a morning with maltsters, part two

Making malt involves a huge amount of knowledge, skill and experience. This is the second part of my write up of an Orkney Science Festival event that I was fortunate to attend. Making Malt took place on the morning of 7th September at the Highland Park Distillery, Kirkwall. If you haven't read part one, see here.

There were twelve tickets available. Malt, malting and the history of the craft is something that I'm particularly interested in, so I bought two tickets on the first day that they were available. Well worth it. The second presentation of the morning, by Distillery Manager Marie Stanton, was about the practice and techniques of floor malting. She gave us a fascinating insight into the craft.

To make good malt, she said, you need good quality barley as well as common sense, experience, commitment and an unnatural obsession with the weather. The first four things seem obvious but, the weather? What's that got to do with making malt? Malt is a living thing, it requires careful handling and processing. The maltster needs to be very much aware of the weather, looking after the barley on the floor as it begins to germinate and adjusting things accordingly. In cold weather, the barley is couched, or heaped up deeper on the floor. In warm weather, such as the day the seminar was held, they had been raking it out thinner, to cool it. The grain generates heat as it germinates on the floor.

This is the ancient craft of floor malting, a craft that has been around for thousands of years. Decisions about length of steep, depth of bed and readiness for the kiln are based upon years of experience, knowledge and skill.

The steep is about more than just getting the barley wet before it goes onto the germination floor. Water temperature is important, as well as several air rests. Grain left in water will drown and be no good for germination. The idea is to rehydrate the harvested and stored grain up to about 45% moisture.

When sufficiently steeped, the grain is couched, spread, turned and raked regularly according to temperature and conditions. It begins to germinate. This might sound straightforward, but there's more to it than you might think. I'll write about this in the next blog, the tour of the Maltings. When we were visiting, malt was drying in the kiln but there was none on the floors.

steeped grain on the malting floors at the Highland Park Distillery, Kirkwall, Orkney
source: undiscovered Scotland where there is more about floor maltings

The presentation on Making Malt continued. Bowls of barley were passed round.

One contained freshly steeped barley. It had the aroma of wet grain, as you might expect. Another contained barley that had been on the floor and had begun to germinate. This had a pleasant, fresh, almost floral aroma which is hard to describe. The two bowls had very different aromas, although they were just a couple of days' processing apart. This was something I did not expect, these aromas of germinating barley.

There is some complex chemistry going on inside the grain as it begins to germinate. If you want to know more about the biochemistry and physiology of grain germination, there's a reading list at the end of the blog.

The purpose of germination is to allow the embryo to grow, just a little. Enzymes develop and begin to degrade the beta glutens, proteins and cell walls. This is known as modification. When the grain (green malt) is sufficiently modified, it's ready for the kiln.

The malt is dried slowly and gently, to preserve the enzymes. They will be needed in the mash tun. Although there is a fierce fire, the malt is not put directly above it. Hot air and smoke from the fire needs to pass along the flue and through the bed of malted grain, drying it gently over several days. The malt steams as it dries. Both peat and coke are used as fuel. The wet malt takes on flavour from the peat smoke. It's turned regularly in the kiln, to ensure an even drying process. The maltster does not want the malt to be too dry, does not want roots, but they do want plenty of enzymes. It's important to know your kiln, we were told. Each one is different and the drying of the green malt from the floor is a matter of great skill, experience and knowledge.

After kilning, the malt needs to rest for a few weeks before it is used. There was some discussion in the room about why this should be and why it affects the flavour. It seems that the complex chemical processes of this resting period are still not understood. There was general agreement that rested and unrested malt should not be mixed together. 

At the end of the presentation, a bowl of the finished malt was passed round. We were told that we could have a taste.

It was delicious, each malted grain imbued with a peaty, smoky aroma, very good indeed.

Next, the tour of the maltings. We saw bubbling steep tanks, malt chariots and shiels. We saw the malt, steaming in the kilns. As we went in I realised I'd forgotten my camera. I made notes, not just about what we saw on the tour, but also some thoughts on origins of this ancient craft and the potential archaeological evidence for it.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

After completing my Master's in 1999, I tried to get funding for a PhD looking into the history and prehistory of malting and the archaeological evidence for malt. I didn't get any funding, but I did get to spend several years preparing funding applications. I worked with brewing scientists and therefore I had access to their library at UMIST, Manchester, where I read up on malting and brewing science, grain germination physiology. I can't say that I understand it all but I learned a lot. 

Here are a few books that cover the subject in detail:

Bewley and Black 1994 Seeds: Physiology and Development

This is about all seeds, see the chapters on barley, barley germination, malting

Dennis Briggs 1998 Malts and Malting

This is what maltsters call “the bible”.





D E Briggs, R S Stevens, Tom Young, J S Hough 1981 Malting and Brewing Science: Malt and Sweet Wort, Vol 1, Springer US
There is a second volume on hopped wort and beer.

saccharification or what happens in the mash tun

I'm picking up the blog again, after taking quite a long time off. To my surprise, folk have been reading our past posts, so thank you very much indeed for that.

One of the reasons that I started this blog was to try and deal with some peculiar misunderstandings about how beer and ale are made. In the archaeological and anthropological literature you can read all sorts of odd things about brewing beer in prehistory and how it was invented. Malt is rarely mentioned.

I have read that "... beer was invented when some barley got wet in a bucket and then it fermented" or, and I read this very recently, that "... beer is one of the most important of human inventions, as it is likely to be one of the key reasons that farming was started, in order to grow hops for brewing ..."

You need malt, not hops, to provide the fermentable sugars to make beer and ale. This blog is about what happens to the malt in the mash tun - the transformation from grain starch into sugars.

Most people don't have the opportunity to see or to experience this magical process. We are fortunate, we have our own mash tun in the garage and we regularly make some very tasty ale and beer, using crushed malt that we buy directly from the maltster. We can go online and buy the malt. It's delivered to the door. We buy 25 kg at a time and it's always very fresh and good malt.

Our mash tun can take about sixteen or seventeen pounds of malt and we usually make about ten or eleven gallons of beer. That lasts us a while, so we don't have to make it too often.

We can choose how strong or weak we want the beer to be. We do this by deciding how much malt to use and how much water to sparge with. We can add hops or herbs, whatever we decide to do. In the past we've made some very good ancient ales in our mash tun - meadowsweet is the usual herb of choice because we live on Orkney and it grows profusely here. So we can go and pick it in July/August, dry it, store it and use it whenever we want to. We'd like to try other herbs. I'm just starting to grow a brewers herb garden, so far I have yarrow, heather, meadowsweet and angelica. Mostly we use hops.

