Utah man brews beer using 3,500-year-old Egyptian recipe and ancient yeast to travel back in time

There's a lot that humanity has discovered about ancient civilizations from Egyptian to Mesopotamian, through their monuments, texts, and artifacts. But what they ate or drank provides insight into their everyday lives, and is something that can be recreated easily as compared to pyramids or ancient rituals. Craft beers are mostly made using traditional ingredients like malted barley. At least that's what Salt Lake City, Utah's Dylan McDonnell was doing until he got the idea to produce a beer from ancient yeast extracts that are nearly 3,000 years old. McDonnell is passionate about brewing craft beer and also works as a nonprofit operations manager, but he also holds a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies at the same time, as per the Smithsonian Magazine.

The idea of producing this one-of-a-kind beer came to McDonnell when he came across the news of a man who used a 4,500-year-old yeast strain to bake some sourdough. But McDonnell took three years to create that specific beer after conducting thorough research to find the perfect beer recipe from the Ebers Papyrus, which is an ancient Egyptian text that dates to 1550 B.C.E., as per the New York Times. The Papyrus not only contained the recipe for McDonnell's beer but also had formulas for hundreds of medical concoctions.

McDonnell narrowed things down to 75 recipes from the Papyrus that were associated with beer and made a list of ingredients that he needed. Out of all the ingredients, the beer enthusiast made a list of eight common items like Egyptian balsam fruit, Yemeni Sidr honey, sycamore figs, black cumin, juniper berries, Israeli golden raisins, carob fruit and frankincense, as reported by the Salt Lake Tribune. McDonnell found the rare sycamore figs from a 1,400-year-old grove with help from a friend in Egypt. He also sourced Egyptian barley and emmer wheat, known as farro in Europe, for base grains in the beer. 

A German company called Primer's Yeast helped him to get hold of some ancient yeast strains from a piece of pottery that was found in Israel. The yeast strain is from around 850 B.C.E. and was most probably used by the Philistines for brewing beer. Then McDonnell used a three-vessel brewing system that he had installed in his backyard and produced about 10 gallons of beer that cost roughly $1,000. McDonnell told KTVX, “Three thousand years ago, there was some guy in Egypt that was likely putting the same ingredients into a pot and boiling it with the hope of making the same thing.” He successfully made a beer that tasted close to gose, a type of German-styled beer with a slightly salty taste and 5% alcohol by volume.

“It’s a little bit rustic, maybe a little bit farmhouse like but it’s still bright and citrusy,” Chris Detrick, a brewer at Salt Lake City’s Level Crossing Brewing Company who was not involved with McDonnell, told the Salt Lake Tribune. “But that sourness, it’s not too much of a sour lactic acidity that you take one sip and you’re done and it’s really refreshing and I want another sip after that.” Even though McDonnell does not plan to sell the beer that he has named "Sinai Sour," he offered to host private tastings, according to the New York Times. McDonnell wishes to brew a beer with 25% alcohol by volume as part of his next project.