Drinking With the Dead — The Complexities of Bringing Ancient Beer Back to Life in the Modern World

The Grecian sun burns overhead, where the cerulean gradient of sea and sky dissolves into distant, misty peaks. Below, a team of archaeologists gathers where two other worlds collide: the living and the dead. They’ve just unearthed the tomb of an ancient ruler, surrounded by the remnants of a long-abandoned feast. There are dozens of drinking vessels, amphorae, and cups scattered on the ground, and while they all appear empty, they contain a wealth of ancient clues.

It’s always been true that the things we eat and drink tell us who we are. But “to understand how something was used [in the past], you have to look at the bigger picture,” says Bettina Arnold, a professor of anthropology with a homebrewing background who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In the growing disciplines of biomolecular and experimental archaeology, new discoveries and technology enable interdisciplinary teams of scholars, scientists, and brewers to bring ancient foods and drinks back from the dead. 

Learning what was in an ancient beverage, who made it, who drank it, and why helps us tell a more complete human story. This work is about making the invisible visible, and bringing what has been hidden into the light. Alcohol evaporates and food disintegrates, leaving behind only their chemical signatures, but scientists now have the technology to detect and analyze these molecules. It’s also about context, however, and context can change everything. 

Written recipes and physical evidence are often scant or inconclusive, so researchers must look to art, architecture, ancient texts, and modern-day people who still follow traditional practices to piece together the clues—then test them out by actually making and sampling these ancient drinks in the modern day. There are so many unknown variables that many call them reinterpretations or rebrews instead of recreations.

“One of the misperceptions about what [we] do is that we find a recipe and recreate it. That is definitely not how this goes down,” says Travis Rupp, who teaches classics at the University of Colorado-Boulder and remakes ancient beverages under the moniker “The Beer Archaeologist.” (He also worked as a brewer at Avery Brewing Company in Boulder, Colorado, from 2012 to 2020, where he helmed the “Ales of Antiquity” series.) “The best I can say is that I’ve gotten as close as I possibly can with the tools I have.”  

These beverages can be a powerful tool to bridge our ancient ancestors with today’s brewers and drinkers. “People are interested in alcoholic beverages, and you can use that as an entry point to … the archaeological and historical evidence,” Arnold says. “It allows you to reach a segment of the population who run screaming from the room when they hear the word ‘history’—until you say ‘craft beer.’” 

Importantly, they also allow us to interrogate millennia of ingrained biases. From archaeochemists examining 9,000-year-old backwash to brewers attempting to resurrect ancient beers, navigating complex questions of ownership and access as they go, we now have tools that enable us to peer more deeply and critically into the past than ever before—and it’s challenging what we thought we knew about ourselves.

LIFE’S BOOKENDS

What draws academics to the study of ancient booze? “Alcohol is central to culture, and a large part of what makes us human,” says Dr. Patrick McGovern, anthropology professor at the University of Pennsylvania and leader of its museum’s Biomolecular Archaeology Project for Cuisine, Fermented Beverages, and Health. He’s dedicated himself to exploring the interrelationship between humans and fermented drinks, and believes we may have co-evolved. After all, before colonialism, indigenous alcohol-making cultures existed all around the globe. 

Virtually everywhere that alcohol appeared, it was in the context of ritual feasts. From births and christenings to weddings, initiations, changing seasons, and spiritual events, “Alcohol marks important moments in time—when you’re born, when you marry, and when you die, the ‘bookends’ in life—and cements them in the communal memory,” Arnold says. But the most illuminating archaeological evidence comes from the final marker: the funerary feast, where people would gather at graves and tombs to share food and drinks with the living and dead, a ritual that stretches back to the Stone Age. 

“You could make offerings at that burial mound and expect … that the ancestors, by continuing to feed them, could help you in this world while you’re still alive,” Arnold explains, and “alcohol was the most important aspect.” It took a stiff drink to access the spirit realm, and these rituals often involved what McGovern calls “extreme beverages”: boozy, high-ABV cocktails of beer, wine, and mead, often all at once and sometimes co-fermented in the same vessel, mixed with herbal (and occasionally psychedelic) adjuncts. 

