Brewing 3,000 Year-Old Ancient Mesopotamian Beer

The ancient Mesopotamians absolutely loved beer but perhaps none more so than the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II who once supplied 10,000 jars of the stuff for a 10-day feast for nearly 70,000 guests, and while he served plenty of basic beer he also had specialty brews like this bittersweet pomegranate beer known as Alep-Anu. So thank you to Hungry Root for sponsoring this video as we The record of the banquet of Ashurnasirpal II is one of the most detailed that we have from the ancient world and it is probably the biggest that we know of. The stele which catalogs the entire menu mentions 10,000 measures of beer were served plus an assortment of specialty mixed beers and just as much wine was served as well. Now exactly what these specialty beers were is impossible to tell but it is very likely that one of them was a bittersweet pomegranate beer known as Alep-Anu. Now several years ago I made a beer based on an ancient Sumerian text called the Hymn to Ninkasi and while that can inform how we would make this beer it was actually written about 900 years before Ashurnasirpal II so it can only get us partway there. Like we know that certain things had changed like while the Sumerians drank their unfiltered beer through straws and communal jars the Assyrians seemed to prefer their drink in goblets which would imply that the beer was at least somewhat filtered or at least it didn't have bits of barley bread still floating at the top. Now most of what we know about beer making from this period actually comes from archaeology and so as I am not an archaeologist I'm going to be leaning on the work of Tate Paulette in his fantastic book all about Mesopotamian beer. I'll put a link to that in the description and I have to thank my friend Arim who is coming out with a book called Table of Gods which is all Mesopotamian food and he gave me the idea to do this as well as a lot of information about Alep-Anu. So to make this one specific version, my version of Assyrian Alep-Anu what you'll need is two and three quarters cup or 450 grams of barley and that is not pearled barley but actual barley grains because that's what we're going to use to make malted barley. You can also just buy malted barley. Then two-thirds of a cup or 120 grams of emmer wheat berries, one cup or 175 grams of pomegranate seeds, one and a half cups or 350 milliliters of pomegranate juice, and the word refers not only to this type of beer but to the bittersweet taste of pomegranate seeds and the bittersweet taste that some dates have. So I'm also adding six dates, then a half cup or 170 grams of honey, and one teaspoon of ale or wine yeast. Now one of the big questions about beer making from this period is exactly how they introduced yeast into the beer. What is known is that they were no longer using bapir which is beer bread and that is a quasi-dried bread that is dried in such a way where the yeast is likely still alive and that's how they were making beer earlier than the Assyrians and since we're adding yeast directly to it we don't have to make any of the bapir, and when I did make bapir for the Sumerian beer a couple years ago it does take a while so we do cut that out but still this recipe especially if you're going to mulch your own barley is going to take about two weeks to make. So if you are looking for a recipe that won't take you two weeks to make might I suggest one of the quick and easy recipes from today's sponsor Hungry Root. 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Just go to hungryroot.com and use my code TASTINGHISTORY to get 40% off of your first order plus a free item in every box for the life of your subscription, and now let's make some beer. So first we're going to start by malting our barley, and to do that you soak the barley in water overnight, about 12 hours is best. Then drain off any excess liquid and you can prepare it to sprout, and essentially what this is, what you need to do rather is keep it moist but also keep it so it's not pressed against anything because it can get moldy and you don't want that. So what I've found is one of the easiest ways to do this is to set out a cooling rack on a tray and then put down a layer of cheesecloth, then spread the barley on the cheesecloth and set another layer of cheesecloth on top of that. The idea is to keep air moving throughout the barley so it needs to be lifted up off of the tray. Then a couple times a day you want to spritz it down with some water just so it doesn't all dry out, and after about three days you will start to see little sprouts coming up from the barley and at that point when you lift the barley off the cheesecloth you should see lots of sprouts, and that is exactly what you want. So pull the sprouted barley off of the cloth and lay it out on a tray and then set the tray in the oven at the lowest temperature possible around 200 degrees Fahrenheit, no more, and let it slowly dry out for about four