What happens in the mash tun? Saccharification. The creation of sweetness that can be fermented. Grain starch is converted into malt sugar in the mash tun by enzymes in the malt.

Where do the enzymes come from? Basically, when any grain begins to germinate, starch converting enzymes are activated in the aleurone layer of cells, just beneath the grain husk. These enzymes convert the starch of the endosperm into sugars, the food source for the growing plant. The maltster's job is to begin germination, then stop it and dry it, very gently, at just the right moment. The craft of the maltster goes back to the dawn of grain agriculture. The first alchemy. 

Saccharification is an essential part of the brewing process. The brewer takes the lightly crushed malted grain and adds it to hot, but not boiling, water in the mash tun. Enzymes in the partially germinated grain re-activate in the mash tun and convert the grain starch into malt sugar. The process takes about an hour.

Here's our mash tun:

The strike: the moment when crushed malt is added to hot water

The aroma of a mash is distinctive - it's a strong, sweet, delicious smell. Recently we went to a meeting about recreating old beer styles at Fuller's Brewery in Chiswick, London. As we approached the brewery, even though we could not see it, we knew we were going in the right direction because we could smell the first mash of the day. Exactly the same smell that we get from our little mash tun in the garage.

The process is the same, no matter what the size or the shape of the mash tun.

A few years ago, I went to the Eindhoven Open Air Archaeology Museum and used an earthenware bowl to demonstrate the saccharification - how to gently heat crushed malt and water over the hot ashes of a fire and make sugars. In the photograph below, you can see the white crushed malt in the bowls by the hearth. For me, that's a little over crushed, but it still worked just fine for the saccharification. In little over one hour, the starchy crushed malt had become a mash of delicious malt sugars, as you can see in the large earthenware bowl in the hearth.

Saccharification in a hearth at Eindhoven Open Air Museum.
The beautiful bowl was made by Flor Buchuk Gill, she was the potter at the Open Air Museum at the time.

The equipment is very simple. The technique is not complicated. There is no need to understand the complex biochemistry that goes on in the mash tun. All you have to do is get the details right and you will get a result. Heat some crushed malt with abundant water at temperatures not exceeding 67 degrees Centigrade and the enzymes will re-activate. If the temperature is too high, then the enzymes are destroyed. 

The next stage is to separate the sweet liquid (the wort) from the mash. This is done by sparging, washing hot water through the mash and collecting the wort. I shall save that for the next blog.

Some people think that the beer brewer's mash tun is something like the wine maker's tub. They are not at all the same thing. They are completely different processes. Perhaps the word 'mash' is confusing.

Making wine, as most people know, involves treading or mashing grapes into a pulp, then syphoning off the juice and fermenting it. When making ale or beer, you have to make the sugars first, and this happens in the mash tun.

Some people make 'country wines'. Among the most popular are dandelion, parsnip, nettle and elderflower. Each wine making event involves gathering the ingredients and then buying a few kilos of sugar. Dandelion flowers, for example, are mixed with hot water and a kilo or two of sugar. Here's a typical country wine recipe. There are loads of recipes for these so called country wines. They are all pretty much the same. They all involve several bags of sugar.

As has been explained in an earlier blog, flowers, nettles or parsnips do not provide any fermentable sugars, just flavour.

I can understand why some people might be confused if they have never seen inside a mash tun or if they have not made an ale or a beer using malted grain. For most people today, seeing what happens inside a mash tun is not part of their everyday life and experience.

However, a few hundred years ago, making the malt and brewing ale and beer at home was a common activity. It happened on farms and in large households. It was a household task. In the past, when making the malt and the ale was a regular event, it would have been something that people were familiar with.

Today it seems to be a mystery to many.

first farmers, first maltsters?

Could the first farmers in the fertile crescent have been the first people to make malt? Who were the first maltsters? After I had completed my M. Phil in 1999, I used to go round archaeology conferences and meetings (as an independent researcher, not affiliated to any University or College) and I gave papers and presentations that aimed to promote some discussion of these questions among archaeologists and anthropologists.

This is the first of a number of blogs based on these talks, presentations and papers from between 2000 and 2010.

I'm presenting here a few thoughts based upon a simple question - what were those first farmers doing with grain that they were so keen to grow? Of course, grain can be ground into flour to make bread, or perhaps, in the neolithic, some kind of gruel or porridge was made. But there is something else that can be done with grain, which not everyone is familiar with. It can also be malted.

quern, suitable for crushing grain and malt here

Malting is the process of deliberate and careful partial germination transforms the properties of the grain. Within the grain, at the beginning of germination, enzymes are activated that can convert starches into sugars. Malted grain is friable, easier to crush and is very different to unmalted grain.

It seems probable that grain, because of its' special qualities when malted, was a status crop rather than a staple crop in the neolithic.  

Every all-grain beer brewer knows the importance of malt. It's the fundamental ingredient. When malt is crushed a little, mixed with water and heated in a mash tun to the correct temperature, it becomes sweet. The brewer then separates the liquid from the grain by lautering and sparging, and collects the liquid run off which is known today as wort. This is boiled with herbs or hops, then fermented into ale or beer.

the first farmers
The transition from fishing, hunting and gathering to a settled life of farming began around ten to twelve thousand years ago in the Near East and Levant. Wild grain grew abundantly, in natural fields, in the area now known as the Fertile Crescent (Harlan, 1967). Grain, lentils and chickpeas were gathered and processed by the nomadic population. As time went on, people began to plant and cultivate these crops deliberately. They processed them in different ways. Villages became established, such as Beidha, and plant domestication began as well as the domestication of goats. Hunter-gatherers became farmers. This was the neolithic revolution, or so it was named by Vere Gordon Childe in the 1930s.

fertile crescent, image copyright:Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago

The new lifestyle spread rapidly across Europe, reaching the British Isles around five or six thousand years ago. This ‘wave of agriculture’ and the debate surrounding it have been discussed at great length in the literature (eg Maisels 1993, Harris 1996, Smith 1998, Zohary & Hopf 2001, Bellwood 2005). A great deal has been written and it is a complex issue. In 1952 Gordon Childe proposed that climate change was a major factor. Other explanations for the origins of agriculture include population pressure (Binford 1968, Flannery 1973), changes in socio-economic complexity, inequalities and drought. Theories abound, too many to discuss here. In 1990 Brian Hayden noted that