Combining multiple sugar sources—such as beer, wine, and mead—facilitated the highest possible alcohol content in the pre-distillation era. While extreme beverages have historically been attributed to high-status burials, made using prized ingredients such as honey and fruit for added flavor and heft, evidence increasingly shows that variations were also consumed across socioeconomic levels. 

“Fermentation itself is [an] almost otherworldly process,” McGovern says. “You get bubbling [and] lots of activity you couldn’t really explain if you were living in the Palaeolithic period, so you might think some force outside of nature was at work. Then you drink, and you get the pleasure cascade of neurotransmitters. … No wonder these beverages have been incorporated into society as something remarkable and the way to communicate with the dead, ancestors, and gods.”

In what Arnold calls “the BYOB afterlife,” many ancient people believed that “when you died, you went to a place similar enough to this one that you had to bring your alcoholic beverages with you.” Some cultures outfitted tombs like houses, with animal-skin rugs, fabric wallpaper, and dozens of drinking and serving vessels. In this way, burials are among the best-preserved snapshots of culture, especially in dry environments: Sealed away from the ravages of water and oxygen, which can destroy organic evidence, these scenes teach scholars and scientists about ancient people’s spiritual beliefs, social practices, economic structures, class struggles, gender roles, trade routes, and even surrounding landscapes. 

BREAKING BEER

Physical evidence of ancient food and drink, however, remains scarce. The clues we do have are preserved as degraded remnants of the past: Telltale molecules lurk in the evaporated liquid residues at the bottom of ancient vessels; in charred grains and burnt crusts. They are embedded in the DNA structures of ancient organisms, from single-celled yeasts to mammalian skeletons, and lodged in the tartar and calculus between human molars frozen in eternal mastication. But the field of biomolecular archaeology now allows scientists to examine this evidence, however degraded it might be, at the molecular level.

“When done well, traditional archaeology puts together a lot of information about people’s lives, but at a macro level. It tends to focus on the inorganic—the pottery, metals, and architecture, and not as much on the animals, plants, and organic material. Human life is organic, to a large degree, [but] organics break down and disappear, [and] we may only have a very small percentage of the original evidence. That’s where biomolecular archaeology comes into the picture … applying chemical techniques to excavated organic remains.”

The Penn Museum website describes biomolecular archaeology as the “wave of the future in discovering the past.” The field employs innovative tools and methods to examine residues and site samples. Gas and liquid chromatography are used to separate organic compounds, and mass spectronomy then measures their molecular weights and determines their chemical structures. This process allows scientists to search for and identify the chemical indicators of ancient alcoholic beverages. Calcium oxalate is a marker for beer, tartaric acid for wine, beeswax for mead. When these are detected in a sample taken from an ancient artifact like a cup or amphora, it suggests a fermented drink might once have been inside.

“When done well, traditional archaeology puts together a lot of information about people’s lives, but at a macro level. It tends to focus on the inorganic—the pottery, metals, and architecture,  and not as much on the animals, plants, and organic material,” McGovern says. “Human life is organic, to a large degree, [but] organics break down and disappear, [and] we may only have a very small percentage of the original evidence. That’s where biomolecular archaeology comes into the picture … applying chemical techniques to excavated organic remains.”

McGovern is known as “the Indiana Jones of Extreme Beverages,” but as someone whose work brings together archaeology and chemistry, he’s just as much Walter White (at least before he went all Heisenberg). He developed the subfield of organic residue analysis in the 1980s; after fellow archaeologists brought him intriguing samples to analyze, he applied his techniques to the study of alcoholic beverages—later discovering what were, at the time, the earliest chemically attested examples of grape wine, barley beer, and an extreme beverage. These came from Godin Tepe, a site in modern-day Iran dating to around 3,000 B.C., and the Jiahu settlement in China, a 9,000-year-old site where a rice-based beer-wine hybrid was served in funerary rituals. 

