Calagione Sam - Ancient Brews: Rediscovered and Re-Created

This volume is intended as a general information resource for readers interested in the history and re-creation of ancient beverages, along with meals that might have accompanied them. Neither the publisher nor the author can guarantee that every reader will be able to re-create any particular beverage or meal from the instructions given or that every reader will be able to drink any re-created beverage without any adverse effects. As of press time, the URLs displayed in this book link or refer to existing websites. The publisher is not responsible for, and should not be deemed to endorse or recommend, any website other than its own or any content available on the internet (including, without limitation, any website, blog page, or information page) that is not created by W. W. Norton. The author, similarly, is not responsible for third-party material.

For Homo imbibens, today and in the past

Theres the story, then theres the real story, then
theres the story of how the story came to be told.
Then theres what you leave out of the story.
Which is part of the story too.

MARGARET ATWOOD, MaddAddam

CONTENTS

For mood-enhancing atmospherics and more meal suggestions, go to: http://www.penn.museum/mcgovern/ancientbrews/.

Sam Calagione (right) and Dr. Pat adding salivated Peruvian red corn to the kettle at the Rehoboth Beach brewpub, on their way to re-creating Chicha. (Photo courtesy of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery.)

Sam Calagione and Dr. Pat traveling Back to the Future. (Cartoon courtesy of Tony Kentuck, Brookvale NSW, Australia.)

Our Stone Age ancestors gathered around the watering hole. (Cartoon courtesy of Tony Kentuck, Brookvale NSW, Australia.)

Original bottle label for Midas Touch. (Photo courtesy of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery.)

Bottle label for Chateau Jiahu. (Photo courtesy of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery.)

Bottle label for Ta Henket. (Photo courtesy of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery.)

Bottle label for Etrusca. (Photo courtesy of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery.)

Bottle label for Kvasir. (Photo courtesy of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery.)

Bottle label for Theobroma. (Photo courtesy of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery.)

Sam, Clark Erickson, and Dr. Pat salivating red Peruvian corn, in advance of re-creating Chicha. (Photo courtesy of Ryan Collerd.)

An ancient Aztec pulque party. (After Codex Magliabechiano.)

Sam Calagione

I met Dr. Pat McGovern at a beer festival in 1999, on his home turf of the University of Pennsylvanias museum. We were introduced to each other over pints of beer by the British writer Michael Jacksonthe patriarch of the modern beer journalism world. When we first started working together on Midas Touch, he came to our brew pub early in the morning to make the first starter batch. We had our coffee, we chatted, and we started questioning where the honey should come from for the batch. Should it come from Turkey or Italy? And then, without asking, Dr. Pat walked behind the bar and at 9:00 in the morning he filled up his coffee cup with our Chicory Stout. At that moment, listening to him passionately talk about which honey they wouldve used historically and arguing back about which honey would contribute the most nuanced and delectable aromas to the beer, I realized, this is going to be a fun journey with this guy. He knows his shit but hes also not afraid to have a breakfast beer. And we have been great friends ever since. I think the reason that we hit it off so well is that our perspectives and personalities are more complimentary than they are overlapping. Dr. Pat sums up this reality very well when he says that his focus is on the past and mine is on the present.

Even though our daily work at Dogfish Head is on the present, and indeed the future, of craft brewing, looking to the past with Dr. Pat has proven personally and professionally rewarding to me. I think my invaluable and inventive colleagues at Dogfish Head, like Mark Safarik, Leader of the Dogfish Head Brewing Team, and Chef Kevin Downing, as well as Doug Griffith of Extreme Brewing, all of whom have had the chance to work with Dr. Pat, would say the same thing. And I believe any homebrewer, commercial brewer, or beer lover can find as much or more opportunity for creative inspiration by looking backwards to how our ancestors approached producing and consuming fermented beverages as by relying on their own forward-looking creativity.

I began homebrewing one month after graduating from college, and months after producing my first batch I began writing a business plan to open my own brewery. As a 24-year-old kid, I knew Id be starting my brewery very small. And as an English major, my experience was limited to bartending and waiting tables, so I knew I needed a unique and well-differentiated business model to stand out against the more established first-generation craft brewersthen called microbrewersthat had popped up across America throughout the 80s. This was the early 90s, the dawn of the Internet era, but I did my research the old-fashioned way at the New York City Public Library. I researched the beginning phases of the American locavore food movements, studying everyone from Alice Waters at Chez Panisse to James Beard, the great East Coast local food evangelist.

In researching the contemporary locavore movements in America, I also stumbled upon the concept of the Reinheitsgebot, a German beer purity lawwhich, ironically, is celebrating its 500th anniversary as I write thisthat declared only water, barley, and hops could be used in the production of beer (later, when the role of yeast was better understood, the rules were revised to include it). When I read that, I decided that it would be my call to arms and Dogfish Heads great source of differentiation: we would be the first brewery committed to brewing the majority of its beer outside of the Reinheitsgebot conventions, using culinary ingredients from around the world. In 1995, our initial beers were a Chicory Stout and Raison DEtre, made with raisins and beet sugars. Then we branched out with some beers I like to think of as historical, such as an Ethiopian Tej, made with honey and tree leaves, and a medieval British Braggot, made by fermenting honey and barley together. Originally, people thought that Dogfish Head was being disrespectful to brewing traditions by making beers with culinary ingredients instead of just yeast, hops, and barley. Which is why it was so fortuitous that I got to meet Dr. Pat. As it turns outand as youll read in this bookthe idea behind that 500-year-old law is actually a comparatively modern limitation.

Once Dr. Pat and I began doing work together, brewing these, as we call them, liquid time capsules and bringing these traditions back to life; I could finally hold my head up high. History and science were on my side to prove that the Reinheitsgebot is nothing more than a relatively recent attempt at censorship. Through my work with Dr. Pat, Ive learned that so many different civilizations, in so many different parts of this world, have long made beers limited only by their creativity and the range of natural ingredients that grew in the lands that they called home. By using science and the physical remains of these ancient brews when creating our recipes, Dr. Pat brought a much higher level of authenticity to a process that I had already begun by making my own historic beers or making beers with culinary ingredients that had no historic touch to them and just came from my imagination.