“few topics have engendered as much discussion and resulted in so few satisfying answers as the attempt to explain why hunter-gatherers began to cultivate plants and raise animals.” (Hayden 1990, 31) 

Archaeobotanical analysis of pollen, seeds, flora and fauna within the archaeological record seems to reveal that, ten to twelve thousand years ago, there were oak woods, pistachio trees and there was an abundance of wild life and game (Maisels 1993). Streams and rivers would have provided good fishing. It seems unlikely that the Natufian cultures of the epi-palaeolithic gathered wild grains to tide them over food shortages. They collected and processed them, and later domesticated them, because they wanted to make something. But what did they want to make?

the bread or beer debate
In 1953, Robert Braidwood from Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago initiated the ‘bread or beer’ debate, by organising a symposium "Did man once live by beer alone?". He was curious about the reason for the neolithic revolution, having been excavating at Jarmo, an early Neolithic village in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains of Iran, since the 1940s. He had organised a specialised multi disciplinary team with natural scientists, archaeobotanists, anthropologists and archaeologists (Braidwood et al, 1983). The excavation report Prehistoric Archaeology along the Zagros Flanks is a classic, if you like to read excavation reports, that is.

The symposium was published in the Journal of American Anthropology, number 55, in 1953 and it is now available to read online if you follow the next link. The specific question proposed by Professor Jonathan Sauer in Braidwood's Symposium was this:

“… could the discovery that a mash of fermented grain yielded a palatable and nutritious beverage have acted as a greater stimulant toward the experimental selection and breeding of the cereals than the discovery of flour and bread making? One would assume that the utilisation of wild cereals (along with edible roots and berries) as a source of collected food would have been in existence for millennia before their domestication took place. Was the subsequent impetus to this domestication bread or beer?” (Braidwood 1953, 515)

Hans Helbaek considered that malting could perhaps have been the key to understanding early agriculture, even though he was aware that it was "a sore point in archaeological interpretation." It seems that it still is today. He discusses several aspects of malting on pages 517 & 518, for example, that a large vat may have been useful for part of the process. Germination may have been deliberate or accidental, he says, and context would be vital if germinated grain was to be found. Later on, he points out that germinated grain would have not survived in the ground. Carbonised grain might perhaps indicate a failed malting. It is clear from his argument that in the 1950s, there was some scientific understanding of the malting process. There were established techniques and processes that scientists had begun to understand.

Paul Manglesdorf pointed out that barley is “virtually useless” for bread making. He found it difficult to believe that “the foundations of Western Civilisation were laid by an ill fed people living in a perpetual state of partial intoxication” (page 520). He did not recognise germinated grain among the samples that he analysed from Jarmo, concluding that the earliest cereals were not used for brewing or baking but that they were used as ‘popped’ or ‘parched’ grains.

Linton noted the difficulty of making finely ground flour suitable for bread using a pestle and mortar or rubbing stones (page 524) and Oppenheim (page 525) suggested that gruel made from coarsely ground grits was the most likely product being made by the first farmers.

There was no consensus of opinion. After this auspicious start, the question of ‘bread or beer’ rested, debate appears to have died down and there was little further discussion. Presumably, it remained a controversial idea. The debate was resurrected in the late 1980s. In 1986, Solomon Katz and Mary Voigt published a paper in Expedition, volume 25/2 "Bread and Beer: the early use of cereals in the human diet" in which they presented a new paradigm: the biocultural development of cuisine. Their hypothesis included the idea that epi-palaeolithic hunter-gatherers had discovered that slightly sprouted grain tasted sweeter. I'd agree with their hypothesis. It would not be too difficult to discover this. The debate is not just about beer or bread, flour, porridge or gruel. It is also about making malt, malt sugars, the wort. I wrote my thesis, "Barley Malt and Ale in the Neolithic" about this, but I am not the first person to suggest the idea of maltsters in the epi-palaeolithic. Without malt there would be no wort and no ale or beer.

Grain processing was not necessarily a backbreaking, dreary chore of grinding the grain into a rough kind of flour to make unleavened bread.

The processes of malting and mashing magically transform inedible grain starch into delicious, sweet malt sugars. It could even be considered the first alchemy. The biblical phrase ‘land of milk and honey’ might refer to domesticated animals and the milk that they produced, as well as the production of liquid sugars from cereals, what brewers today call wort.

Malt and sweet barley mash are likely candidates for the things that the first farmers were interested in making. The accidental discovery of fermentation, whereby sugars are transformed into alcohol, followed closely behind. The spent grain that is left after sparging makes excellent animal fodder (Dineley, 2006). Spent grain is not alcoholic, it's just the slightly sweet barley husks and mash that is left after the malt sugars have been washed through.

Maltsters have known, for millennia, what they need to do with harvested grain in order to make sugars. Malting is an ancient skill, based upon techniques that, even today, have an element of magic, ritual and mystery. Making malt and malt sugars from the grain was one of the new technologies of the epi-palaeolithic. These grain processing techniques were discovered in the fertile crescent, these new skills crossed Europe, eventually arriving in the British Isles around five or six thousand years ago.  

neolithic farmers of the British Isles
What were the early neolithic farmers of the British Isles making with the grain that they grew? The transformation of grain into ale can be accurately described as both a ritual and a domestic activity and it seems to have been an important aspect of the neolithic cultural package. In the British Isles, harvested grain was being made into ale, an intoxicating beverage to be consumed, perhaps, at ceremonial sites. The making of the ale was as much of a ritual as its' consumption. 

further reading
My paper on the craft of the maltster was finally published, I put it on my Academia.edu page here

I wrote an article, based on the paper, for Brewer and Distiller International about the archaeological evidence for floor malting. It was published in the February issue, 2016: Who were the first maltsters? 

references

Bellwood P. 2005 First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies. Blackwell.

Binford L. 1968 Post Pleistocene Adaptations. In S. Binford and L. Binford (eds) New perspectives in Archaeology. Chicago.

Braidwood R. (1953) Did Man once live by bread alone? American Anthropologist 55, 515-526.

Braidwood R., Braidwood L., Howe B., Reed C. & Watson P. eds 1983 Prehistoric Archaeology across the Zagros Flanks. University of Chicago Oriental Institute Publications Vol 105, Chicago. here

Dineley M & Dineley G 2000 Neolithic ale: Barley as a source of malt sugars for fermentation. In Fairbairn A (ed) Plants in Neolithic Britain and beyond. Neolithic Studies Group Seminar Papers 5, 137-155, Oxbow Books. Paper presented at the Spring Meeting of the Neolithic Studies Group, Royal Academy, London, March, 1998.

