There are some seriously crazy craft beers out there incorporating everything from frozen pizza to squid ink, but Utah homebrewer Dylan McDonnell has attempted the ultimate beer experiment by recreating an ancient Egyptian recipe using real ancient yeast.
McDonnell, who also holds a master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies, was inspired by the habit of baking at home during the pandemic. He remembers seeing video game designer Seamus Blackley share a video on social media of him baking bread with 4,500-year-old Egyptian yeast. As an aspiring homebrewer, McDonnell wondered if he could replicate the concept with beer.
The process ultimately took more than three years, as McDonnell conducted meticulous research to create “the closest thing to what Ramses the Great would have drunk between battles with the Hittites,” according to The New York Times. McDonnell began by studying the Ebers Papyrus, an ancient Egyptian medical text that contains recipes from 1500 B.C. He decided to use the eight ingredients most frequently mentioned in 75 beer recipes. These included dessert dates, Yemeni sidr honey, sycamore figs, Israeli golden raisins, thorny juniper berries, carob kernels, black cumin, and frankincense, a combination that is still considered pretty novel in today’s crazy craft beer world. He chose Egyptian purple barley and emmer wheat as his base grains. Finding the ingredients proved difficult, but McDonnell got some good luck along the way. One of my friends, who is also an architectural historian, helped me acquire the most difficult to find plane tree.
To track down the ancient yeast strains, McDonnell turned to Primers Yeast, a German company that extracts and preserves ancient yeasts. He selected a batch taken from an amphora found in Israel that was likely used for brewing around 850 BCE.
“That was definitely the most important part of the process,” he told The New York Times. “To me, without the yeast, this would have just been one of those interesting beers I made, nothing noteworthy.”
The result is a 5 percent alcohol beer that McDonnell says is similar to a sour German-style gose. He called it Sinai Sour, after the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. He has no plans to sell the beer, but is open to private tastings.
