I'm not gonna lie to you, I've never liked the
taste of beer. But I didn't know why until I started brewing Mesopotamian beer which to my
surprise tasted really good. In this episode I'll tell you about the origins of beer in the cradle
of civilization, how I proceeded to brew it from explosions to serving beer live on channel 4 in
Sweden, and getting countless orders from people wanting to buy my beer. Watch until the end when
I will taste three of my home brewed Mesopotamian beers and give you instructions on how to brew
them yourself. And if you're anything like me you might just have found your new favorite drink.
Today's sponsor is Table of Gods, a cookbook inspired by the world's oldest recipes written on
clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia 4,000 years ago. If you go to tableofgods.com/yt you can get
three of these ancient recipes to cook right away. Flat and fried unleavened stuffed bread offered
to the moon god Nana in Ur around 2000 BC. Wheat porridge with yogurt, oil, and fried mint offered to
the god of agriculture Ninurta in 2300 BC. And soft butter cookies with pistachios and date syrup
served to the king Zimri-Lim around 1800 BC. So beer is probably as old as the agricultural
revolution itself. There's still a scholarly debate on whether beer or bread came first and
I will not feed the fire with more fuel. But in any case, the beer humans brewed 10,000 years
ago was likely a thick fermented bread liquid. Probably not something you'd like to drink or
eat today. Determining the exact location of this beer bread porridge liquid is worthless because
archaeologists find new evidence all the time. But we can be certain that beer was first made by
people living in the fertile crescent, at least if we're talking about beer made of barley or wheat
which is normally what we refer to when we talk about beer. But the thing is that we don't know
much about stone age beer, just as we don't know much about anything that happened before writing
was invented. So let's go to the place where writing took off. Uruk 3200 BC, also known as the city of
the first superhero Gilgamesh who I made an entire video about in case you're interested. The first
written evidence we have for beer in Uruk is a salary slip written on a clay tablet describing a
payment in beer. Can you guess the sign of the beer? It's the upside down cone. No wonder the
Sumerians created the first civilization. I mean how much more effective wouldn't
you work if you got your salary in beer? We also know from other cuneiform sources that
the Sumerians divided their beers into different categories such as ordinary beer, good beer, very
good beer, golden beer, red beer, dark beer, and so on. Although the Sumerians were advanced brewers
five thousand years back beer was likely brewed in homes at this point, and solely by women. Women
had always been responsible for the grain storage making it likely that it actually was a woman
who invented beer. A fun fact is that the first recorded chemist was also a woman from Mesopotamia
named Taputi. Taputi made perfumes however, and not beer. But that's a whole different story. It wasn't
until 2700 BC in the city of Lagash that the first professional brewery appeared. The brewery
had a round oven that was 5 meters or 16 feet and 5 inches in diameter. That's so big you could
bake 100 normal sized pizzas simultaneously in it. I'll get to why they needed this large oven to
brew beer later but for now we can be certain that the brewery in Lagash brewed huge amounts
of beer and that some of it might actually have been delivered to local pubs. Just a few months ago
archaeologists found one of these pubs in Lagash. And the most amazing discovery wasn't that the
citizens of Lagash could stroll down the street and order beer 5000 years ago, but that they could
stroll down the street and order a cold beer 5000 years ago. The pub in Lagash had pits for storing
ice and cooling drinks before they were served. So if you thought about ancient people to be ancient,
think again. Around 2000 BC, a hymn was written to the beer goddess Ninkasi. Yeah, beer was so holy
they had a beer goddess in Mesopotamia. This hymn is not a recipe by modern recipe standards since
it doesn't include any quantities but it does give us clues about the process of brewing beer. I'll
get to that in a minute. But needless to say, beer brewing in Mesopotamia became a lucrative business.
People aged 0 to 100 in all social classes enjoyed it and when the Babylonian King Hammurabi in the
18th century BC wrote his law codes many of the laws were directly or indirectly connected to beer.
And you probably think that Hammurabi, famous for his law an eye for an eye, wrote these beer laws in
order to control people's intake of the drink. But on the contrary one of these beer laws punishes
the brewer who dilutes the beer with water. And the punishment was to be thrown in the Euphrates
river. And that was not to take a bath, basically it was a death sentence. And the message was clear.
