In their effort to revive an ancient Chinese beer,
researchers employ a mixture of
fermented rice and cultured fungi,
among other ingredients.
At 9 a.m. in Rehoboth, Delaware, the windows of Dogfish Head Brewery, on the town's main drag, are steamed up. Mike Gerhart, a head distiller for Dogfish, has arrived early to stoke the kettles for today's historic brew. Joining him is his boss, Sam Calagione, Dogfish's founder. Down from Philadelphia for the day is Patrick McGovern, an archaeological chemist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum.
Adventures in brewing are not uncommon at Dogfish Head. In the 10 years since he started the brewery, Calagione, 36, and his crew have distinguished themselves in the brewing subculture for whimsy and imagination. They have made ales with beet sugar and raisins, with chicory and St. John's wort. Their Pangaea ale used ingredients from all seven continents. Five years ago, Calagione and McGovern collaborated on Midas Touch, a beverage informed by the 2,700-year-old remains of a funerary feast discovered in central Turkey and believed to have been that of King Mita, the historical figure behind the Midas legend.
This morning they are pushing further into the murk of alcoholic prehistory. For the past few years McGovern has been analyzing scraps of pottery excavated from a site in central China. Last year he announced that he had detected traces of the oldest alcoholic beverage yet discovered, a Stone Age brew dating back 9,000 years. When I visited McGovern's basement laboratory the day before, he handed me a plastic bag containing one of the shards. I could not get my mind around the stretch of human culture it embodied—a time period twice the span from the pyramids of Egypt to the pyramids of Las Vegas; Christianity rising four and a half times. Nonetheless, with this meager evidence, McGovern and the brewers at Dogfish have found their mission: to coax an ancient brew back to life.
Molecular archaeology is the name for the nexus of disciplines at which McGovern finds himself. He is one of a number of scientists who in the last quarter century have been using the analytic tools of modern chemistry—spectrometers and chromatographs—to scrutinize the artifacts of lost worlds, seeking evidence with which to piece together the lives of our ancestors. McGovern has made a name for himself tracking down and studying traces of prehistoric alcohol, the details of which he reveals in a recent book, Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture.
The author concocted his own pale brew (center bottle) from rice,
grapes, honey, a starter culture,
and dried hawthorn berries.
For many years, the analytic machines in McGovern's laboratory were too expensive to fit the modest budgets of most archaeology departments. Many of McGovern's are hand-me-downs, donated by DuPont when they upgraded to newer, fancier models. The growing availability of the technology has permitted artifacts long cataloged and relegated to museum storage rooms to be reanalyzed.
The pottery fragments in McGovern's laboratory hail from Jiahu, a Neolithic dig site in the province of Henan in central China, where they were excavated in the 1980s. Little was left after nine millennia but a few salts and organic chemicals. Alcohol and sugars were long gone. McGovern boiled the shards in the solvents methanol and chloroform, then evaporated away the solvents, leaving behind an organic residue. He ran some of the residue through his spectrometers and chromatographs, which shoot a beam of light at a sample to measure its absorption. Other residues he farmed out to colleagues. When the results were pooled and collated, McGovern found matches for rice, beeswax, and a fruit containing tartaric acid. Tartaric acid is easily attributed to grapes, but at the time of McGovern's study, the scholarly record showed little use of wild grapes in China. McGovern proposed an alternative source from among the local flora: the fruit of the Chinese hawthorn, Crataegus pinnatifida. (Archaeobotanists have since found both grape and hawthorn seeds in the dusts of the Jiahu site, adding credence to McGovern's idea.)
Archaeologists will tell you that what they do is not about the dead but the living—connecting the former world with the current one. Off the record they might admit that it gets a bit dry and dusty down in the tombs and that they sometimes long for a connection with a little more juice in it. Thus the domains of archaeology and brewing have met on several occasions over the years: In 1989 Fritz Maytag of the Anchor Steam Brewing Company in San Francisco staged a re-creation of an ancient Sumerian recipe decoded from the "Hymn to Ninkasi," an ode to the goddess of brewing. In 1996 Delwen Samuel of England created what became Tutankhamen Ale, a beer based on analyses of an ancient Egyptian tomb, and in 2000 followed it with Heather Ale, based on druidic digs in Great Britain. McGovern's collaboration with Dogfish on Midas Touch garnered so much attention that when he mentioned the Jiahu findings to Calagione, the question was not whether but how soon.
