When someone points out a wine that has been aged for 50 years, I’m impressed. So when I heard that Lakefront Brewery recreated a 2,500-year-old beer, my mind temporarily exploded.
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Professor Bettina Arnold, an anthropologist and archaeologist, discovered an ancient cauldron that contained traces of an alcoholic brew. Proving that the people of the Iron Age knew how to send people off, the cauldron was found in a burial plot in what is now Germany.
Professor Arnold decided to team up with Lakefront Brewery to recreate the 2,500-year-old beer based on what was left in the cauldron. The revamped recipe contains just five ingredients: honey, mint, barley, yeast, and meadowsweet.
#SpoonFact: Meadowsweet is a preservative as well as a source of bitterness and aroma in beer, similar to hops, which is used in most beer.
The revived brew took just seven hours to make, and two weeks to ferment. Who knew bringing back a 2,500-year-old recipe could be done so quickly?
NPR journalist Bonnie North got to try the beer, explaining that “the result was smooth and pleasant… with a minty, herbal tinge to it… [and] an alcoholic kick.”
Although the Lakefront Brewery team had fun with the experiment, they don’t expect the 2,500-year-old beer to hit the shelves. They chalk it up to being a cool experience, but not something that people might actually want to buy.
Professor Arnold is hopeful that this is the first of many brew revivals. UWM is already creating a course on the process of fermentation and the culture surrounding it. As an extension of that, Professor Arnold wants to eventually design a course where students would be recreating brews themselves based on other scientific findings.
Raise your modern day Natty Light to that, because it’s cool AF.