Do not mess with someone who wants to drink beer. Some thousand years later in the vast Assyrian
Empire beer brewing was done on such a large scale that the Assyrian King Ashurnasirpal could
offer 100,000 liters of beer at his great feast in Kalhu in 879 BC. Ashurnasirpal also offered 100,000 liters of wine to his foreign guests. But wine was always inferior to beer in ancient Mesopotamia.
There was no wine god or goddess and the drink was solely for the elite, so the kings, queens, and the
gods. But even they preferred beer. Anyway, with the history of beer behind us let us now talk about
how I proceeded to brew ancient Mesopotamian beer. With no experience in fermenting anything and with
an F in chemistry I started the process. I came across an article written by two students from the
University of Helsinki which I'll link to in the description, and I followed the recipe. I brewed
Babylonian date beer in a sealed glass jar from Ikea. And if you know anything about brewing beer
you probably know what happened next. Everything seemed to go fine until day five when suddenly
the jar exploded. I'm not kidding. Fortunately no one was at home when it exploded in the kitchen. What I didn't understand was that I wasn't even brewing beer. I was fermenting dates with water
which is more like the process of making wine. My second attempt was also to use a glass jar from
Ikea. I know some people never learn, but this time I didn't seal the lid. This meant that no pressure
could be built up inside the jar and there was no risk of explosions. The problem with brewing beer
this way however is that I relied on wild yeast to ferment the beer and that made the beer mold
more often than not, and even when it didn't mold it tasted sour and just bad. Not at all how it was
described in ancient clay tablets, sweet and divine. But brewing with no experience didn't do justice
to recreating Mesopotamian beer that was brewed by the best female chemists in the land. So I decided
to recruit a female chemist, my sister Diala. Sorry, this is Diala, but she's named after the river
Diala. As a descendant of the Mesopotamian beer brewers, yep her DNA points to Northern Mesopotamia,
Assyria. Diala took it to another level. She bought equipment that didn't explode and yeast
that wouldn't mold. We also had several discussions with Tate Paulette, an archaeologist and historian,
who probably knows more about Mesopotamian beer than anyone in the world. Which is funny because
his most common answer when we talked was we don't know, which gives perspective to what we're dealing
with. We also talked with a beer brewing expert Diego, from Green Daily brewing in Stockholm. Diego
helped us understand what we were currently doing wrong but also how we could improve our process
to recreate something that looked more like Mesopotamian beer based on all the information we
gave him. After talking with Tate and Diego we used botanical evidence from Mesopotamia for selecting
ingredients and literary sources of what beer was described as, and then we started the process. The process we
used to brew our Mesopotamian beer was inspired by the hymn to Ninkasi. Without going through
the entire hymn I'll compare it to modern beer brewing practices to show you the similarities and
differences. A simplification of the modern beer brewing process would consist of five steps. Step
one is called malting. Barley grains are soaked in water and allowed to germinate. The hymn to Ninkasi
reads "Ninkasi, you're the one who soaks the malt in a jar". Step two in the modern beer brewing process
is called mashing. The malted barley is crushed and mixed with hot water which creates a liquid called
wort, which is then separated from the grains it was mashed with. The hymn to Ninkasi reads
"Ninkasi, you're the one who spreads the cooked mash on large reed mats. You're the one who holds
with both hands the great sweet wor. Ninkasi, the filtering vat which makes a pleasant sound, you
place appropriately on a large collector vat". So far it sounds like the brewers of ancient
Mesopotamia copied the modern process of brewing beer today, except they did it 5,000 years ago. Step
three in the modern beer brewing process is boiling. The wort is transferred to a kettle and brought
to a boil. This is not mentioned in the hymn to Ninkasi so we asked Tate about it and he said they
could have boiled it but we simply don't know. We decided to boil the wort however because
it ensures a more stable fermentation process and also extracts more flavors. The fourth step
in the modern beer brewing process is cooling. After boiling the wort needs to be rapidly
cooled to prepare it for fermentation. And in the hymn to Ninkasi there's a line that reads
"coolness overcomes". The fifth and last step of this simplified modern beer brewing process is
fermenting. The cooled wort is transferred to a fermentation vessel, often a large tank. Then yeast
is added to the wort and fermentation begins. In Mesopotamia they use clay vessels and not tanks,
although some vessels could be several hundred liters big. But when it comes to yeast we don't
really know how the brewers of ancient Mesopotamia started the fermentation process. Most likely
they use spontaneous fermentation which relies on wild yeast present in the environment. That
process would probably have developed lactic acid, a bacteria that is commonly used in modern sour
beers. So to try to replicate that taste but in a controlled environment we relied on a sour
yeast with the lactic acid bacteria in it. So to summarize, the brewers of ancient Mesopotamia
brewed beer very similarly to how beer is brewed today. The main difference is in the ingredients.
