2,500-Year-Old Booze Brewed Up From Recipe Found In Iron Age Burial: Would you dare drink the forbidden brew?

IFLScience ^ | March 3, 2023 | Laura Simmons

[SunkenCiv]

Bones, ancient grooming tools, even gold – these are all things you might expect to find if you go poking around an Iron Age burial site. What you might not expect to find is your new favorite tipple. But, back in 2016, archaeologists were stunned to uncover a 2,500-year-old cauldron that contained the remnants of an ancient alcoholic beverage.

Project lead Bettina Arnold, from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, was investigating a burial mound – called a tumulus – dating back to between 400 and 450 BCE, when she and her team came across what appeared to be a bronze cauldron. But it wasn’t only the vessel itself that was largely intact...

That contents amounted to nearly 14 liters (3.7 gallons) of an unknown alcoholic beverage, that had been buried along with the occupant of the tumulus. As the researchers explained in a blog post, the cauldron full of booze, as well as the weapons he had been interred with... we can see how arriving in the afterlife with 14 liters of liquor could help with that.

Of course, the only logical next step for the team was to figure out if they could make some of the ancient brew and taste it for themselves. They enlisted the services of palaeobotanist Dr Manfred Rösch, who was able to analyze the cauldron contents and come up with a rough idea of the recipe...

The beverage was determined to have most likely been a type of mead called a braggot, whose origins go back way into the distant past, long before Chaucer mentioned it in his Canterbury Tales. And, luckily for Arnold and the team, one of the cellarmasters at local Milwaukee beer producers the Lakefront Brewery, Chad Sheridan, had a fair amount of experience brewing this particular drink.

[SunkenCiv]

“a type of mead”

Mead ain’t beer.