Wanna get some real beer snob cred? With Egtved Girl’s Brew, you can sneer at your friends’ beers and their “founded in the 1800s” claims to authenticity. Because this beer’s recipe is 3,300 years old. Now that’s a legit brew.
Yes, Egtved Girl’s Brew is made from a recipe that dates all the way back to the Bronze Age, 1,370 years BCE. This brew, made in a partnership between the Danish National Museum and Skands Brewery, is based directly on the vintage stuff: residue samples taken from a bark beer bucket buried in an ancient coffin discovered in Denmark in 1921.
Egtved Girl must’ve gotten pretty thirsty in the afterlife — either that, or 3,300 years in the ground led to an unfortunate leak in her beer vessel. So the brewers and historians who determined the beer’s ingredients from the dried residue had to improvise to come up with the proper recipe.
“We had the basic list for the beer, but the challenge was to find the relationship between the ingredients, and we had to taste our way to a result,” said Peter Steen Henriksen, curator at the Danish National Museum. “So, is our new brew the drink Egtved Girl’s people took to their graves? We cannot know for certain, but it’s an educated guess.”
You can buy the ancient beer, a wheat beer with flavours of malt, honey, bog myrtle, and cranberry, directly from the Danish National Museum. Now that’s some old-school brew. [Danish National Museum via PastHorizons]