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To put it bluntly, the Ancient World was a dangerous and terrifying place.

If you lived pretty much any time before the invention of modern medicine and sanitation you were confronted with ages full of ignorance, plague, and things seemingly designed to kill you.

Even something as simple as drinking the water back in the day could lead to a slow and agonising death.

And, that’s where beer comes in.

We’ve been drinking it for thousands of years, for nutritional, social, medicinal, and religious reasons. Most notably, it was a way to stay hydrated, with just enough alcohol to kill pathogens.

Roughly 4 000 years ago, the Sumerian people of southern Mesopotamia wrote the Hymn to Ninkasi, the goddess of beer. Around the same time, Egyptians recorded their brewing methods on their walls.

Ninkasi is a deity I can get behind.

Miraculously, a couple of the recipes for these ancient beers have managed to survive.

Last year, per Atlas Obscura, 3 000-year-old yeast from a jug dug up by archaeologists was fermented into a golden, frothy beer.

“It’s actually a pretty good beer,” says Aren Maeir, an archaeology professor at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and the director of excavations at the site of Tell es-Safi.

Scholarly, but determined that archaeology should be fun, Maeir, upon first tasting the beer, joked that as long as no one died from it, it would be a successful project.

Slapping the slogan ‘as long as no one dies from it, it’s a successful project’ on it, is a great way to kick off marketing.

Journalists were invited to try a sample. No one died.

The team that found the jug reckoned that it was used to brew beer because of holes between the container’s main compartment and its spout, which could have been used to filter out bits of grain leftover from the fermentation process.

Image: bartenders pour beer and mead made with 3 000-year-old yeast that were brewed as part of an archaeological-microbiological study, Judah Ari Gross/Times of Israel

Maeir joined a team of biologists, other archaeologists, and a brewer who isolated yeasts from several ancient yeast colonies discovered within jugs from sites in Israel. They then used these microorganisms to make different types of beer, a few of which they unveiled during a press conference at the Biratenu bar.

These beers were the first of their kind to be made from ancient yeast. It also confirmed suspicions that the jugs were used to make beer. The brewers are thought to be the Philistines.

Thankfully, you don’t need to go in search of a couple of archaeologists to get your hands on a beer with a bit of history thrown into the brewing process.

In 1899, in a brewery near Pico de Orizaba, the highest peak in Mexico, a brewer created a light, refreshing beer made from the water closest to the sun.

The story goes that, as the brewer held up the beer, a ray of sun shone through a hole in the roof onto the transparent bottle and, in honour of the sun, inspired the name Sol.

Here we are, 121 years later, and they’re still going strong.

[source:atlasobscura]