Dineley M. 2006 The Use of Spent Grain as Cattle Feed in the Neolithic. In D. Serjeantson and D. Field (eds) Animals in the Neolithic of Britain and Europe, Neolithic Studies Group Seminar papers 7, Oxbow Books. Paper presented to the Spring Meeting of the Neolithic Studies Group, British Museum, 2004

Flannery K. 1974 The Origins of Agriculture. Annual Review of Anthropology, 2, 271-310.

Harlan J. R. 1967 A Wild Wheat Harvest in Turkey. Archaeology 20, 197-201.

Hayden B. 1990 Nimrods, Piscators, Pluckers and Planters: the emergence of food production. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology Vol 9, No 1, 31-69.

Harris D. R. 1996 The Origins and Spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia Routledge.

Katz S. & Voigt M. 1986 Bread and Beer: the early use of cereals in the human diet. Expedition Vol 25/2, 23-34 here

Maisels C. 1993 The Emergence of Civilisation. Routledge.


Smith B. 1998 The Emergence of Agriculture Scientific American Library, New York.

Zohary D. and Hopf M. 2001 Domestication of Plants in the Old World: the origin and spread of cultivated plants in West Asia, Europe and the Nile Valley. Clarendon Press, Oxford Science Publications.

thousands of grain impressions in a burnt plaster floor

Sometimes, a single sentence in an excavation report can be the beginning of research that sparks your curiosity and makes you ask questions. For me, it was a few words and a brief, enigmatic description that I read in an excavation report several years ago, in the late 1990s, when I began my research into ancient grain processing techniques and the neolithic revolution.

The site was Beidha, a small neolithic village in the Jordan Valley. Here, in the 7th Millennium BC, people began to settle down, grow grain and keep domestic animals - cows, pigs, sheep and goats. Although they were still hunting and gathering, they were beginning to process the crops they grew, which included cereals and lentils. The earliest agriculturalists. Today, when you search for the neolithic village of Beidha on the internet you will find lots of information about it. This is, to some extent, thanks to a project established in 2010, to protect and promote the site. Beidha is an ancient place, now open to the public. It is not far from Petra, in Jordan, and is part of the World Heritage Site. Definitely on my list of places to go.

The village appeared to have burned down, nobody knows how or why. Diana Kirkbride excavated the site in the 1950s and 1960s as part of a larger project to investigate the early agriculturalists of the Ancient Near East, organised by Robert Braidwood of the Oriental Institute of Chicago. In her report, she described the remains and the contents of one of the rectangular mud brick buildings in the village of Beidha. As well as a lime plaster floor, facilities and equipment suitable for grain agriculture and processing were found, specifically, hoes, sickles and quern stones. There were also large stone bowls and the remains of baskets that appear to have been waterproofed. The baskets had been lined with either bitumen or lime plaster.

She thought that the building may have burnt down, somehow leaving behind the evidence of the presence of grain on the floor, which she described as

 “... tens of thousands of grain impressions in the burnt plaster floor ...”
Kirkbride, D. 1968 ‘Beidha: early neolithic village life south of the Dead Sea’ Antiquity XLII, 263

This is an intriguing description.

At the time that I was studying the Beidha excavation report, Graham and I had recently returned from Orkney where, at the Corrigall Farm Museum, we had our first lesson in the techniques and traditions of floor malting. The curator, Mr Harry Flett, had explained to us how the grain must be steeped in water, then turned out onto a smooth floor in a barn to begin germination. Malt is partially germinated grain. When growth is obvious, that is, when the root and shoot begin to show, the malt is carefully dried. Then it can be used for making wort and brewing ale.

I had been reading excavation reports from neolithic sites in the British Isles and northern Europe, where floor surfaces of buildings are rarely preserved. The floors of the long houses and other buildings of the Linearbandkeramik Culture were destroyed by modern deep ploughing. In the British Isles, I had only come across one description of a deliberately made beaten earth floor in a neolithic building. This was in one of the rectangular timber buildings at Lough Gur, in Ireland, a site excavated in the early 1950s by Sean O'Riordain and published in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy.

It was great news to me that some floor surfaces of buildings from early neolithic cultures in the ancient Near East had been so well preserved. I began to read more excavation reports, to see what else had been discovered. Although I have yet to find another description of grain impressions in association with an early neolithic lime plaster floor from that part of the world, I did find plenty of detailed descriptions of floors made of beaten earth, stamped clay and lime plaster. Some of them were painted, and there was very little discussion of their function or purpose.

The function of floors is a subject not often discussed in excavation reports. Floors are important. They are a crucial facility for making malt. And, as many people know, it's the malting that interests me most. When was it discovered? How? Who were the first maltsters? How has malting technology changed and developed over the millennia? What is the archaeological evidence for malt? What role did malting play in the development of grain agriculture and the neolithic revolution? 

the neolithic revolution in the Fertile Crescent

The practice of grain cultivation, agriculture and grain processing as well as animal husbandry and the domestication of cattle, sheep, goats and pigs are defining features of the neolithic way of life.

Archaeologists agree on this definition, although there is much disagreement among the academics about why people "became farmers". It is one of the biggest questions in academic archaeology - why did people begin to cultivate and process wild grains in the Ancient Near East and Levant? What were they making with the grain? These were some of the questions that Braidwood's team of archaeologists, anthropologists and archaeobotanists and had set out to answer in the 1950s. Was it bread or beer?

The debate was reawakened in the 1980s by Solomon Katz and Mary Voigt, when they published their paper "Bread or Beer: the early use of cereals in the human diet". They suggested that making malt was an important part of the story. Hunting and gathering were, of course, still important ways of food acquisition. Wheat and barley grew as wild plants in this region. People began to gather and process them long before they started to cultivate them deliberately and settle down in villages to tend their crops and look after their sheep, goats, pigs and cattle.

Grain cultivation and processing began in the Near East and Levant around ten to twelve thousand years ago. This new way of life spread across Europe and reached the British Isles around six thousand years ago.

mud, clay & lime plaster floors in the neolithic of the Fertile Crescent

A common feature of many early neolithic sites in the Fertile Crescent are the deliberately made, smooth, level floors made of mud, clay or lime plaster. Mud or clay floors may have been relatively easy to make. The lime plaster floors, some of them apparently polished, would have involved a particularly complex technology in their manufacture, as well as considerable human effort and co-operation in their construction. The Natufians, these first agriculturalists of the Fertile Crescent, were using lime plaster for a wide range of uses - to make walls, floors, statues, as well as so called 'white ware' vessels, the precursor to pottery made from clay. The use of lime plaster in the early neolithic of the Fertile Crescent is a huge area for research and investigation.