hours. Now once it's dry you're going to crush this up into a powder. Ideally you're going to do this in a huge mortar but a food processor or blender will work in a pinch, and if you have purchased your malted barley then this is where your recipe starts. Once the barley is crushed do the same with the emmer wheat berries and then heat 5 quarts or liters of water to 150 degrees Fahrenheit or about 65 degrees Celsius. Then add the barley and the wheat and let it infuse for one hour, and you want to keep an eye on the temperature. You can heat it a little bit warmer or let it cool a little bit but you want to try to stay within 5 to 10 degrees of 150. Then once it has steeped for an hour pour it into another pot straining out a good amount of the wheat and the barley. To that you add another quart or liter of water along with the dates and the pomegranate seeds and stir everything together, and then let it slowly heat to a boil and let it boil for one full hour. Now since we're just adding things right into the liquid this is going to end up being pretty murky as a beer. More modern recipes will have you take everything and put it into like mesh bags and suspend it in the wort and so it'll be a little bit clearer but we're not doing that, but we're also not like taking the barley bread the bapir and just throwing it in and leaving absolutely everything in and that's what the Sumerians did so this is kind of in the middle of that. Now once the water has boiled for an hour remove it from the heat and add in the pomegranate juice and the honey and let it cool completely. Then once it is cooled it is ready to add the yeast and ferment. Now you could transfer this to a huge earthen jar like the Assyrians would have had but then you can't actually see it fermenting so that's no fun so instead I am transferring it to a clear glass jar before adding the yeast and letting it dissolve. Then back in the day they would just cover the top with straw as it fermented which you can absolutely do. Not the most hygienic way to do this but it is a short-lived beer so not the worst either but if you don't want things to get into the beer I think the best thing to do is to use a lid with an airlock and that's what I'm using. Then leave it in a cool dark place to ferment for seven to ten days and you'll know that it's working when you see foam on the top and little bubbles coming up from the depths. Now while this beer was definitely known to the Assyrians it was actually known in Mesopotamia much earlier than that. In fact it was produced by exclusively female brewers at the Palace of Mari under King Zimri Lim. That's the palace and the king that I discussed in the video on the Baked Good Mersu but it is another palace and another great ruler that I'll be talking about today because Ashurnasirpal II's great feast was actually to celebrate the opening of his new grand palace at Kalu. Ashurnasirpal II was the third king of what would become known as the Neo-Assyrian Empire, a period which would see the empire expand to new heights and give the world a model of what an empire could be for centuries to come. A later king the similarly named Ashurbanipal would accomplish this through learning and culture, building one of the greatest libraries of the ancient world but Ashurnasirpal did not have the luxury of library building. No his claim to fame would be the brutal, ruthless, and relentless conquest of his enemies and the subjugation of his own people but the man really knew how to throw a party. See by the time he came to power in 883 BC the Assyrian Empire had gone through a series of ups and downs, one of those downs being the Bronze Age Collapse which destroyed many of the empires of ancient Mesopotamia but the memory of what had once been loomed large in the mind of the Assyrians and especially Ashurnasirpal so his goal was to restore the empire to its glory days and he started by putting down rebellions in cities like Suru which were supposed to be clients to the Assyrian king and he put down these rebellions with ferocity like in the city of Tella their men young and old I took prisoner from some I cut off their feet and hands from others I cut off their noses ears and lips of the young men's ears I made a heap of the old men's heads I made a tower I exposed their heads as a trophy in front of their city the children boys and girls I burned in the flames the city I destroyed burned and consumed with fire not a nice guy it turns out. Now he soon realized that destroying all these cities would kind of dry up the revenue from their taxes and their tribute so instead he started just punishing them and then kicking out their leaders and installing his own people kind of taking over governance and truly building an empire as we would think of it today and while some cities like Tella he did raise to the ground there were other cities like Tushan which had pretty much been abandoned which he decided to bring back to life. I took Tushan in hand for renovation. I