Corroborating evidence for the latter came from a later discovery in China, where jars were found still full of an ancient liquid after 3,000 years. Most samples archaeologists encounter, however, are like those from Godin Tepe and Jiahu, limited to the evaporated remains of millennia-old libations. But even identifying what’s in these residues doesn’t necessarily tell the whole story. Calcium oxalate, for example, is present in all carbon-based life. Charred grains could mean people were making either beer or bread. The more of these elements appear together, the more certain you can be—but to be sure, the research team needs to put it in context. 

CONTEXT CLUES

Contextualizing the clues researchers have collected means comparing any physical evidence found at a given archaeological site with other locations where food- and beverage-making facilities have been discovered. It also means hitting the books, and combing through artistic depictions, ancient texts, and historical literature (some, like Arnold and Rupp, even draw upon their own brewing backgrounds). Scenes from Mesopotamian art, for instance, show people sipping liquid from long straws—ancient beer’s calling card, since wine and water weren’t consumed this way. Egyptian paintings depict the brewing and winemaking processes, while palace scribes from the Mycenaean civilization in Bronze Age Greece made lists inventorying provisions and equipment for feasts. 

It’s interdisciplinary work, because each specialization needs the context of the other. Given that fermented beverages are, essentially, processed plants, botanical clues are crucial; in addition to archaeologists and anthropologists, teams include archaeo- and ethnobotanists, who look at past and present relationships between people and plants; geologists, who conduct soil analyses that reveal which ingredients might have been available and the local water source’s potential pH; DNA scientists; and paleoentomologists, who study fossilized insect remains. The practice of experimental archaeology brings all the evidence together, using potential combinations of ingredients and processes to actually make the beverages in question. 

Arnold gives the example of a Bronze Age cauldron unearthed from a funerary site in modern-day Germany. She immediately recognized the vessel type from similar burial sites, informed by her research in medieval Celtic literature and her homebrewing experience. True to her assessment, the cauldron contained visible organic residues, which were examined by a paleoethnobotanist. He found not only honey pollen, but Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast, plus meadowsweet and mint, which suggested it once contained a mead-like beverage; later, those ingredients were used to make a rebrew.

Tania Valamoti, professor of archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, recalls a moment of contextual recognition when she encountered a Grecian Bronze Age site scattered with drinking cups and the remains of 3,000 malted grains. (Valamoti’s research has involved charred grains, since burning preserves the chemical composition of organic materials like seeds, grains, and crusts.) The scene suggested beer, but the surrounding architecture lent further evidence. The excavators couldn’t explain the structures with short, parallel stone walls, but Valamoti had seen similar ones in Egypt, used for sprouting malt grains on rolled-out mats. 

“Certain configurations on site [can indicate] a wine cellar or fermentation room, [but] unless you’re familiar with what the vessel types and arrangements are, you could easily miss or destroy it,” McGovern says. Adding to the challenge, water, oxygen, and environmental microbes can contaminate or destroy a chemical sample; past archaeologists often unwittingly erased evidence by washing artifacts or treating them with preservatives.

In addition to geographic context, temporal context is another important consideration. Some of the literature “operates under the presumption that when I’m done drinking my cup of coffee here, I just throw the cup away. We don’t do that,” laughs Rupp. Most ancient vessels were used repeatedly, with acidic or sticky residues from a variety of substances embedding themselves in the cracks of the material, “so we have to be careful in assuming that [certain ingredients are] indicative of a recipe.”

But researchers agree that “the only true way to put the period at the end of the sentence is to visit the location, see what the culinary culture is today, talk to people, and try to experience what they consider historic foods and [drinks],” as Rupp says. That research method is known as ethnography. “What we find is that alive and well, often hundreds if not thousands of years later, are the roots of that culinary and alcohol culture.” 

