The Beer Archaeologist. History. It’s just after dawn at the Dogfish Head brewpub in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where the ambition for the morning is to resurrect an Egyptian ale whose recipe dates back thousands of years. Photo Gallery. But will the za’atar—a potent Middle Eastern spice mixture redolent of oregano—clobber the soft, floral flavor of the chamomile?

And what about the dried doum- palm fruit, which has been giving off a worrisome fungusy scent ever since it was dropped in a brandy snifter of hot water and sampled as a tea?“I want Dr. Pat to try this,” says Sam Calagione, Dogfish Head’s founder, frowning into his glass. At last, Patrick Mc. Govern, a 6. 6- year- old archaeologist, wanders into the little pub, an oddity among the hip young brewers in their sweat shirts and flannel.

Proper to the point of primness, the University of Pennsylvania adjunct professor sports a crisp polo shirt, pressed khakis and well- tended loafers; his wire spectacles peek out from a blizzard of white hair and beard. But Calagione, grinning broadly, greets the dignified visitor like a treasured drinking buddy. Which, in a sense, he is.

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The truest alcohol enthusiasts will try almost anything to conjure the libations of old. They’ll slaughter goats to fashion fresh wineskins, so the vintage takes on an authentically gamey taste. They’ll brew beer in dung- tempered pottery or boil it by dropping in hot rocks. The Anchor Steam Brewery, in San Francisco, once cribbed ingredients from a 4,0. Ninkasi, the Sumerian beer goddess.“Dr.

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Pat,” as he’s known at Dogfish Head, is the world’s foremost expert on ancient fermented beverages, and he cracks long- forgotten recipes with chemistry, scouring ancient kegs and bottles for residue samples to scrutinize in the lab. He has identified the world’s oldest known barley beer (from Iran’s Zagros Mountains, dating to 3. B. C.), the oldest grape wine (also from the Zagros, circa 5. B. C.) and the earliest known booze of any kind, a Neolithic grog from China’s Yellow River Valley brewed some 9,0. Widely published in academic journals and books, Mc. Govern’s research has shed light on agriculture, medicine and trade routes during the pre- biblical era.

But—and here’s where Calagione’s grin comes in—it’s also inspired a couple of Dogfish Head’s offerings, including Midas Touch, a beer based on decrepit refreshments recovered from King Midas’ 7. B. C. tomb, which has received more medals than any other Dogfish creation.“It’s called experimental archaeology,” Mc. Govern explains. To devise this latest Egyptian drink, the archaeologist and the brewer toured acres of spice stalls at the Khan el- Khalili, Cairo’s oldest and largest market, handpicking ingredients amid the squawks of soon- to- be decapitated chickens and under the surveillance of cameras for “Brew Masters,” a Discovery Channel reality show about Calagione’s business. The ancients were liable to spike their drinks with all sorts of unpredictable stuff—olive oil, bog myrtle, cheese, meadow­sweet, mugwort, carrot, not to mention hallucinogens like hemp and poppy. But Calagione and Mc. Puerto Rican Tacos. Govern based their Egyptian selections on the archaeologist’s work with the tomb of the Pharaoh Scorpion I, where a curious combination of savory, thyme and coriander showed up in the residues of libations interred with the monarch in 3.

B. C. (They decided the za’atar spice medley, which frequently includes all those herbs, plus oregano and several others, was a current- day substitute.) Other guidelines came from the even more ancient Wadi Kubbaniya, an 1. Upper Egypt where starch- dusted stones, probably used for grinding sorghum or bulrush, were found with the remains of doum- palm fruit and chamomile. It’s difficult to confirm, but “it’s very likely they were making beer there,” Mc.

Govern says. The brewers also went so far as to harvest a local yeast, which might be descended from ancient varieties (many commercial beers are made with manufactured cultures). They left sugar- filled petri dishes out overnight at a remote Egyptian date farm, to capture wild airborne yeast cells, then mailed the samples to a Belgian lab, where the organisms were isolated and grown in large quantities. Back at Dogfish Head, the tea of ingredients now inexplicably smacks of pineapple.

Mc. Govern advises the brewers to use less za’atar; they comply. The spices are dumped into a stainless steel kettle to stew with barley sugars and hops. Mc. Govern acknowledges that the heat source should technically be wood or dried dung, not gas, but he notes approvingly that the kettle’s base is insulated with bricks, a suitably ancient technique. As the beer boils during lunch break, Mc.

Govern sidles up to the brewery’s well- appointed bar and pours a tall, frosty Midas Touch for himself, spurning the Cokes nursed by the other brewers. He’s fond of citing the role of beer in ancient workplaces. For the pyramids, each worker got a daily ration of four to five liters,” he says loudly, perhaps for Calagione’s benefit.

It was a source of nutrition, refreshment and reward for all the hard work. It was beer for pay. You would have had a rebellion on your hands if they’d run out. The pyramids might not have been built if there hadn’t been enough beer.”Soon the little brew room is filled with fragrant roiling steam, with hints of toast and molasses—an aroma that can only be described as intoxicating.

The wort, or unfermented beer, emerges a pretty palomino color; the brewers add flasks of the yellowish, murky- looking Egyptian yeast and fermentation begins. They plan on making just seven kegs of the experimental beverage, to be unveiled in New York City two weeks later. The brewers are concerned because the beer will need that much time to age and nobody will be able to taste it in advance.

Mc. Govern, though, is thinking on another time scale entirely. This probably hasn’t been smelled for 1. The shelves of Mc. Govern’s office in the University of Pennsylvania Museum are packed with sober- sounding volumes—Structural Inorganic Chemistry, Cattle- Keepers of the Eastern Sahara—along with bits of bacchanalia. There are replicas of ancient bronze drinking vessels, stoppered flasks of Chinese rice wine and an old empty Midas Touch bottle with a bit of amber goo in the bottom that might intrigue archaeologists thousands of years hence.

There’s also a wreath that his wife, Doris, a retired university administrator, wove from wild Pennsylvania grape vines and the corks of favorite bottles. But while Mc. Govern will occasionally toast a promising excavation with a splash of white wine sipped from a lab beaker, the only suggestion of personal vice is a stack of chocolate Jell- O pudding cups. The scientific director of the university’s Biomolecular Archaeology Laboratory for Cuisine, Fermented Beverages, and Health, Mc. Govern had had an eventful fall. Along with touring Egypt with Calagione, he traveled to Austria for a conference on Iranian wine and also to France, where he attended a wine conference in Burgundy, toured a trio of Champagne houses, drank Chablis in Chablis and stopped by a critical excavation near the southern coast. Yet even strolling the halls with Mc.

Govern can be an education. Another professor stops him to discuss, at length, the folly of extracting woolly mammoth fats from permafrost. Then we run into Alexei Vranich, an expert on pre- Columbian Peru, who complains that the last time he drank chicha (a traditional Peruvian beer made with corn that has been chewed and spit out), the accompanying meal of roast guinea pigs was egregiously undercooked. You want guinea pigs crunchy, like bacon,” Vranich says. He and Mc. Govern talk chicha for a while. Thank you so much for your research,” Vranich says as he departs. I keep telling people that beer is more important than armies when it comes to understanding people.”We are making our way down to the human ecology lab, where Mc.

Govern’s technicians are borrowing some equipment. Cheese Cloth.