Explore Ancient Brews: Rediscovered And Re-created Fabricated By Patrick E. McGovern Presented In Paper Edition

think it was likely the narrator of this audio book that made the material seem so very dry, I mean, this is fascinating stuff, how ancient peoples made booze and how Dogfish Head recreated them, But, it just seemed to lumber on and my motivation to even continue listening to it waned, I mean, he couldn't even pronounce things correctly and had this homebrewer and Certified Cicerone genuinely confused about some of the information, So, ima blame the narrator and not the material for the rating Fascinating combination of beer, science, and history AND I've drunk most of the beers described! Logging the last of myreads today so that they'll count towards this year's Reading Challenge totals.
Full review coming in early, Interesting stuff if you're really into archeology, history and alcohol, Not really my thing overall, but wellresearched and would probably hold a lot of interest for a homebrewer, Great as an audiobook . A detailed account of the authors journey to uncover the ingredients of ancient fermented beverages, Chapters are roughly broken into geographic regions, cultures, and the resulting modern approximation of the ancient brew, Many of these modern brews are done in conjunction with Dogfish Head Craft Brewed Ales, Overall a solid book. The only negative point I can think of is the authors extreme use of the word extreme, I blame Sam Calagione. Interesting blend of discovery, science, and beer of course!, The challenge is that these threads weave together in an almost distracting way, Plus, the “discovery” is more about the chemical residues than the adventure, which might not be what folks are thinking when diving into an archaeology book, Nevertheless, wellwritten and the athome recipes themselves are worth the price of the book, I come by my interest in this subject matter by way of my vocation I've had an interest in ancient beer since working on an archaeological site in Iceland, where we were pretty certain we'd unearthed evidence of ancient beer making.
So I'm an archaeologist, a researcher, a traveler and a beer enthusiast so this book was practically written for me, wasn't it
This isn't a research book, which personally disappointed me just a little, but in fairness it doesn't claim to be.
It doesn't include the sorts of technical details you'd expect of a research paper and McGovern has published many of those, But there is a huge general interest in exploring and tasting! the roots of beer production, which this book is capitalizing on, inspired by the topical trend of the booming craft beer industry.
It's part research, part travelogue, and part recipe book, Unfortunately I found the reading a little dry considering the subject matter McGovern is a research visionary and an accomplished academic who is considered the world's leading authority in this sort of analysis, but he's not a novelist with a good sense of pacing and perhaps a little flair for the dramatic.
And unless I'm an experienced beer brewer dedicated to hunting down rare and unusual ingredients like Irish moss, purple corn, or meadowsweet to experiment with, which I'm not, the recipes are pretty unapproachable.

It's not a bad book at all especially not for someone with interests similar to my own, It goes without stating that its wellresearched and the subject matter is certainly interesting it just lacks the spark that keeps you turning the pages or imprints the information deeply into your psyche so that you can share the next time you're enjoying a craft beer with your friends at the local pub.
quite good, but geographically off, .

Honduras is not on the Gulf of Mexico, theobroma section This was a book about the history and archaeology of alcoholic beverages, In theory, this should have been really interesting, but in practice, the book was really poorly written,

The author, Pat McGovern, is a chemical archaeologist he studies the history of alcoholic beverages by analyzing the chemical residues in ancient pottery, In addition to studying ancient beverages, he's also helped to recreate them, working with Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head breweries, Together, they've made a line of "Ancient Ales", which you can buy at certain liquor stores,

The book was organized around these Ancient Ales each chapter corresponded to one of them, The general format of these chapters was that McGovern would explain the archaeological discoveries that had led to the recreation often including the story of his own archaeological work, and then he would talk about the process that he and Calagione went through to adapt these archaeological findings into a new beer.