ALL THAT GLITTERS

Given all these considerations, it can be a real challenge to translate findings into present-tense, consumable beverages. Without written records, the reinterpretation process is like a millennia-long scavenger hunt. Sometimes teams are lucky enough to find texts that mention combinations of ingredients, but not quantities. At best, it’s like trying to reassemble a cookbook from fragments of the pages, says Valamoti, “trying with different bits and pieces to generate the recipe.”

Despite those difficulties, interest in rebrewing ancient beverages has grown in recent decades. Sometimes, rebrews are strictly academic, shared in private events attended by scholars and experts. Other times, commercial breweries get involved and produce them for public consumption. Either way, academics typically team up with professional brewers to turn their research into something that can be shared and consumed.

“The only way to ‘recreate’ something is not just to recreate a recipe, but [also] the process and all of the variables, [including] the temperature; the atmospheric pressure; what season it was brewed in; the pollen in the air … Was it next to a bakery or by the sea? All of that is going to change the flavor profile and the outcome.”

The best-known rebrew—and the one that first made the concept widely visible to consumers—arose when McGovern teamed up with Sam Calagione, founder of Delaware’s Dogfish Head Craft Brewery. Together, they created Midas Touch, which reconstructed a 2,700-year-old ritual cocktail of beer, wine, and mead from the Phrygian civilization, unearthed from a well-preserved tomb that may have belonged to King Midas. 

When archaeologists cracked open that crypt, they found brilliant bronze vats, cups, and bowls with yellow residues, and a royal body lying on vibrantly colored textiles and felt. A grant enabled McGovern’s team to use new technologies for the first time to determine what might have been in those glittering vessels. Backed up by contextual clues, testing revealed an extreme beverage fit for a king. 

McGovern’s team recreated the entire feast for a museum event, and Calagione won a brewer’s competition to reconstruct the ancient drink. They thought they’d only make it once, but the result was so well-received that Calagione went on to brew a commercial version, spawning a fruitful creative partnership and Dogfish Head’s Ancient Ales series. “It really captivated people’s imaginations, and this idea of connecting history to the modern beer renaissance seemed to find a zeitgeist moment,” says Calagione. 

In search of other ancient beverages, Calagione and McGovern traveled all over the world, and their efforts were chronicled in a 2010 Discovery Channel program, “Brew Masters.” Other beers in the series followed, including Chicha, a corn-based beverage from South America; Etrusca Bronze, made with hazelnut flour, pomegranate, raisins, honey, gentian root, and myrrh, based on a beer/wine hybrid from modern-day Italy; a Nordic Kvasir, which McGovern says was their most historically accurate rebrew; and Chateau Jiahu, inspired by those 9,000-year-old Jiahu findings and made with rice, orange blossom honey, muscat grape juice, barley malt, and hawthorn fruit, fermented for two weeks with an American Ale yeast.

As much as rebrews take inspiration from ancient sources, a necessary degree of subjectivity is also involved: Professional brewers weigh in on proportions, and the end result ultimately comes down to a taste test, interpreted through the lens of time and culture. “Paleolithic humans had a similar brain structure to modern humans, so we think their tastes and smells would have been similar to ours,” McGovern says. “And we assume that humans would prefer ‘good taste,’ but that can vary culturally.”

Yeast often presents the greatest challenge to rebrewers. As endless horror films have shown, you can try to bring a human back to life, but it’ll never be quite the same; this is also true of ancient microbes. Since DNA evidence from archaeological sites is scant—not to mention that the genomes of most yeasts haven’t been mapped—there’s almost no way to know with certainty if you’re using the right strain, scholars and scientists say. 

To get as close as they could while making Ta Henket, which was based on chemical and archaeobotanical evidence from several ancient Egyptian burial and settlement sites, Calagione and McGovern employed an unusual method: Yeast-bearing fruit flies were captured from a date palm grove near the pyramids and sent to a lab in Belgium, where scientists isolated and cloned the yeasts for use in Dogfish Head’s beer. But even in this case, McGovern says, it’s impossible to identify the exact age and lineage of those yeasts.