To make lime plaster, large quantities of chalk had to be collected, then burnt at 850 degrees Centigrade to make the quicklime. Water would have been added to make the slaked lime which can then be used to make the floor. They must be laid and levelled very quickly and would have been similar in appearance to a modern concrete floor.

Polished lime plaster floors were found in a rectangular building at Gobekli Tepe, in the layers of this enigmatic settlement or temple dated to the seventh and eighth millennia BC, the era of the pre pottery neolithic. Gobekli Tepe was excavated by Professor Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute over many seasons. The earliest levels have been dated to the epi-palaeolithic, around the tenth millennium BC. The team excavating this site interpreted it as having been a place of feasting and cult activity.

Another interesting and large rectangular building of the seventh millennium BC was excavated at the early neolithic village of Yiftahel, lower Galilee. Inside one of the buildings there was a lime plaster floor measuring 110 square metres and 3-6 cm thick. It would have required some seven tons of lime plaster. At the time of excavation, it was the largest rectangular mud brick building of the period in the Levant. Details of the lime plaster, what it was and how it was made can be found here in a paper published in the Journal Palaeorient in 1991.

remains of a lime plaster floor at Yiftahel: the production of lime plaster was on an industrial scale. see here

bins, pestles, mortars & earth floors at Ain Mallaha see here

At Ain Mallaha there are the remains of an early neolithic settlement. It is situated by Lake Huleh in the upper Jordan valley and was inhabited between 10,000 and 8200 BC. The floors within the buildings apparently gave the impression of having been deliberately made by accumulation and they appear to have been cleaned and repaired on a regular basis.

Stamped mud floors, some  surfaced with a smooth layer of clean clay, together with domed ovens and brick-lined roasting pits were features discovered during excavations at Ali Kosh, a neolithic settlement dated to c7200 BC and located on the southern plains of Khuzistan.

At Tell Ramad, a neolithic village in Syria, c7000–6000 BC, the remains of lime kilns were excavated and some of the floors were made of lime plaster. Again, lime plaster was being made on an almost industrial scale. During excavations, it was noted that some of the floors had upturned edges. What purpose was this innovation for? We may never know, but perhaps this refinement had the function of containing the malt. It would work to keep the germinating grain on the specially made lime plaster floor surface.

Floors of compacted clay were found in the buildings of the earliest and lowest occupation levels at Mureybit a settlement dated to between c8500 and c6900 BC and located beside the Euphrates river in northern Syria. Excavations also revealed a variety of grain agriculture and processing equipment including sickles, pestles, mortars, quern stones, fire pits and hearths.

A floor at the site of Ain Ghazal, an early neolithic settlement near Amman in Jordan, showed evidence of at least five different layers. It had been repeatedly repaired and well maintained. Re plastering and regular maintenance of these lime plaster floors was undertaken at a number of these early neolithic sites.

This is a feature of more recent malting floors. It is desirable to have a smooth and level surface for the efficient raking and turning of the grain as it germinates. Access to a reliable water source is another necessity for the malting and mashing of grain and at all of these sites that I have mentioned, there were nearby springs, streams or rivers.

Robert Braidwood of the Oriental Institute of Chicago initiated the "Bread or Beer" debate in 1953. Anthropologists and archaeologists discussed the roles of bread and beer in the Origin of Grain Agriculture debate. Only Hans Helbaek considered the role of malt, without which there would be no fermentable sugars and no beer.

The archaeological evidence, some of which is outlined above, indicates that it was neither bread nor beer, rather it seems that those first agriculturalists may have been making malt.

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further reading:

I have a peer reviewed paper "The Craft of the Maltster" which is hopefully, due to be published soon. It was presented to the Food in Archaeology Conference in April 2010 at Exeter University. The book of the conference is, I am assured, on its' way into print. I have been given permission by the publishers to put the paper on my academia page. It can be downloaded here.

Beakers were for Beer! part three: alewives and barmaids

In the early years of my research, I visited a few microbreweries. I wanted to talk to professional brewers who made ale in the traditional way using crushed malt, not malt extract, and who worked on a small scale. This approach to brewing beer in small batches, supplying local pubs, hotels and restaurants, began to take off in the 1980s and 1990s. The interest in real ale in Britain began with CAMRA in 1971. Peter Brown does a good job in telling the story of the rise of craft beer UK style. Worth reading. Anyway, to get back to my story, one of the microbreweries I visited was a tiny establishment, equipped with one mash tun, one boiler and two fermenters. He used crushed malted barley, hops, water and yeast and made a wide variety of beers from these basic ingredients. As any good brewer does.

He was interested in the story of the Bronze Age woman buried in a stone cist at North Mains, Strathallan. She had been buried with a Food Vessel. The residue from a cereal based alcoholic brew, flavoured with meadowsweet, was discovered within it (see part one). We chatted about it in detail, and with some excitement, because I had only just found out about the residue analysis in the Strathallan pot myself. That evening, he went down to the pub and related the story to his mates. And why not? It's a good story. One of his mates was a journalist for the local paper. A couple of days later there was a headline "Bronze Age Barmaid" or "Prehistoric Barmaid discovered" or something along those lines. And my name was attached to it, almost as if I had discovered it. Many of the details were wrong. It was only a small piece in a local newspaper, but it seemed like sensational stuff at the time. Some folk at the University were not very pleased about it.

I had just had my first encounter with The Press, and with some of the silliness that seems to surround any news story about ancient alcoholic brews - beer, wine or mead. 

alewives and cup bearers 
Maybe that journalist was thinking along the right lines, although 'barmaid' is not quite the right word to use in a prehistoric context. There is a well established tradition of women as cup bearers, providing the drink at feasts.

Eva Koch, writing in 1986, gives several archaeological and historical examples of the woman as hostess, who would have held a high status position within society. In her article the woman with the drink she describes the grave at Juellinge of a woman, in her 30s, who was buried wearing her silver jewellery and hair ornaments. In the grave with her was some meat, either a whole sheep or pieces of pork and beef - archaeological sources vary. The bronze bucket had contained a drink brewed with barley and cranberries or crowberries and bog myrtle. There were drinking horns and glasses for her guests. The grave was excavated in 1909. 

