Beer from the past: ancient Sumerian beer made a brief reappearance in 1988, thanks to the Anchor Brewing Co

Modern Brewery Age, March 31, 2003 by Gregg Glaser

Which came first? Beer or bread? A fascination with this question led to the recreation of a 2,700-year-old Sumerian beer, a project undertaken by Fritz Maytag, owner of San Francisco's Anchor Brewing, and Dr. Solomon Katz, a bioanthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archeology and Anthropology.

Maytag had read a story in Expeditions, UPenn's museum publication, of the beer vs. bread debate first posed in the 1950s. Robert Braidwood of the University of Chicago had written that there was a cause-effect relationship between bread malting and the domestication of cereal grains. Jonathan D. Sauer, a botanist from the University of Wisconsin, countered by suggesting that the first uses of domesticated cereals may have been for beer rather than bread. Braidwood decided to hold a symposium on the subject for the journal American Anthropologist titled, "Did man once live by beer alone?"

Intrigued by the debate, Maytag invited Katz to visit and discuss the issue. What Katz didn't know at the time was that Maytag also had in mind the idea of reviving an ancient beer. He was thinking ahead for a beer that would celebrate the tenth anniversary of Anchor's new brew-house and the 1988 meeting of the Association of Brewers.

As it turns out, in 1987 Katz was lecturing in California at a wine and health symposium run by the Mondavi wine company. "My son was with me," said Katz, "and I remembered the several invitations from Anchor. I thought this would be fun and also something my son would enjoy."

At the brewery, Katz said he and his son were given the red carpet treatment. "Fritz and I hit it off immediately, and we began talking about the history and origins of beer and bread. I had earlier proposed that beer had almost certainly preceded bread, but it was like the chicken and egg debate -- in order to make ancient beer, you almost certainly had to make some bread with it?"'

Maytag and Katz began corresponding on the topic, faxes flying between San Francisco and Philadelphia, with Maytag wanting to support Katz's research on beer and the origins of brewing. "At the time I had put forward the idea that Mesopotamian beer was older than Egyptian beer, something I'm not so sure of today," remembered Katz. "I knew that beer malting played an important role in Sumerian society and that Mesopotamia was close to the region of the earliest cereal domestication."

A key element in deciding on this region and time was an ancient text from Sumeria dated about 1800 BC and translated in 1964 by Miguel Civil of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. This text, from stone tablets found at Nippur, Suppar and Larsa, was known as the "Hymn to Ninkasi." The text sings the praises of the Ninkasi, a minor goddess in the Sumerian pantheon, whose name translates as "you who fill my mouth so full." "This hymn," said Katz, "was basically a recipe for brewing beer. Fritz and I both gleaned as much information as we could based on the hymn."

The more Maytag and Katz studied the recipe, however, the more they didn't think it would successfully brew beer. "Certain aspects of the recipe seemed wrong," said Katz, "based on what we know of modern brewing techniques. So we located Miguel Civil and had him re-translate a portion of the text." As it turns out, Civil had translated the Ninkasi text at the beginning of his career, and now, as the world authority on Sumerian cuneiform writing, he had greatly perfected his translation techniques. Sure enough, his re-translation turned up changes that fit perfectly with the brewing process problems with which Maytag and Katz had been concerned. "Finally," said Katz, "we could successfully recreate the Sumerian beer."

Back in San Francisco, the Anchor brewers used a honey and barley flour mixture to make a bread called "bappir" in the Ninkasi text. They guessed that the Sumerians may have added dates to the bappir in order to sweeten and flavor it, but they decided to add the dates only to the final mixture of the bread when it was being put into the mashing vat. The combination of unmalted, malted and roasted barley for the flour didn't dry out, however, so it was baked a second time, much like present-day Italian biscotti.

The next step was to add one-third bappir and two-thirds barley malt in the mashing vessel. After the boil, they allowed the unfermented beer to cool naturally and they fermented it with a standard brewing yeast.

The Ninkasi text didn't specify a bittering or preservative for the beer, such as hops offers modern brewers, so the beer was flash-pasteurized to assure preservation. The beer finished its fermentation with just over four percent alcohol by volume.

"I was worried if we could actually serve this to people," remembered Katz. "I couldn't be there the night it was first served, but everyone enjoyed it and nobody got sick, so that's all good."

The Sumerian Ninkasi beer debuted, as Maytag had planned, at the brewers' association meeting. It was consumed in proper Sumerian fashion, sipped from large jugs using long drinking straws fashioned to resemble the gold and lapis-lazuli straws found in the mid-third millennium tomb of Lady Pu-abi at Ur. The beer had a dry flavor, not at all bitter, and tasted similar to a hard apple cider with a pronounced fragrance of dates. Unfortunately, Ninkasi beer has not been brewed again.