If accuracy is the ultimate aim, no detail is too small to consider, says Rupp. His rebrew of “the original IPA” is one example. Not only did he simulate the conditions of brewing the beer, but also its transport and storage—including barrel-aging for periods from three-and-a-half months to two years, fluctuating the temperature from the mid-40s to the mid-80s Fahrenheit, and putting the beer out to a metaphorical sea by rocking the barrels. 

“The only way to ‘recreate’ something is not just to recreate a recipe, but [also] the process and all of the variables,” he says. That includes “the temperature; the atmospheric pressure; what season it was brewed in; the pollen in the air … Was it next to a bakery or by the sea? All of that is going to change the flavor profile and the outcome.” 

THE CHALLENGES OF RECREATION

But if those are the standards, few rebrews, if any, could be considered completely accurate. Ironically, the best way to learn about ancient alcohol—by making it yourself in the modern day—is an inherently limited process. 

Basic logistics can be challenging enough. The complications begin with the brewing vessels: Ancient brewers often used containers, vats, and structures made of ceramic or wood, which can greatly affect flavor; wood also biodegrades, destroying procedural evidence. 

Both Rupp and Calagione confronted the physically grueling process of recreating Chicha, a millennia-old, beer-like beverage made from corn, grain, and/or local fruit, attested in ancient Peruvian art and sculpture, in the traditional manner. It’s still made today in Central and South America using one of the oldest beer-making practices: manually processing the grains by chewing them up and spitting them into a large container, where the enzymes naturally present in human saliva break down the starches into sugars. (A source of yeast is still needed to start the fermentation.) 

“What we call ‘beer’ is a much more recent, and very limited, kind of beverage, especially with respect to the kinds of [flavors] you can get.”

For Rupp, however, the jaw pain wasn’t the biggest challenge. The first batch of grain got cooked and stuck in the lauter tun: “It literally turned into polenta, and it took 12-14 hours to get all that corn out of there,” he says. The second batch became cement in Avery’s pressurized brewing system, requiring another eight-hour recovery. “Modern brewing equipment is designed to do one thing,” he adds, “and it really does not play well with a lot of these ancient processes.”

Meanwhile, historically and geographically accurate sourcing can be logistically impossible or prohibitively costly. Calagione cites ingredients getting tied up in customs for months, while the saffron and Muscat grapes used in Midas Touch proved royally expensive. Commercial rebrewers often opt for ingredients similar to the originals from local, cheaper sources—for example, grains from Montana rather than Egypt or Greece—but each shortcut undermines the integrity of the brew. 

Projects produced within scholarly environments tend to be the most stringent, because they don’t have to meet legal restrictions or factor in profits. “Mixed beverages sound great from an archaeological perspective, but if you’re a brewer, they’re a problem,” Arnold says. 

In the U.S., rebrewers must also contend with legal definitions of what beer is; these vary from state to state and may differ from federal law, which doesn’t require a minimum hop addition (that’s only for malt beverages). California, for example, expanded its definition of beer in 2019 to include ingredients such as fruit, honey, herbs, spices, and food materials, citing “the consumer’s desire for more varied and unique styles.” But some states still define beer in reference to hops—an ingredient that was notably absent from ancient alcohol. For millennia, grain-based alcohol in European societies featured “gruit,” a cocktail of native, bitter herbs and adjuncts that varied by locality, such as meadowsweet, yarrow, mugwort, and buckthorn to offset the sugar content. “What we call ‘beer’ is a much more recent, and very limited, kind of beverage,” Arnold says, “especially with respect to the kinds of [flavors] you can get.” 

To bring this concept to life, she helped launch the Unhopped Iron Brewer Challenge at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee: a competition where students submit their own rebrews. The only stipulations are that entrants can’t be a professional brewer, their style must be historically attested, and they can’t use hops. Students and faculty receive samples while beer experts are brought in to judge, uniting often-siloed sectors. The event opens new opportunities for participation in brewing and beer culture while celebrating the student body’s diverse culinary backgrounds; the most recent winner, Arnold says, brewed a Kvass from her family’s Ukrainian recipe. 