A recent detailed analysis of these residues has led to the novel idea that the Juellinge vessel had contained 'nordic grog'. The media loved this story. There are variations of it all over the internet, but journalists don't always get all the details right. I don't agree with the concept of a 'nordic grog'. I think it is far more likely that the bucket contained an ale, or perhaps you could call it a barley wine, made from wort and flavoured with a few berries, flowers, herbs and maybe some honey. All the sugars that you need for fermentation can be obtained from the mash tun, as I explained in earlier posts.

There are many similarities between the Juellinge grave and the burial of the young woman, described by some as a dancing woman or priestess, at Egtved.

reconstruction of the oak log coffin of the Egtved Girl. Bronze Age. 1370BC

She was buried wearing bronze jewellery and the bucket at her feet contained the remains of an ale or beer, flavoured with berries and perhaps honey. The bucket was made of birch bark and is too big for a drinking vessel. It is more suitable for serving or perhaps it was one of the vessels used in making the ale. One interpretation is that she was buried with ale for the journey into the afterlife, which is certainly possible. I can't help wondering whether she was buried with the tools of her trade - her brewing bucket.

And so we move on to Bronze Age Scotland and the cist grave excavated in 1979 - the one that the brewer was so interested in. The Bronze Age barmaid herself, buried with her Food Vessel. Could she have been a cup bearer, at feasts and ceremonies, perhaps? Maybe she was an alewife. Some might see her as a priestess or as one of the elite, a high status and important member of society. There are several possible interpretations of who this Bronze Age woman was and what her role in society could have been.

female cist burial excavated in 1979 at Strathallan, North Mains, SC845100. (copyright Historic Scotland)

The specialist secrets, skills and knowledge of how to transform harvested grain into ale by malting, mashing, lautering, sparging and fermentation were as important then as they are now. Without them, there would be no ale or beer for the feast.

I'm sure that the tradition of the alewife, or brewster, goes right back to prehistoric times, to the earliest grain cultivators and processors, the neolithic folk. There are many different herbs and plants that have been used to flavour, preserve or enhance ale. Known today as gruit, some herbs have medicinal or hallucinogenic properties. Henbane pollen was identified in cereal based residues on sherds from large bucket shaped neolithic pottery known as Grooved Ware at a site called Balfarg in Scotland. More on this in the next post. This discovery extends the potential role of the alewife to that of a healer, maybe even more than that. Here's a link to a blog about the 'brewster as witch' by Jane Peyton, a sommelier and beer expert. Her article is a bit of an advert for a Ninkasi style women's brewing competition that took place in 2011. So, sadly, too late for me to make a brew for that. But she makes some interesting points.

I shall return to the 'magic of brewing' in a later post. It's a huge topic.

beakers, food vessels and tripartite urns - some brief notes
Welcome to the wonderful world of prehistoric pottery! It can be quite bewildering. Confusing to non archaeologists, at the very least. I have discovered this after many years of explaining (or trying to explain) prehistoric pottery classifications to tourists.

In a British Bronze Age context, there are beakers, collared urns, tripartite food vessels and funerary urns. Simply explained - beakers were drinking vessels. Food Vessels, otherwise known as tripartite food vessels, appear to have had no specific function, other than for 'food preparation'. This is how they are described in the archaeological literature.

Sometimes they are found in stone cists and they contained the cremated bone. Collared urns are larger vessels, also often found with cremated bone in burials. This is a blog. It is not an academic thesis. So I must apologise to all archaeological pottery specialists for the simplicity of these descriptions.

a few recent rather exciting discoveries of tripartite food vessels
In March 2012, the land owner of a disused quarry on the island of Arran, off the west coast of Scotland, noticed something interesting in the cliff face. It turned out to be not one, but two Bronze Age stone burial cists. One cist was empty and the other contained the remains of an adult human cremation in a tripartite food vessel and a flint knife.

the food vessel

an unusual excavation technique at Sannox Cliff, Arran

A radiocarbon date of 2154 - 2026 BC was obtained. The flint knife, when analysed, had traces of silica, indicating that it had been used to cut grasses or cereals. This is intriguing. Was this the cist grave of someone, probably a woman, whose work involved the gathering and the processing of wheat or barley? I think so. It's not the sort of thing that is found every day. Excavation techniques involved the use of a cherry picker. A news report with some great photos, is here. The excavation was undertaken by GUARD Archaeology, Glasgow and is available here.

In September 2011, in Spinningdale, by the Dornoch Firth in Sutherland, northern Scotland, the accidental discovery of a very well preserved Bronze Age female cist burial, with food vessel, occurred when someone was digging the hole for their new septic tank. Once again, it was excavated by the team at GUARD. Radiocarbon dates from the bone were 2051 -1911 BC and from the charcoal within the grave, dates of 2151-2018 BC were obtained. Inside the cist was female skeleton with a tripartite food vessel at her head.

She was between 35 and 50 years old and had been laid upon a sheepskin, or maybe she wore woollen clothing. It is not quite clear, but unusually, fragments of the wool had survived in the well sealed cist. The excavators thought she may have been an important woman, having been buried with such great care and attention. More details here.

The cist grave of another high status, important and wealthy Bronze Age woman was recently excavated near Windsor, England. Excavations at the Kingsmead Quarry, undertaken by Wessex Archaeology, were presented to the public in 2013. They have put a lot of their information online. It is a large, complex site that includes mesolithic, neolithic, bronze age, iron age, Romano British and medieval elements. The excavations were generously funded by CEMEX. The archaeologists have been digging up lots of really exciting stuff at Horton and you can read all about it on their web site.

Of particular interest is the female burial, dated to between 2500 and 2200 BC. She was at least 35 years old, according to bone evidence. She was buried wearing her necklace of gold, amber and black lignite beads. She may also have had a bracelet, since there were black lignite beads near her wrist. Some perforated amber beads or buttons indicate that she may have worn woolen clothing, with these valuable fasteners. By her side was a large drinking vessel, beaker style. Was this a serving vessel, rather than her personal beaker? It must be considered a possibility. It would be fantastic if a residue analysis could be done of the vessel fabric. I'm not sure, but I don't think this has yet been done.

We cannot be completely sure of her full role within society, whether she was a princess, queen, alewife or cup bearer. It is clear that she was a woman of some importance. More details about her here.

In the words of the site director, Gareth Chaffey, who has been excavating the site for seven years, " It is interesting to think who this woman was within her community. She was probably an important person in her society, perhaps holding some standing which gave her access to prestigious, rare and exotic items. She could have been a leader, a person with power and authority or possibly part of an elite family - perhaps a princess or a queen."

