The Beer Wars and Dogfish

DR. PAT McGOVERN, a biomolecular archeologist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology' and Anthropology, in Philadelphia, is standing before some large and inscrutable scientific equipment on the museum's fifth floor as he explains his process to me. "We always start with infrared spectrometry," he says- "That gives us an idea of what organic materials are preserved." From there, it's on to tandem liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry, sometimes coupled with ion cyclotron resonance, and solid-phase micro-extraction gas chromatography-mass spectrometry.




The end result? A beer recipe.




Starting with a few porous clay shards or tiny bits of resin-like residue from a bronze cup, McGovern is
able to determine what some ancient Norseman or Etruscan or Shang dynast was drinking as he kicked back thousands of years ago. From a cardboard box, McGovern pulls out several plastic bags containing ancient pottery shards from China. It was from these that he identified the world's oldest known fermented beverage, dating to about 7000 B.C.—a few centuries after humans began transitioning from hunter-gatherers to farmers.




From another box, he pulls out shards and residues collected from four Scandinavian settlements, dating to between noo B,c. and 100 A.D. All of them contained traces of an essentially identical beverage, suggesting a drink— McGovern dubbed it "Nordic grog"—that was popular across Scandinavia for more than a millennium.




Details will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Danish Journal of Anthropology. But if your curiosity is more immediate and tends toward the gustatory, head to a nearby wine-and-beer store and request
a bottle of the most recent Ancient Ale from Dogfish Head. The Delaware-based brewery launched its Ancient Ale Series in 1997, and in 1999 collaborated with McGovern to make the Midas Touch




Why did complex, deeply layered beverages get siloed into restrictive categories—mead from honey, wine from grapes, beer from grain—which then became increasingly homogenized over lime? How did we get from Nordic grog to Bud Light?




Calagione heaps some of the blame on restrictions imposed by Bavarian rulers in 1516. which would later become known as the beer-purity law. "They mandated that beer could only be made with water, barley, and hops," he says and McGovern adds, "Humans had been brewing these exotic hybrid beers for 10,000 years, yet now roughly 99 percent of the beer commercially made around the world references a 500-year-old tradition. It's a war the Germans have pretty much won."





He seems that there is a natural progression toward specialization, as beer makers started producing on a larger scale. "They get a successful product using a limited range of ingredients that  people like
and understand," he says, "and then they flood the market with it."


Kvasir is not what anyone would consider a streamlined product. It's a hybrid of beer, fruit wine, and mead, flavored with (among other ingredients) yarrow, lingonberries, cranberries, bog myrtle, and birch syrup. "The ingredient I'm most excited about is the lingonberries," Calagione says. I had thought Kvasir would have a boggy, primeval flavor, but instead it tasted quite modern: bright and tart, with an extremely dry finish.


Calagione won't discuss Dogfish Head's next Ancient Ale, other than to say, "It won't even be defined as a beer. "
== pg 47 The Atlantic Monthly.


My nephew, the ex-chemist, is a brewmeister.