But when it comes to commercial rebrews, there have been notable patterns regarding who makes them, who is represented in them—and who has been left off the record.

MEN, METAL, MEAT, AND ELITES

There’s a growing academic consensus that the original brewers in most ancient societies were women—at least in certain contexts. 

Arnold notes that there is scant physical evidence explicitly tying production of any kind, from beer and food to ceramics and metalwork, to gender; brewers might also have varied by event, with women focusing on everyday beer for household consumption and men pitching in for large-scale occasions. Still, “There is a fair bit of evidence indicating that brewing was primarily the profession of women until the Industrial Revolution,” says Rupp—it’s just largely contextual. “Beer was primarily a homebrewed commodity and ‘industry’; therefore, it went hand-in-hand with the cooking arts, which were dominated by women throughout history.” 

Ancient Egyptian art shows men and women brewing side by side, and there are names of female tavern-keepers listed in the Code of Hammurabi, one of humanity’s first legal documents. Art, artifacts, and literature reflect female brewers throughout ancient Mesopotamia, China, and Germanic Iron Age Europe. And, as researcher Janine Fries-Knoblach noted in the BEFIM journal in 2019, brewing cauldrons were part of a woman’s dowry in some Germanic societies, handed down along matrilineal lines.

In mythologies spanning the Near East to the Nordic countries and ancient Greece, beer was also the domain of female deities, another indicator that brewers in these places and times were women—and that beer was a sacrament, entrusted to society’s most valued members. Valamoti theorizes that women in ancient cultures may have been kept from dangerous activities such as hunting and fighting because their lives were too precious to risk, not because they weren’t capable of such tasks. In keeping, women held prominent political positions in humanity’s early days; Mesopotamian art, for example, shows queens drinking beer from the signature straws. 

The Hymn to Ninkasi, a 5,000-year-old poem that describes an ancient brewing process, is also dedicated to its namesake: the goddess of beer. (The first documented commercial rebrew was Anchor Brewing Company’s 1988 translation of this boozy literature, which McGovern participated in—but since the technology for organic residue analysis hadn’t been developed yet, the recipe involved some educated guessing.)

One example of hard, physical evidence for female brewers, Arnold says, is from a monumental temple complex in Peru called Cerro Baúl, where a potent Chicha was made and served in spiritual rituals. Cerro Baúl was built by the Wari, a pre-Incan civilization, and encompassed everything from growing necessary crops to brewing and serving the Chicha. Women’s shawl pins were found at the brewing site, directly linking them with the task—evidence backed up by Chicha production in modern Andean societies, which is still typically a female domain. The findings spawned a rebrew by Chicago’s Off Color Brewing, in collaboration with The Field Museum and Dr. Ryan Williams, associate curator and excavator.

“The Cerro Baúl site is a good example of a situation where all aspects of the process are represented,” Arnold says, including “the actual brewing process, the vessels used in drinking the beverage, and the cultural continuity of practice in the form of women who still [make] a version of the pepperberry Chicha that was rebrewed as Wari Ale.”

And this wasn’t grunt work; the brewers were upper-class women. Here, as in other ancient societies, alcohol was used to establish and uphold power dynamics, say researchers. What drinks were served when, in what way, and to which people helped build allegiances between elites and secure tribute from the lower social classes. As Valamoti says, “[Alcohol] can be manipulated to enhance social differentiation, or by sharing in community.” This is not unlike the modern beer industry, where a male-dominated class of brewers uses their beers and collaborations to cement bonds with each other and shape consumer tastes.

Despite deep female lineages, however, the archaeohistorical record mainly reflects a bias toward men, metal, meat, and elites, because that’s what has been best preserved: vessels and coffins that don’t biograde; the bones of animals from lavish meals; high-status burials sealed in subterranean tombs; stories told by those in power about their own kind. Most modern, male-led reinterpretations have also conspicuously omitted the detail of their beers’ feminine origins from marketing and press.