Some of the chapters seemed decently wellwritten, but others just utterly failed to cohere, In general, the writing didn't seem to follow any clear line of discussion, and I had trouble figuring out what point McGovern was trying to make, He threw in miscellaneous archaeological and autobiographical facts, seemingly at random, in a way that felt more like it was about padding the word count than providing useful information to the reader.
It felt like one of those books that happens when the publisher calls up the author and says "Hey, can you write a book on this topic by this deadline", and then the author struggles to write a Ancient Brews's worth of material in time.
Alternatively, maybe McGovern was just drunk the entire time he wrote it,

The chapters at the end seemed least coherent, They were about Theobroma, a chocolatebased drink, and Chicha, a cornbased one, The random facts seemed to be hiding the fact that actually, they didn't have much archaeological info to go on for these drinks, It sounded like we really don't have that much archaeological evidence for Chicha, And although there's lots of archaeological evidence of chocolate use, the book didn't make it clear whether any of those chocolatebased drinks had been alcoholic and it felt like maybe the writing was trying to cover up the fact that they weren't.


So anyway, this book was probably not worth reading, and I wish I'd gotten this same info out of online articles instead, But I did learn a few bits of actual factual content:

Up until recently, the Reinheitsgebot a German beer purity law which says that beer can only be made from barley malt, hops, and yeast has held sway.
Craft breweries, with their adventurous beers, didn't really become a thing until around the year, I hadn't realized this, since I wasn't anywhere nearat that time,

I had always thought that alcohol was discovered relatively late, like, after the agricultural revolution hence why there's a higher incidence of alcoholism in populations that are new to agriculture.
But McGovern hypothesizes that humans have known about and deliberately consumed alcohol since early in our evolutionary history, To support this, he argues that all sorts of animals deliberately seek out alcoholically fermented fruit, Anyway, it's definitely just a hypothesis, and a somewhat romantic and fanciful one at that, But it's one I'd never considered before,

I had also always thought that early beverages were low in alcohol, and that the point wasn't to get drunk, but to create a source of carbs that would not go bad, and also to create a source of liquid that couldn't be contaminated by harmful microorganisms.
But according to McGovern, the ancients wanted beverages with a high alcohol content, because they like us appreciated alcohol's psychoactive properties,

In order to achieve this high alcohol content, they basically just mixed together everything that would ferment, and turned that into a beverage, Rather than making wine, mead, or beer, they'd throw grapes, honey, and grain all together in one fermenting vessel, For whatever reason probably just to make them sound cool, McGovern calls these hybrid beverages "extreme fermented beverages",

A lot of the recreated beers didn't seem very faithful to the original they just mixed together any ingredient that had appeared in any archaeological find in a given region, rather than trying to recreate a specific rediscovered beverage.
But there was one, Midas Touch, which did seem to be a faithful recreation, It was based on residues found in an ancient Phrygian tomb, which either belonged to the historical King Midas, or, more likely, to his father King Gordias who is said to have tied the Gordian knot.
Apparently, this king was buried with a huge amount of food and drink, and it ended up being very wellpreserved, so archaeologists were able to study the residues in depth.
It was a combined winemeadbeer,

The Canaanites / Phoenicians were some of the first people to make wine see sitelink wikipedia. org/wiki/Phoenic . Prior to them, everyone was making these "extreme fermented beverages" out of anything they could find, But the Canaanites and Phoenicians made wine, and traded it to their neighbors in the Mediterranean it became a very highprestige item, They would get other cultures interested in the wine via trade, and then they would come and help those cultures develop their own

vineyards and wineries, In doing so they spread both their grapevines and their wine culture around the Mediterranean, thus displacing earlier beverages, The book talks about the traditional beer of the Egyptians, and the traditional drink of the Etruscans, which were two of the beverages that got displaced, Interestingly, the Phoenician wines were made with tree resins possibly as a preservative,

Some ancient beer was made by first baking bread and then making the beer out of the bread instead of going straight from the grains to the beer.


Corn beer in South America called Chicha is traditionally made by chewing the corn first to get the salivary amylase to convert starches to sugars,

The book made two mistakes which I consider unforgivable, and which contribute to the low rating, The first was that it described the Etruscans as a Celtic people which spoke a nonIndoEuropean language, which is a contradiction, The second is that it used the word "quixotic" as if it meant a combination of quirky and exotic,

I do not recommend reading this book, .