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Israeli team recreates 2,000 year-old beer recipe
(22 May 2019) LEADIN
Ever wondered what beer tasted like 2000 years ago? Well now you can find out.
Researchers have extracted yeast from archaeological finds, and a craft brewer has made modern day beer from it.
STORYLINE
These might look like typical pots from any archaeological dig. But in fact they carry clues to the taste of ancient beverages.
Israeli researchers raised a glass in Jerusalem to celebrate a long-brewing project of making beer and mead using yeasts extracted from ancient clay vessels - some over 5,000 years old.
Archaeologists and microbiologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority and four Israeli universities teamed up to study yeast colonies found in microscopic pores in pottery fragments found at archaeological sites spanning from 3000 BC to the 4th century BC.
The scientists say the brews made from resurrected yeasts are an important step in experimental archaeology, a field that seeks to reconstruct the past and better understand the flavour of the ancient world.
Well there are several things that are very important, explains Aren Maeir from the Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology, at Bar-Ilan University.
One is the very fact that we can identify the specific microorganisms that were used in the production of a food - and in this case beer - and the very fact that these microorganisms survived so long, which nobody believed that possible, he says.
Second of all, it opens up a whole new field of the possibility that perhaps other microorganisms survived as well and you can identify foods such as cheese, wine, pickles, you know all kinds of other things that are there and then we can understand more about the behaviour of past cultures and then also, this opens up another thing which is fantastic, I'm actually tasting, tasting the past which is something that we really don't have the ability.
Hebrew University microbiologist Michael Klutstein explains:
What we discovered was that the yeast can actually survive for a very, very long time without food - a parallel phenomenon to what was discovered many years ago in bacteria... Today we are able to salvage all these living organisms that live inside these nanopores, and to revive them and study their properties.
The yeast samples came from nearly two dozen ceramic vessels gleaned in excavations around the country.
While other researchers of ancient beers have concocted drinks based on ancient recipes and residue analysis of ceramics, the Israeli scientists say it's the first time fermented drinks have been made from revived ancient yeasts.
By brewing with these ancient strains, they have recaptured the microorganisms responsible for producing the flavour of beer consumed by people in antiquity.
For this initial experiment, the team paired up with a Jerusalem craft brewer to make a basic modern style ale using yeast extracted from the pots (differing from its ancient Levantine forebears in its use of hops).
The mead was made using yeast extracted from a vessel found in the ruins of a palace near Jerusalem that contained honey wine roughly 2,400 years ago.
We tried to recreate some of the old flavours that people in this area were consuming hundreds and thousands of years ago, says Shmuel Naky, a craft brewer from the Jerusalem Beer Centre, Biratenu, who helped produce the beer and mead.
Yeasts, he adds, have a very crucial impact on flavour.
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