Mesopotamian Beer
This is not a step-by-step recipe page. Instead, my goal is to give you all the resources you need to brew Mesopotamian beer based on your preferences. I’m still experimenting with it, and I hope you will too!
Don’t forget to share your thoughts and experiments – successes or failures – in the comments here.
The history of Mesopotamian beer.
Watch this video to learn how humans started brewing beer and how it evolved in Mesopotamian society. I’ll also show you how I brewed it.
Ancient vs modern beer.
In this video, I let people blind test date beer, pomegranate beer, and honey beer – and compare them to similar but modern beers.
Ingredients
Malt
It’s most convenient to buy malt instead of making it yourself, which can be tedious and not always yield the desired results. Buy malt based on barley or wheat. If you’re making a southern Mesopotamian beer, it should only include barley malt. But northern Mesopotamian (Assyrian) beer can combine barley and wheat malt. Experiment with different malts until you find something you like. You’re not allowed to use hops in any circumstances!
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Sugars
While date and pomegranate syrups were the most popular, you can also use syrups from a wide range of other fruits. Grapes (more common in Northern Mesopotamia), figs, and apricots. Ensure there is no added sugar – but 100% syrup from the fruit. Otherwise, it’s pretty easy to make syrups from fruits by yourself. If you don’t want to use syrups, use honey instead. Just make sure it’s unpasteurized. You can also combine honey and fruit syrup, as we did with the pomegranate beer.
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Spices
Here’s where you can get creative. In the early days of ancient Mesopotamia, the brewers used coriander, mint (be careful with it since it’s a potent herb), fennel, sumac, cumin, black cumin, thyme, saffron, mustard, and even garlic or onion. Just imagine how cool it would be to offer someone a garlic beer! From around 2000 BC, many spices from the Indus Valley found their way to Mesopotamia. The most popular were cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, and turmeric.
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Bappir
This is a barley bread made with two ingredients, barley flour, and water. The brewers of Mesopotamia probably added sourdough to let it rise slightly (barley bread doesn’t rise much due to low gluten content). But you can use dry yeast if that’s more comfortable. No one knows how this bread looked, tasted, or even where it was used in the process (more on that later). But for 5 liters (1,3 gallons) of water, we used 7 dl (3 cups) barley flour, 150g (5 ounces) sourdough starter (or 1 tablespoon dry yeast) and 3 dl (1,3 cups) water. Knead it to a dough and let rise under a baking cloth for 1 hour. Bake it in the middle of the oven for 25 minutes at 200° Celsius or 390° Fahrenheit.
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Yeast
We used Philly Sour – yeast with the lactic acid bacteria present. But you can also use “normal yeast” and add the lactic acid bacteria. The reason we wanted to have the lactic acid bacteria present in our beer, is because it was likely present in ancient Mesopotamian beer too. And it gives the beer a fresh taste too.
Brewing
Mashing
You’re going to need a thermometer. To make the wort sweeter, we mashed on temperatures between 65-75° Celsius or 149-147° Fahrenheit. How long you keep that temperature depends on the malt you use. It’s in this step, we used the Bappir. So we mashed it with the malt and filtered out everything before boiling.
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Boiling
Here’s where we added our sugars and spices. The syrups or honey should be added early in the boiling process. Stir thoroughly so it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the kettle. Then leave it to boil on high heat for 60 minutes. Five minutes before it's done boiling add the spices using a brewing bag. Leave the spices in for 5 minutes, then remove.
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Cooling
Fill the sink with cold water and put the kettle in it until it reaches the right temperature for your yeast. That temperature is usually between 25-35° Celsius ​or 77-95° Fahrenheit. However, check what your yeast recommends.
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Fermenting
Before moving your brew to a brewing vessel you can use a hydrometer to measure the alcohol content. You will need to measure the value both before you begin fermenting and after the brew is done fermenting to calculate the alcohol content. When you have transfered your brew to a vessel, you add the yeast. How much yeast you need depends on how much liquid you have. How long you need to ferment the beer also depends on the yeast you’re using.
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Carbon dioxide
Cool your beer! That’s how they drank it 5,000 years ago. But adding sugar to carbonate the beer will divert from the original beers of ancient Mesopotamia. Although they could’ve been slightly carbonated, it was nothing close to modern carbonated beers. But don’t let that limit you. If you want to carbonate your ancient beer, by all means, do it. The ancients would probably have done it too!