to try it for myself.

i think that the tricky part getting the terracotta , soon do my own beer

I would love to try it!! You guys are so lucky to actually taste it!

It's interesting to see the genius of ancients. I feel we often underestimate their knowledge and ability.

Wait a minute, didn't Egyptians had wells, so they don't have to drink from the Nile? Didn't one of hieroglyphs described shaduf - wooden crane used to draw water from a well? Am I wrong here? Also in myth of The Eye of Re, Thoth used wine or red colored beer to deceive angry goddess of Sekhmet who acquire a taste for human blood? I heard both versions - which one is true ? Other than that, this is cool video - Ancient Egypt and beer are one of my favorite things and I wonder; can you buy beer made in this style ?

Please tell me the British Museum sells this stuff! Worth noting our modern grains are very different from Ancient Egyptian grains - modern varieties are much bigger and more packed with calories. Ancient grains would've been closer to their wild ancestors. Possibly that's why there was a lot more alcohol.

I made it the same but i made all the mash hot let it cool down. I then added yeast rose water dates and pomegranate. My take on it anyway it was delicious. I got 14% alcoholic in it and it keap 2 weeks in refrigerator.

The beer made by the Ancient Egyptians was also much lower in alcohol. Modern yeasts were developed to make much stronger beer.

Great panel - very interesting.

I chased down your info, but never actually saw a recipe. Bits and pieces that left out whatever you girls did. Not enough info to duplicate...my attempt is fermenting. I hope it wasn't a lot of money wasted. Thanks for the inspiration. I have learned a lot more about making beer than I knew before, and I doubt I would have looked it up without your video.

I want to hear Susan Boyle sing.

Hmm, I wonder if the higher than expected ABV is a result of the modern ingredients? Modern dates, I would expect, are holding more sugar capacity than ancient varieties? Never mind grains that likely looked half-again smaller and held less nutrient content. I wonder too at the strain of yeast from the ancient period. Would it have been as efficient at processing sugars?

What fun.

5:04 “the crux of pleasant vices” nice.

Cheers!

I'd love to try some of this!

The beers seem to be delicious.

what ever happened to the recipe that was going to be shared?? almost 3 years later and I'm still here!

really enjoyed this

Loved this.

Three Woman arond a Kettle: witsches 😏 Good job Ladys! Prost from Frankfurt Germany 🍻

Any ideas why this method has such a high efficiency? You mention it a couple of times but never go into the details.

Where did the majority of the yeast come from? Was it the grain or the dates? As for the ABV, do you think that the ancient Egyptians would have waterd down their beer just enough to keep it sterile without being too intoxicating?

The carbonation seems anachronistic, considering they wouldn't have had the type of glassware necessary to keep those pressures. It's only very recently that we've been able to store carbonated drinks.

This video was great!

Step 1: Make beer Step 2: Wait 5,000 years

Does anyone know how they pre-inoculated the terracotta vessel with the yeast?

But how exactly did they serve the beer? Did they use like a dipper and dip it into your cup?

Thanks for sharing!

Great, now I'm a fan of two Susan Boyles.

I knew that beer was invent in Egypt and i knew it was common in English medieval life but i did not know it was given to all the workers so thank you for correcting history

Thank you for the interesting video. Is there much difference to mesopotamian beer?

Very cool!

The womans shirt on the right makes it look like her shirt texture hasn't fully loaded.

I thought the ancient Egyptian beer was a thick liquid food, not like modern day beer

It is utterly disappointing that I can not now go out to pick up a 6-pack of British Museum Ancient Beer Iterations #1 through #3.

Is this wild-fermented? No 'yeast' added?

interesting...it's been my experience that the more people add descriptors to something they taste it's because they are searching for a reason to like the product. I'm not suggesting the process is wrong (super cool in fact). I'm suggesting their recipe might have got them in trouble in ancient Egypt lol.

So how many takes did you do of the tasting? I'll bet the video got better and better with successive takes! ;->

Enjoyed!!!

It's been four years but I'll ask again - any chance we can see that recipe sheet please?

did ya find these recipes when you took the rest of Egyptian culture back home to your island?

was it a 1:1 ratio of cold mash to hot mash? and how did you know it was done fermenting?

What good is an eternal afterlife without beer

You had me at "This whole episode is about alcohol"......and how exactly do I become a Drinks Researcher please......

5::33 brewing

11:00 They misspelled "iteration."

Tried to recreate this figuring out the quantities of the various ingredients, and failed miserably. Is there the exact recipe somewhere on the internet? I’d like to do this properly.

Sumerians invented the first beer 🍺 cheers

The residue would make a good granola base

Why did they have no mention of sanitation?

Can hops be added to this brew or do hops HAVE to be boiled?

Now, my question is how do you make the ceramic pot rofl will there be a tutorial

I'm confused, you say they couldn't drink the water but the beer, which is low in alcohol content is made from water and malt with hops.

😂I thought the middle girl was wearing one of those food caps

Hello, is there gonna be an item on the yeast you used for the beer? There's nothing in the blog, video or in the recipe about it

This was a cool one! I've always wondered about stuff like this. Did you guys not use rye so you wouldn't be hallucinating and whatnot? I dunno how long it takes ergot to form up but if that process is that efficient it'd probably do it pretty fast.

It would take 5000 years to made 5000 year old beer.

7:07 vindaloo for dinner last night

Did I miss the ingredient list?

Living prudently, consuming prudently, fundamental beer is NOT a vice. It's an optimal beverage for doing well in life, including while working, consumed in prudent moderation.

You have to drink this when you watch a documentary about eygpt.

Mmmmm beer :)

It takes 5 minutes into the video for three British women to figure out that people like things to taste good.

This makes my thirsty. xD

I was looking down when they said "Susan Boyle," lol NOT the Susan Boyle I was expecting to see!

why am i watching this i just want to pass a course in uni

What temperature was the second mash heated to?