Similarly, many rebrews have neglected the everyday beer brewed for household consumption (which persisted post-industrialization, for a time, as a female-led task). The early literature assumed these quotidian drinks were thick, low-ABV, tasteless sludge, reflecting cultural and historical biases that may be related to beer’s regions of origin and the melanin of its makers. “Not only do I think it’s a gross generalization that’s applied to ancient peoples—that they didn’t know what they were doing or they didn’t care about the quality of their food—but experimental archaeology has proven that’s not the case,” Rupp says. 

And evidence to the contrary is mounting, say Arnold, McGovern, and Rupp, including dozens of names for different beer styles documented in ancient Sumer. While “the daily beer of the working class” would have been more sessionable for both practical and financial purposes, Rupp says, when he rebrewed an Egyptian beer from the New Kingdom, it fermented in 48 hours and was over 4.5% ABV. And it wouldn’t have been watery or flavorless; it’s well-attested that ancient people flavored their beer with fruit, herbs, and botanicals, while many rebrews boast what Arnold describes as interesting, complex “flavorscapes.” 

WHOSE BEER IS IT?

In 1999, Midas Touch was the most accurate, accessible commercial rebrew to date, exposing thousands of beer drinkers to a piece of otherwise little-known history. Now, with 2022 hindsight, we can bring new context to the Ancient Ales series specifically and the rebrewing practice more generally. As new technology has enabled deeper understandings of the past, so too can we ask new questions of these projects about access and inclusivity, namely: Who gets to make ancient alcoholic beverages, and who are they for?

When underrepresented people brew a drink from their background, they’re experientially recreating their past: an especially meaningful activity for those whose histories have been repressed, misinterpreted, or erased. But by definition, a rebrew means removing the beverage from its original social, historical, and temporal context, and all the nuance that comes with it. 

The commercial aspect complicates things even further. “We will try to recreate the beer, and then, appropriating the prehistoric past, the investor will make money out of it,” says Valamoti, and the bigger the brewery, the more likely that will be the focus. The practice of rebrewing for profit begs some important questions: Are the drinks, their histories, and their keepers inextricable? Is it possible for brewers of other backgrounds to do this respectfully, making an interpretation an homage? What are the responsibilities of those capitalizing off ancient brewing lineages?

Calagione says Dogfish Head was accused of “messing with tradition” for making beers with culinary ingredients, such as chicory, coffee, and pumpkin in the mid-1990s (which, believe it or not, were rare ingredients at the time). The brewery made a medieval-inspired Braggot (a beer-mead hybrid) in 1997 as a response to the naysayers. “When people would laugh at me, I’d say, this recipe was invented long before … commercial modern beer styles, and it allowed us to engage in a conversation about the long history of brewing,” says Calagione.

But as Dogfish Head continued to grow, it would be accused of messing with other cultures’ traditions. Chateau Jiahu was a hit with many Chinese consumers who were “proud of the fact that they had the oldest recorded fermented beverage in the world,” McGovern says, but the local media accused those involved with the rebrew of “making money off their heritage.” They were especially hard on the Chinese archaeologist and scholars who drove the research, he adds—even though, using their findings as a guide, “Anybody can try to recreate this [beer], which Dogfish [Head] did. You could have a company in China recreate it, too. We’re not trying to corner the market.” 

Later, the brewery became involved in trademark disputes regarding terms from other cultures. In 2013, it told Dipak Topiwala, an Austin, Texas-based owner of Indian descent who named his microbrewery Namaste Brewing Co., that the Delaware brewery had trademarked the word “namaste”—a greeting and protected spiritual principle in India—for its Belgian Witbier. Topiwala was instructed to change the name, pay them a licensing fee, or limit beer sales to on-premises only; he took to social media in protest, but without the resources for a court battle resigned to changing the name (it’s now Kamala Gardens). 

