• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Advertise
  • About Craft Brewing Business

Craft Brewing Business

Professional Insight, Unfiltered

  • News
  • Business & Marketing
  • Ingredients & Supplies
  • Packaging & Distribution
  • Equipment
  • Webinars & White Papers
  • COVID-19

Great Lakes Brewing recreates ancient brewing techniques, says NY Times

June 20, 2013Chris Crowell

Great Lakes Brewery 25th Anniversary
25 years? Pfff. That’s nothing. Try a few centuries, then come talk to us.

Stainless steel equipment, globally sourced ingredients, nationwide distribution — if only the ancient Sumerians could see the craft beer industry now.

Ah yes, the Sumerians. The people that were into craft beer before it was cool, or rather, before it existed.  Historians and archaeologists trace the roots of brewing back to these ancient people, most notably from the Hymn to Ninkasi, the Sumerian goddess of beer. According to this great article in The New York Times, Great Lakes Brewing Co. is working with the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago to replicate a 5,000-year-old Sumerian beer using only clay vessels and a wooden spoon.

In place of stainless steel tanks, the Oriental Institute gave the brewery ceramic vessels modeled after artifacts excavated in Iraq during the 1930s. In keeping with the archaeological evidence, the team successfully malted its own barley on the roof of the brew house. It also asked a Cleveland baker to help make a brick-like “beer bread” for use as a source of active yeast — by far the most difficult step in the process.

What Craft Brewing Business finds most interesting about this feature actually is how the motivation is almost entirely non-business related.

Great Lakes has no plan to sell its brew, also based on the Hymn to Ninkasi, to the public. The project, unlike others that recreate old recipes on modern equipment, is an educational exercise more than anything else. It has been shaped by a volley of emails with Sumerian experts in Chicago as both sides try to better understand an “off the grid” approach that has proved more difficult than first thought.

Having said that though, the public will be able to try it out at some point:

The company is making plans to showcase its Sumerian beer at events in Cleveland and Chicago by the end of this summer, offering a public tasting of the final brew alongside an identical recipe made with more current brewing techniques.

Definitely head over The New York Times and read the full story.

Scientists are sequencing the hop genome and discovering some medical potential
Know your barley: These high-performing, craft-centric varieties from LCS and Breun swept MSU’s spring trials
Brewer Education Guide Feature
UC Davis Brewing Spring courses on foam, flavor and recipe scaling open for enrollment
R-Yeast-yeast-shot-2-med-res
This novel lager yeast could revolutionize commercial lager production

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. LarryEngel says

    September 15, 2013 at 11:43 am

    RT @craftbrewingbiz: @GLBC_Cleveland recreates ancient brewing techniques. Cool story from the NYTimes. http://t.co/wgtrXdyn12 #sundayread

    Log in to Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Primary Sidebar

Latest News

  • Craftpeak launches Square integration within its digital storefront
  • Why (and how) Cabarrus Brewing will stick with online sales post-lockdown
  • Marketing Idea of the Week: CraftHaus Brewery’s scratch ‘n sniff cans
  • Portland Cider Co. donates $12,500 to Hunger-Free Schools

Sign up for our newsletter

unsubscribe from list

Most Popular Today

Recent Features

  • libdib online beer distributorWhy (and how) Cabarrus Brewing will stick with online sales post-lockdown
    February 25, 2021
  • craft beer consumer tastesCraft Beer Consumer Habits in February 2021: Are on-site attitudes changing?
    February 24, 2021
  • No and low alcohol beer grew 30+ percent last year, now enjoy some big haps in the NA beer sector
    February 23, 2021
  • How to Seduce a Distributor: The importance of branding, common misconceptions and automatic disqualifiers
    February 22, 2021
  • I would totally sit in a hot tub of hops and drink chill pints at this new beer spa in Denver
    February 18, 2021
  • truly hard seltzer‘Truly’ crushing it: Boston Beer nets over $1.7 billion in 2020 revenue
    February 18, 2021

Footer

  • Email Newsletter Sign Up
  • About Craft Brewing Business
  • Contact Us
  • Advertise on Craft Brewing Business
  • Media Kit Download
  • Privacy and Terms

© 2021 · CBB Media LLC

Continue ...

sponsored by