Book Review: Ancient Brews: Rediscivered and Recreated

As one of the far too many hobbies I've picked up over the years, homebrewing is one of my favorites.  The whole science and history of brewing is just so fascinating, so when I got Ancient Brews: Rediscovered and Recreated for Christmas I set right into it.  Patrick Mcgovern is an expert in biochemistry and archeology at Penn University, and he has written several books about the ancient world and the food and drinks to be found there.

The book starts off with a nice explanation of the techniques Mcgovern had used over his time at the University, with all sorts of sampling techniques and both destructive and non destructive testing to break down residues found in ancient containers.  He references this techniques several times through the book, so it might be handy to mark these pages a little more to have for easy reference.  The book then talks about how animals and ancient man likely would have first come into contact with fermented liquids by finding fruits that had fallen to the ground and had been left by chance to find some suitable yeast and grow into a sweet, intoxicating treat.  He then starts at some of the earliest known fermented drinks found in Ancient Mesopotamia.  The book meanders through China, Egypt and Turkey, Northern Europe, and then to Central and South America.  The chapters can get a little repetitive, but hearing about the finds in each place and the way that the archeological teams think some f the recipes and techniques made their way through was fascinating.  The section on how wine supplanted ancient brews in Egypt and how that then spread North to Italy from the Canaanites was especially intriguing, as was the section on the corn chewed beer.

Each chapter ends with some discussion of how these ancient brews were recreated by the team at Dogfish Head Brewing.  Each one of these sections is a little bit boring, since the answer for a lot of the time is to substitute in a modern item because of the expense or difficulty in identifying all of the ancient ingredients.  It then further gives a nice home brew recipe for each one, along with a food pairing.  I have yet to try any of the brews (I have the Hawthorne Berries for Chateau Jihau, but need the time), nor any of the recipes.  They are a little more involved it looks like, but all sound quite scrumptious.

This was an excellent easy read for getting some history of what brews have meant to human culture through time, as well as a nice insight into brewing techniques and the science that allows us to see into the past.  Overall this is a definite 5/5, and its highly recommended.