I shall leave the mysterious high status women of the Bronze Age, for now. I'm sure you will come to your own conclusions about them.

Site Director Gareth Chaffey, of Wessex Archaeology, who has been excavating the site for the last seven years, said: “It is interesting to think who this woman was within her community. She was probably an important person in her society, perhaps holding some standing which gave her access to prestigious, rare and exotic items. She could have been a leader, a person with power and authority, or possibly part of an elite family - perhaps a princess or queen.” - See more at: http://www.wessexarch.co.uk/blogs/news/2013/04/19/beaker-burial#sthash.uX7GzXBU.dpuf

Site Director Gareth Chaffey, of Wessex Archaeology, who has been excavating the site for the last seven years, said: “It is interesting to think who this woman was within her community. She was probably an important person in her society, perhaps holding some standing which gave her access to prestigious, rare and exotic items. She could have been a leader, a person with power and authority, or possibly part of an elite family - perhaps a princess or queen.” - See more at: http://www.wessexarch.co.uk/blogs/news/2013/04/19/beaker-burial#sthash.uX7GzXBU.dpuf

Beakers were for Beer! part two: a birch bark bucket with residues

The image below might not, at first, seem to have anything to do with prehistoric ale. Or beer even. This is the oak log coffin of the young Bronze Age woman known as the Egtved Girl. She died about 3300 years ago. Her oak coffin was found by a farmer, Peter Platz, within a large grassy burial mound in southern Jutland, Denmark. He called in the archaeologists from the local museum who excavated it in 1921. Recent dendrochronological dating of the oak log coffin reveals that the tree was felled in 1370 BC. The North European Bronze Age is a fascinating place to go and visit online to understand some of the background to the Egtved Girl's world. There is a lot of information out there - for example, this atmospheric short film. And lots of pictures of the things that they made and wore and used - the bronze figurines, the sun chariot, the drinking vessels, the well preserved clothing and even a wooden folding seat.

 

What the archaeologists discovered within the Egtved Girl's oak coffin was quite astonishing ... there was no skeleton, just a few fingernails and some of her teeth, brains and hair remained. Her bones had been destroyed by the acidic conditions. But the clothes and the grave goods of the young woman had survived the millennia virtually intact. She had been buried wearing a woven woolen tunic top, a corded wool skirt and a woven belt with a bronze spiked disc. Bronze bracelets adorned her arms. Most people agree that she was a dancer, maybe even a priestess, and that she was buried in her dancing clothes. A small bronze figurine, doing a back flip and wearing a skirt like that of the Egtved Girl, was found at Grevensvaenge, Zealand, Denmark. It was part of a small Bronze Age hoard that was first reported in 1779. Over the years, several of the figurines have been lost but the little bronze acrobatic dancer is now in the National Museum of Denmark.

a reconstruction of the Egtved Girl's clothes: details here

Now the oak coffin, the clothes and grave goods have been reconstructed and there is a wonderful display in the National Museum of Denmark. She is visited by thousands of people. There is so much on the internet about the Egtved Girl that it is easy to find out about her. She even has a few Facebook friends ...

I first came across reports of the Egtved Girl through reading the bibliography of Eva Koch's article Prehistoric Plant Food of Denmark, published in 1999. Archaeology can be a bit like a detective story. In the days before the internet was everywhere, the bibliography at the end of an academic paper was probably the only lead you had to find the next piece of information. What interested me about this young woman's grave was the discovery and subsequent analysis of cereal based organic residues in a birch bark bucket that had been placed in the log coffin.

residues in a birch bark bucket
The reconstruction at the National Museum shows how she was laid upon a cow skin. A bundle of cloth, at her feet, contains the burnt bones of a small child, aged 5 or 6 years old. Also at her feet was a bucket made of birch bark. Someone noticed that there was a thick, dark brown residue at the bottom of the bucket. It was analysed in 1929 by Bille Gram. For all you fellow bibliography hunters, this is the reference for the original archaeobotanical report ... over the years I have tried, and failed, to get hold of a copy. In either Danish or English. Maybe you can find it. If you do, please let me know!  

Th. Thomsen (1929): Egekistefundet fra Egtved. Nordiske Fortidsminder Andet Bind. København. (In this book, her drink is mentioned by Bille Gram on page 184 note 2, apparently)

the birch bark bucket 

I don't know how the analysis of the residue was undertaken. I would imagine that it involved a microscope and not a lot else, given that it was done in 1929. The bucket had contained an alcoholic drink - it was probably ale - made from wheat, cowberries or possibly cranberries, bog myrtle, some other plants and perhaps with added honey.

Descriptions of the residue analysis vary in the archaeological literature, which is why I would like to read the original archaeobotanical report. Some archaeologists mention the presence of clover pollen, others mention lime flower pollen. Mixed pollens often indicate the addition of honey. It has been suggested in some academic papers that the "beer" was made from the berries, but any all grain brewer knows that this is simply not possible. The primary source of fermentable sugars had to come from the grain - or rather, from grain that had been malted. It could have been either malted wheat or malted barley or a mixture of both.

Residue analysis provides you with a list of probable ingredients. It does not provide you with a recipe. Nor will it tell you the ratio of ingredients to each other, nor the quantities that are required. To make a similar brew from the list of ingredients you need a recipe. In other words, you need to know and understand the brewing process, the techniques and the methodology of how to make malt and ale.

making malt and ale
There seems to be some confusion amongst archaeologists and anthropologists about what malt is, how it is made and how the brewer uses it. Malt is sometimes described as 'toasted barley sprouts' or even as 'sprouted barley' - something like beansprouts. Neither of these is an accurate description. Malt is grain that has been steeped and aerated in water, then spread out on a smooth, level floor within a dark but well ventilated building to begin to germinate. When the acrospire (the root and shoot) is no more than one third the length of the grain, it is dried gently in a kiln. This is traditional floor malting and this process makes pale malt. Specialist malts are made by roasting at higher temperatures.

I have read descriptions of brewing in academic papers, explaining that malt is 'boiled with water' to make a 'malt solution'  but this would not work at all. The brewer mixes crushed pale malt with hot (not boiling) water to make a sweet wort. This process is called the 'mash' or 'saccharification'. If you boil the malt, then the enzymes that convert starch into sugars are destroyed and you will never make anything fermentable. Specialist dark malts, such as crystal or chocolate malt, are used for colour and flavour and do not provide any sugars in the mash tun.

