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Phrygians were brewing with barley before it was cool. Resurrecting ancient beers and wines is a subtle alchemy, but Patrick McGovern knows all the tricks. He directs the Biomolecular Archaeology Project for Cuisine, Fermented Beverages, and Health at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Many of his ancient brews are sold by Dogfish Head brewery in Delaware. How did you start making ancient drinks? One of the first we made was the Midas beverage, based on residues in bronze vessels recovered from the Midas tomb in Turkey, which dates from 700 B.C. These pointed to an unusual drink combining wine, barley...

Residues of pottery sherds from ancient Scandinavian settlements dating as far back as 1200 B.C. are the inspiration for Delaware-based brewey Dogfish Head's latest ancient ale, Kvasir. Patrick McGovern, a bioarchaeolgist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum and frequent collaborator with Dogfish Head on these brews calls the drink a Nordic grog. The recipe for Kvasir, which is available in limited quantities now, involves yarrow, lingonberries, cranberries, bog myrtle, and birch syrup. Prior to Kvasir, Dogfish Head brewed Midas Touch, influenced by residues taken from 2,700-year-old pottery found in Turkey, and Chateau Jiahu, an ale that traces its history back...

The domestication of wild grains has played a major role in human evolution, facilitating the transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to one based on agriculture. You might think that the grains were used for bread, which today represents a basic staple. But some scientists argue that it wasn’t bread that motivated our ancestors to start grain farming. It was beer. Man, they say, chose pints over pastry. Beer has plenty to recommend it over bread. First, and most obviously, it is pleasant to drink. “Beer had all the same nutrients as bread, and it had one additional advantage,” argues Solomon...

More than 30 ancient anchors have been discovered near the small Sicilian island of Pantelleria. Leonardo Abelli of the University of Sassari says that the anchors were abandoned by the Carthaginians during the First Punic War more than 2,000 years ago. The Romans had captured the strategically located island with a fleet of more than 300 ships. “The Carthaginian ships that were stationing near Patelleria had no other choice than hiding near the northern coast and trying to escape. To do so, they cut the anchors free and left them in the sea. They also abandoned part of their cargo...

Enlarge Image Bottoms up. Lager, as we know it, is likely a hybrid of S. cerevisiae and a newly discovered yeast from Patagonia. Credit: Stephan Zabel/iStockphoto Lager may have its roots in Bavaria, but a key ingredient arrived from halfway around the world. Scientists have discovered that the yeast used to brew this light-colored beer may hail from Argentina. Apparently, yeast cells growing in Patagonian trees made their way to Europe and into the barrels of brewers. Through the ages, brewers have tried to make their beers better, for instance, by improving on taste or color or making them...

Did our Neolithic ancestors turn to agriculture so that they could be sure of a tipple? US Archaeologist Patrick McGovern thinks so. The expert on identifying traces of alcohol in prehistoric sites reckons the thirst for a brew was enough of an incentive to start growing crops... Here is how the story likely began -- a prehistoric human picked up some dropped fruit from the ground and popped it unsuspectingly into his or her mouth. The first effect was nothing more than an agreeably bittersweet flavor spreading across the palate. But as alcohol entered the bloodstream, the brain started sending...

This summer, how would you like to lean back in your lawn chair and toss back a brew made from what may be the world’s oldest recipe for beer? Called Chateau Jiahu, this blend of rice, honey and fruit was intoxicating Chinese villagers 9,000 years ago—long before grape wine had its start in Mesopotamia. University of Pennsylvania molecular archaeologist Patrick McGovern first described the beverage in 2005 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences based on chemical traces from pottery in the Neolithic village of Jiahu in Northern China. Soon after, McGovern called on Sam Calagione at the...

Scholars have always suspected that the ancients had odd tastes. If you believe Homer, wise old Nestor, veteran of the Trojan War, enjoyed a few scrapings of goat's cheese and a dollop of honey in his wine. And Homer might have been right: archaeologists often find little bronze cheese graters in later Greek graves which they think were part of a drinking kit. But until now there has been no good evidence that the Minoans and their mainland neighbours the Mycenaeans knew how to brew beer or mead, let alone mixed them into cocktails. After painstaking chemical analysis of cups,...

Two wine presses found in Egypt were likely part of the area's earliest winery, producing holy wine for export to Christians abroad, archaeologists say. Egyptian archaeologists discovered the two presses with large crosses carved across them near St. Catherine's Monastery, a sixth-century A.D. complex near Mount Sinai on the Sinai Peninsula. (See a map of the area.) More presses are likely to be found in the area, which was probably an ancient wine-industry hub, according to Tarek El-Naggar, director for southern Sinai at Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities. Weeks after discovering the first wine press, excavators unearthed a nearly identical...

Since Colchis was famous in antiquity for gold and precious metal -- it's where the Greek hero Jason went to grab the legendary Golden Fleece -- you'd be wearing gold-spangled robes while pouring and drinking your famous Colchian wine from gold or silver vessels. You'd also be so rich you could afford to bury your wine service with you... A fascinating exhibition, "Wine, Worship & Sacrifice: The Golden Graves of Ancient Vani" at the Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., through Feb. 24, gives a thrilling image of the plenty that nobility enjoyed in that far corner of the ancient...