Remember the huge oven from the brewery in Lagash? That oven was used for baking the barley bread
called bappir. A unique ingredient present in all Sumerian beers. Bappir could have been used to
flavor the beer, or as a fermentation starter, or both. We decided to use it as a flavoring agent. Other unique ingredients in Mesopotamian beer were date syrup, pomegranate syrup, honey, and
spices such as coriander, cumin, cardamom, sumac, etc. But maybe the biggest difference compared to
modern beers is that Mesopotamian beers totally lacked hops. And I will tell you about the huge
difference it makes in a moment because soon we're ready to taste. So after brewing over and
over for six months we finally made something that tastes good. I had some Swedish beer legends
over, including Diego, who tasted it. They liked one of the beers so much they said I could sell it.
Then Sweden's largest news site tasted it and wrote an article about it. I was also invited to
channel 4 in Sweden where I served the beer to two news anchors on live TV. Honestly I was a little
nervous about their reactions, I mean what if they threw up or something? It's not like you can
edit that out. But fortunately they like liked it too. So what does Mesopotamia beer taste like? And
which one did the experts say I could sell? Honey beer, date beer, or pomegranate beer? Make your guess
now and hit the subscribe button while you're at it. If you want to brew your own Mesopotamian beer
I provided ingredients, sources, and best practices at tableofgods.com/beer where you can sign up
on the waiting list for my upcoming cook and beer book Table of Gods. I'm starting with the
oldest Sumerian honey beer spice with fennel. The licorice scent of fennel is definitely there,
but I can't really taste it. This is so fresh, it's probably because of
the sour yeast that we're using, maybe also of the honey. I'm not sure. But the
honey definitely gives something to it but I can't really notice the sweetness of it, but
it's still there somehow. It's hard to explain. Next up is Babylonian date beer. We spiced this with
coriander and that's a hit because I remember the first times we brewed this it basically tasted
wet horse. I'm not sure if you've had wet horse but that's not a pleasant taste. The beer is
not that sweet although I can taste dates. You've probably never had unsweetened dates
either, but that's a bit what this tastes like. Compared to the honey beer I would say that
this is still more on the sweet side rather than the fresh, and the alcohol content
is also slightly higher. Our last beer is the pomegranate beer, also known as
alappanu in the ancient Assyrian Empire. The scent is fresh, like summery. I think
it's in a different league in terms of taste. Not necessarily worse or better, it just
tastes very different from the other two. And I wonder if it's because the pomegranate is just
a weird fruit. It's sweet, sour, and also bitter. We flavored this beer with cardamom and
honey and I can definitely feel the cardamom all the way from the Indus Valley
where it was imported to the Assyrian Empire. The honey not so much. What's interesting with
this type of beer also is that it was usually offered to the kings, queens, and the Gods. Out of
these three beers, the beer experts liked the honey beer the most. But we've improved on the date
beer and the pomegranate beer since so it's not certain that they would say the same today. But the
question is, how does these beers compare to modern beers? I guess my subjective opinion is of no use,
and that's why I've decided to let other people taste it. So in the next episode I will let people
test these three beers and tell you what they think about it. So subscribe to the channel and hit
the bell to get notified when the episode is out.