Trademarks are important in the competitive craft beer landscape, where recipes can be replicated but brand builds loyalty. Yet the incident foreshadowed the industry’s reckonings with inclusion and appropriation in 2020. It’s true that Dogfish Head had every legal right to trademark the word, and Calagione has been credited for his civility in attempting to resolve these matters with brewers directly. Topiwala himself acknowledged this, but he also called the trademark “cultural appropriation” and the licensing offer a form of imperialism. 

Calagione, an Italian-American, countered that he would never make a cultural claim to the word “ciao.” In our 2021 interview, however, he acknowledged the importance of not only recognizing but collaborating with local brewers whose lineages are being brought to life. When Midas Touch was made, “There were no craft breweries in … that area of Turkey for us to collaborate with, celebrate, [and] recognize,” Calagione told me. “As the craft brewing renaissance took off globally, I consciously said, ‘If we’re going to work on reviving an ancient beer style in a country that has craft brewers, let’s [partner with those] who have the reputation for being as adventurous as we are with culinary ingredients.”

When Dogfish Head rebrewed Etrusca, it teamed up with two Italian craft breweries to produce three different versions of the beer; for Kvasir, with a Scandinavian brewer. These collaborations allowed local brewers to capture both the prestige and profits that came from commercializing their heritage. But for Chicha, there were no official partnerships—despite the fact that the team not only sampled the drink, but learned from commercial and family brewers in Peru, using their kitchens to create test batches.

Even the history of the India Pale Ale, the seemingly innocuous British recipe Rupp rebrewed, is part of this larger narrative. It was imported to India for the British colonizers, whereas locals were banned from most venues that served the beer within their own country. While Rupp aims to eliminate biases about ancient beer, drawing from his course curricula, his rebrews also involve blurred lines. Some are educational, such as a Biblical beer based on references from the Dead Sea Scrolls conscripted by the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Others, including two versions of Chicha were sold commercially—and produced independently—at Avery. 

Then there was Monticello, part of the unfinished “Presidential Beers” sub-series. Rupp dedicated the rebrew to Peter Hemings, who was enslaved by Thomas Jefferson and the actual brewer behind the beers credited to the third president. “I appreciated that I was questioned by a writer from ‘Wine Enthusiast’ as to whether it was appropriate that I was the one recreating an enslaved brewer’s beer,” he says. “I had to own up to the fact that I am a cisgendered white guy … coming to a project that is very sensitive without knowing all the background.” 

If history, as they say, is told by the victors, rebrews can either reinforce or challenge cultural narratives. These issues are as complexly layered as the sedimentary sands from which the evidence is unearthed. While they can prove problematic, commercial rebrews bring ancient history to life for people who wouldn’t otherwise experience it, teaching them that people like the Phrygians not only existed, but had a beer culture. However, sharing such knowledge involves not just serving up the beer, but providing proper education, which isn’t always in place. Not just giving public credit to the original creators of a beverage, but also partnering with or building in a way to financially give back to the place, its people, or a related cause could go a long way, notes Valamoti.

She and Arnold have contributed to research that illuminates the nuanced realities of gender roles and power dynamics throughout history; for example, Arnold’s work appears in a publication called “Gender Stereotypes in Archaeology,” which challenges biases about roles and social structures based on biology and sexual orientation. Meanwhile, Valamoti founded an interdisciplinary project called PlantCult to examine what ancient European culinary traditions can teach us about underrepresented people and histories. 

In archaeology, Arnold says, you can’t go into a site with any presuppositions; you have to let it speak to you. Learning about ancient food and beverages and the people who made them, casting backwards from the residues and burnt remains, “takes us closer to distant ancestors,” Valamoti says, “and is something we need to safeguard for the future generations.”

The more closely we can look, the more we learn. Scientific innovations will continue to reveal the contents of ancient drinks and diets with greater specificity, just as re-examining the evidence with contemporary eyes can illuminate past and present biases. Those developments are hard-won, and freighted with value. For all those who toast the ancestors across time and space, “[Ancient alcohol] recapitulates the past, brings them into the present, and sends them off into the future,” McGovern says, “and there are still a lot of possibilities.” 

Words by Holly ReganIllustrations by Colette Holston