The Recipe for a 2,500 Year Old Celtic Beer

A German archaeobotanist studied an ancient Celtic site and ended up by finding the recipe that was used to make beer, in the year 500 BC.

Dr Hans-Peter Stika, from the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart, Germany, has been studying the remains of an early Iron Age Celtic settlement at Eberdingen-Hochdorf, dating from around 500 BC.

He especially focused on the six oblong ditches dug for the process of making barley malt for beer.

In the excavated ditches, the archeologists found thousand of grains of burned barley, and Dr Stika believes that there are the remains of the production of high quality barley malt, necessary for making beer.

The archaeobotanist tried to reproduce several methods for making beer, that the Celtic people in the Iron Age could have used, and his conclusion was that these ditches were used to soak barley grains until they sprouted.

Then, fires were lit at the ends of the ditch, so that the sprouted grains would slowly dry, and that the produced malt would have a dark color and a smoky flavor.

This slow drying would have also stimulated the growth of bacteria that released the lactic acid, adding a bit of sourness to the final product.

Seeds of henbane were also excavated at Eberdingen-Hochdorf, and it is believed that this plant, also called stinking nightshade, was used to increase the intoxicating effect.

This beer could have probably contained mugwort and/or carrot seeds too, believes Dr Stika, since these ingredients are known to have been added to beer during medieval times.

He adds that these spices would have given the beer a flavor completely different from the hop flavor we know today – hop was not used before 800 AD.

Also, it seems that the fermentation was probably produced by yeast on the brewing equipment, or by wild yeast on honey or fruit added to the brew.

The final beer would have been murky, with a yeasty sediment, and the brew would have been drunk at room temperature, PhysOrg reports.

These Celtic findings are not the oldest beer and beer-making discoveries, since brewing facilities dating to around 5,500 years ago have already been found in the Middle East.

The findings are published in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.