California Draft Gore Poised to Put Gore's Name on BallotWed Sep 26, 3:56 PM ET To: POLITICAL EDITORS Contact: Roy Gayhart, +1-858-581-1024, roy@california4gore.org, or Patrick McGovern, +1-812-219-0180, LA@california4gore.org, or Chris Vallone, +1-415-336-0796, all for California Draft Gore SACRAMENTO, Calif., Sept. 26 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Organizers of California Draft Gore, a grassroots campaign to put Al Gore's name on the California presidential primary ballot, announced today that the campaign has volunteers located in or assigned to all of the state's 53 congressional districts. Originally convening on websites like algore.org, meetup.com, savethewhitehouse.com and draftgore.com, California Gore supporters quickly built the infrastructure necessary to...

Ancient Mashed Grapes Found in Greece Jennifer Viegas, Discovery NewsAncient Grapes March 16, 2007 — Either the ancient Greeks loved grape juice, or they were making wine nearly 6,500 years ago, according to a new study that describes what could be the world’s earliest evidence of crushed grapes. If the charred 2,460 grape seeds and 300 empty grape skins were used to make wine, as the researchers suspect, the remains might have belonged to the second oldest known grape wine in the world, edged out only by a residue-covered Iranian wine jug dating to the sixth millennium B.C. Since the...

LONDON - King Tutankhamen was a red wine drinker, according to a researcher who analyzed traces of the vintage found in his tomb. Maria Rosa Guasch-Jane told reporters Wednesday at the British Museum that she made her discovery after inventing a process that gave archaeologists a tool to discover the color of ancient wine. "This is the first time someone has found an ancient red wine," she said. Wine bottles from King Tut's time were labeled with the name of the product, the year of harvest, the source and the vine grower, Guasch-Jane said, but did not include the color...

WASHINGTON - The Chinese were consuming fermented beverages — possibly wine — as long as 9,000 years ago, according to scientists who used modern techniques to peer back through the mists of time.Early evidence of beer and wine had been traced to the ancient Middle East. But the new discovery indicates that the Chinese may have been making their drinks even earlier.“Fermented beverages are central to a lot of our religions, social relations, medicine, in many cultures around the world,” said Patrick E. McGovern of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. These drinks “have played key roles...

China was drinking wine 9,000 years ago By Roger Highfield, Science Editor (Filed: 07/12/2004) A mixed fermented wine of rice, honey and fruit was being drunk in northern China 9,000 years ago, more than a thousand years before the previously oldest known fermented drinks, brewed in the Middle East. In the past scientists relied on the stylistic similarities of early pottery and bronze vessels to argue for the existence of a prehistoric fermented beverage in China. Today's findings provide the first direct chemical evidence from ancient China for such beverages, which were of cultural, religious, and medical significance. Dr Patrick...

The modern diners sitting before Sams were about to eat the first reconstruction of that feast—a celebration that had remained undiscovered for decades after archaeologist Rodney S. Young first excavated Midas' tomb in 1957. Ancient Roman, Greek, or even Maya banquets had been re-created previously, but generally from texts and ancient recipes. Not so with the Midas feast. "It's the first time that somebody tried to do it working just from the chemical evidence," says Patrick E. McGovern, the museum's molecular archaeologist who led the analyses. In other words, from the pan scrapings.

First Wine? Archaeologist Traces Drink to Stone Age William Cocke for National Geographic News July 21, 2004An expert on ancient wine, Patrick McGovern is searching for the origins of the first domesticated grapevine. Above, the University of Pennsylvania archaeologist searches a ravine near the headwaters of the Tigris River in Turkey's Taurus Mountains for grapevines untouched by human cultivation. Photograph courtesy P.E. McGovern Wine snobs might shudder at the thought, but the first wine-tasting may have occurred when Paleolithic humans slurped the juice of naturally fermented wild grapes from animal-skin pouches or crude wooden bowls. The idea of winemaking may...

Patrick McGovern "The site is very rich archeologically, has been excavated for the last 50 years by the University of Pennsylvania Museum. It has a large palace area with rooms, some of which are thought to have been kitchens for making the food for the palace, with jars of barley and other goods. Also, it has a whole series of tombs in which the burial was done in a special wooden chamber beneath a very large mound. It's almost as if you cut it yesterday and put the structure together. It is the earliest intact human building made of...

The history of drinking Uncorking the past Dec 20th 2001 Recreating old drinks provides an enjoyable form of time-travelling IT MAY be small—each molecule is less than a billionth of a metre long, and consists of a handful of atoms of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen—but ethyl alcohol makes an excellent time machine. People have enjoyed alcoholic drinks since prehistoric times, making drinking one of the few strands that runs throughout the history of western civilisation. Appreciating the art, music or literature of long-vanished cultures can require years of study; recreating their drinks, and comparing them to what we enjoy today, ...