This man brews beer using 3,000-year-old yeast and a recipe from ancient Egyptian papyrus

Craft brewers love to experiment. They’ve brewed beer with yeast extracted from wastewater, food waste, and belly button lint (yes, really). They’ve transformed a 1,790-pound pumpkin into a barrel. They’ve made a porter from yeast found in a 220-year-old shipwreck, brewed with hops flown through space, sought the guidance of artificial intelligence, and designed a beer specifically for breast cancer patients.

His latest unusual project? A beer made from yeast that’s about 3,000 years old, with a recipe that comes from a 3,500-year-old Egyptian papyrus.

The man behind this historic brew is Dylan McDonnell, a homebrewer with a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies and nonprofit operations manager who lives in Mill Creek, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City.

During the pandemic, McDonnell heard about a man baking sourdough with a 4,500-year-old strain of yeast, and he wondered: “Could beer have a similar effect?”

The answer is yes, but it took McDonnell three years to reach that conclusion, the report said. The New York Times‘ Alexander Nazarian.

McDonnell began his research by reading the Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian text dating to around 1550 B.C. It contains hundreds of medicinal recipes that promise to cure or treat everything from male baldness to crocodile bites. He zeroed in on about 75 recipes for beer, listing all the ingredients in a spreadsheet.

From there, he broke down the list by the most common ingredients, which turned out to be eight items: Egyptian balsam fruit (desert dates), Yemeni sidr honey, sycamore figs, black cumin, juniper berries, Israeli golden raisins, carob berries, and frankincense. Salt Lake TribuneColby Peterson.

Meet the Utah man who’s brewing ‘3,000-year-old’ beer using ancient pottery yeast

He sourced a rare 1,400-year-old sycamore fig tree with the help of a friend studying in Egypt, and chose Egyptian purple barley and emmer wheat, an ancient grain known in Europe as faro, as his base grains.

For yeast, we contacted Primer’s Yeast, a German company that brings together archaeologists, microbiologists, and other experts to revive ancient yeast strains, and they were able to provide us with a yeast strain that had been taken from Israeli pottery, dating to around 850 BCE, and that was likely used by the Philistines to make beer.

Once McDonnell had everything he needed, he was finally able to start brewing. He used a three-barrel system in his backyard to make about 10 gallons of beer for about $1,000, which McDonnell says is five times the cost of a typical homebrew. Salt Lake TribuneBut the extra cost was worth it for the chance to reconnect with the past.

“It’s amazing,” McDonnell told KTVX’s Jonathan May, “It seems like 3,000 years ago, someone in Egypt was putting those same ingredients in a pot and boiling them and trying to make the same thing.”

In the end, McDonnell created a tart, slightly salty beer similar to a German-style gose (pronounced “go-ze”), with 5 percent alcohol, aromas of apricots and a floral aftertaste. Because it doesn’t contain hops, the pine-cone-like flowers that give beer its bitterness, it tastes more like a mead or cider than a beer.

“It’s a little rustic, maybe a little farmhouse-ish, but still bright and citrusy,” says Chris Detrick, a brewer at Level Crossing Brewing Company in Salt Lake City, who was not involved with McDonnell’s project. Salt Lake Tribune“But the sourness isn’t a tart lactic acid that’s sour after one sip. It’s really refreshing and leaves you wanting another sip afterwards.”

McDonnell has no plans to sell the beer, but is offering to host private tastings, and an improved recipe using more readily available ingredients will eventually be published on the Primers Yeast website.

He hadn’t intended to name his drink, but after being asked repeatedly, he came up with the name “Sinai Sour,” after the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. The New York Times.

And he’s already thinking about his next project: a 25 percent alcohol beer.

“I’m just a guy pursuing my passion,” he says. Salt Lake Tribune.