Sumerian Beer a Non-alcoholic Brew?

Brewers like to trace the history of their art back to ancient Sumer in Mesopotamia, but cuneiform writing scholar Peter Damerow of the Max Planck Institute might have burst the bubble on their beer foam.

“Given our limited knowledge about the Sumerian brewing processes, we cannot say for sure whether their end product even contained alcohol”, wrote Damerow in the Cuneiform Digital Library Journal.

Many 4,000 year old cuneiform tablets refer to deliveries of wheat, barley, and malt to Sumerian breweries, and the Hymn of Ninkasi from about 1800 BC praises brewing. But there are no hard details about the process.

Beer historians believed that the Sumerians first prepared bread, then used that to make “bappir,” Sumerian for bread beer. But Damerow notes that cuneiform tablets never make this clear and only record measurements of the raw ingredients.

Archaeologists from the Ludwig Maximilian Universität together with brewing experts from the Technische Universität München carried out an experiment near the archeological site of Tall Bazi, Syria in an attempt to replicate the bygone beer of Sumer.

Damerow believed that although the experiment produced a brew, it only demonstrated that modern methods can produce a beer under the conditions at Tall Bazi. But he did think the Tall Bazi experiment was a step in the right direction towards understanding how the Sumerians got their drink on.

Read more at Discovery News