I began to discuss these issues in an an earlier post and I will certainly go back to these fundamental aspects of making malt and ale in future posts. My last academic paper The Craft of the Maltster is about to be published as I write this blog post. I was given permission to put it online. The book of the conference will be out soon. Floor malting techniques have not changed over millennia.


the ingredients, according to residue analysis of the Egtved bucket

• wheat - this was probably identified, under the microscope, by the presence of a part of a grain husk. Could it have been a bit of barley husk? This is possible. During the brewing process, specifically in the mash tun, the malted grain is mixed with hot water and the grains become broken up. As mentioned above, whether it was wheat, barley or a mixture of both, the grain had to have been malted. Malt provides the primary fermentable sugars for ale and beer.

• cowberries - not the main source of fermentable sugars. These are very tart, sharp tasting berries. Probably used as an adjunct. Cowberries, also known as lingonberries were probably identified in the Egtved bucket residue analysis by the presence of seeds. It can be tricky to identify the specific berry type from the seed alone. 

• bog myrtle - also known as myrica gale, this leafy shrub has been used for millennia as a 'brewer's herb'. It both preserves and flavours the ale and it was used before the introduction of hops in medieval times. Many other plants and herbs can be used in brewing ale. We have used meadowsweet and juniper berries in our ancient ales. Yarrow is another commonly used plant as an alternative to hops. These are known as gruit and these days you can buy a wide variety of these ancient and traditional ales in the shops, made by several different brewing companies. 

• lime pollen, clover pollen - the presence of these in the bucket residue might indicate the addition of some honey to the ale. Again, it is an adjunct and not a primary source of sugars for fermentation. Alternatively, the pollen might indicate the addition of lime flowers and clover to the wort, for flavour and/or preservation.  

how we would make an 'Egtved Ale'- the basic techniques and recipe
We have been making ancient style ales for fifteen years now. Small batches, a few gallons at a time, in our home brewery. To recreate the ale that was in the Egtved bucket we would, first of all, get some malted grain. If possible, we would try to obtain some malted bere - an ancient strain of barley. The grain is skinny, much thinner than modern barley. We have used bere malt successfully to make an ale flavoured and preserved with a few dried meadowsweet flowers instead of hops.

our mash tun 

We would mash the crushed malt with hot water in the mash tun for about one hour. Grist is the brewer's term for crushed malt. Brewers refer to the water used for brewing as 'liquor'. It is not alcoholic. Then we would lauter, that is, collect the first runnings of sweet wort from the mash tun,  and then sparge. This involves running several gallons of hot water through the mash and collecting more wort. As far as quantities and ratios are concerned, we would use about 15 pounds of malted grain to make roughly 8 or 9 gallons of wort.

Cowberries could be added to the mash tun, or they could be added to the wort during the boil. It is difficult to know exactly how many to add, but when we made our Juniper Ale with berries, we used just a few ounces to twelve pounds of crushed malt. Having obtained the wort we would boil it, together with some sprigs of bog myrtle and/or lime flowers and clover flowers. Yeast would be added, most likely in the form of barm from a previous brew. Leave the ale to ferment for a few days, then rack it off into a fresh container and see what it tastes like.

strange brews
Over the last few years, there have been some rather strange re-creations of the alcoholic drink hinted at by the residues in the birch bark bucket found at Egtved. Not all of them are convincing. I watched a TV programme recently that showed the archaeologist Neil Oliver drinking an 'ancient style brew'. I think, but am not entirely sure, that it was supposed to be based upon the Egtved residues but, sadly, some of the basic ingredients had been altered. Apple juice was used instead of wort. The herbs, honey and berries were included. I don't think that apple juice would have been an option for those Bronze Age brewers 3300 years ago. Crabapples were the only available 'apple' and these are very sour. Even today, when people make a crabapple wine, they have to add a large quantity of sugar because the crabapples are not sweet enough to ferment by themselves. Crabapples also require a modern press to extract the juice. I cannot work out how the juice could have been pressed from crabapples in Bronze Age Denmark.

Another strange brew is Kvasir, made recently by the Dogfish Head Brewery in collaboration with Professor Pat McGovern, who is sometimes referred to as the Beer Archaeologist. For some reason, concentrated birch syrup was included in the Egtved inspired brew. I have no idea why, since this ingredient was not identified in the analysis of the residue from the birch bark bucket. Concentrated birch syrup is made using modern processing techniques. I think the word to remember here is 'inspired'. I don't think they were aiming to actually recreate an accurate copy of the 3300 year old ale, rather, they are making a modern Craft Beer, USA style, that pays homage to the Egtved Girl. I have found no mention of malt, mash tun or wort in the media coverage of this brew.

It is odd that she is referred to as a 'leather clad priestess' when she was actually wearing a tunic made from woven wool and a corded skirt. This is a very well known detail of the Egtved Girl's clothing. When she was first discovered, in 1921, some  archaeologists thought that there must have been a linen undergarment because the 'string skirt' was so revealing.

There are plans to make a commercial beer to a similar recipe in Sweden - Arketyp. This brew appears to have crushed pale malt as an ingredient, but it also includes concentrated birch syrup. Again, I don't understand the reason for this addition to the ale unless it is to make a kind of 'Nordic Grog'. Professor McGovern has proposed, in a recent academic paper, that this is what people made and drank throughout Europe in prehistory - some kind of mixed alcoholic drink made up of different components, such as birch syrup, wine and herbs. Although the biochemical analysis of four residues is incredibly detailed, there is nothing in the paper about malting, mashing, malt sugars or the brewing process.

For some of these strange and exotic brews, it seems as if the archaeologists who try to recreate them are struggling to find fermentable sugars, while neglecting the malt and the wort. Barley, and wheat, are an excellent source of sugars for fermentation  if processed in the right way. Maybe you have to be a brewer to understand these processes.

Egtvedpigens Bryg - made with malt, water, herbs and honey
I am very pleased to say that the National Museum of Denmark, working together with the Skands Brewery, have made an authentic ale based upon the ingredients identified in the bucket residue analysis. It should be available in the Museum Shop. If you are lucky enough to go and visit the Egtved Girl in Denmark, maybe you could try some. The details of this ale are, as yet, sparse on the internet. The launch party was on the 22nd of March 2014, so this really is the most recent and, for me, the most exciting development in the long story of the Egtved Girl and her bucket of ale.

I have found some Press Releases online, in Danish and translated into English. I expect that we will be hearing a lot more about it in the future.

launched recently, a modern commercial version of the Egtved Ale