founded a palace for my royal residence inside. I took over this city for myself and stored therein barley and straw from the land Nirbu. I resettled the people of Nirbu in their abandoned cities and houses and imposed upon their cities more tribute and tax and more forced labor than ever before. Again not really a very nice guy. So after he had consolidated all of his power in the lands that were once Assyrian he decided to keep going and marched through Lebanon all the way to the Mediterranean where his soldiers washed their weapons in the sea, and then he waited for all of the local rulers to come and give him tribute. They brought everything from gold and silver, tin and copper, linens, ebony, ivory, and even a collection of monkeys both large and small. This was their tribute I received and they embraced my feet. Eventually he decided enough is enough at least for now and instead of worrying about these other places he's going to focus on his capital Ashur, an ancient city and home to the prime god of the Assyrians also named Ashur. He redid some roads, rebuilt some temples but soon realized that this ancient city was indeed ancient and it would just be easier to move the capital to someplace new and so that's what he did. He moved the Assyrian capital to Qalhu also known as Nimrud or Qala in the Bible. Now archaeologists aren't entirely sure why he moved the capital. It's all kind of conjecture but there was a lot more space in Qalhu so he could really build whatever he wanted including a new palace that was much better protected as it could be up a little bit raised on a hill. Another reason might have been more political because in Ashur in the old capital there were all of the old guard, his father and grandfather and great-grandfather's people. In his new capital it was all his new lackeys who only responded to him so maybe it was a bit political as well. Nobody really knows. What we do know is that he went all out for this new capital. Over the course of 15 years he built nine new temples, new homes and buildings for the people, entertainment spaces like orchards and gardens and even the first zoo which included monkeys, ostriches, bulls and lions but the grandest of all was his new palace. Now we don't know the exact size of the palace because only a small portion has been excavated about 650 by 390 feet but based on the throne room alone it was undoubtedly large and lavish. The walls were decorated with limestone bas-relief depicting deities, hunting expeditions including images of Ashurnasirpal killing lions with his bare hands and of course his military campaigns which is fitting since it was the booty taken from those campaigns that built the palace and it was of course protected by numerous depictions of Lamassu which was an Assyrian protective deity typically shown as a hybrid of a The place was plush and so when it was finally time to unveil it he did so in grand fashion by throwing a massive 10-day feast for 69,574 guests and what's really cool is that they weren't just the really important people, it was pretty much everyone. In addition to his own court there were 5,000 high officials and dignitaries from all over the empire and other parts of the world but then he also invited 74,000 workmen and women who had built the temple and built the entire city along with the 16,000 inhabitants of that city. The happy people of all the lands together with the people of Kalu for 10 days I feasted, whined, bathed, anointed, and honored them and then sent them back to their lands in peace and joy. Dinner and a bath. Now that is very classy. What's not very classy is bragging about the feast that you just threw and that is exactly what he did because Ashurnasirpal was not a humble man. On one stelae he wrote I am king, I am lord, I am praiseworthy, I am exalted, I am important, I am magnificent, I am foremost, I am a hero, I am a warrior, I am a lion, and I am a man. Sounds like one of those daily affirmations that like a finance bro gives himself in the mirror right before he's going in to make a big presentation to kind of hype himself up. Anyway Ashurnasirpal wanted everyone to know about this huge party that he'd thrown and so he had a stelae created with the entire menu on it, and it was a really, really long menu. I mean like cheesecake factory menu long, and so I'm not going to read the whole thing but here are just a few of the highlights. It starts with the meat. 1,000 barley-fed oxen, 1,000 young cattle and sheep from the stalls, 14,000 common sheep from the flocks belonging to Ishtar my mistress, 2,000 oxen from the herds belonging to Ishtar my mistress, 1,000 fatted sheep, 1,000 lambs, 500 deer, 500 gazelles, 1,000 large birds, 500 geese, 500 fowls, 1,000 suki birds, 1,000 karib birds, 10,000 pigeons, 10,000 doves, 10,000 small birds, 10,000 fishes, 10,000 locusts. Those locusts which were very often served on a skewer were incredibly popular with the Assyrians at the time, and throughout the Middle East for years and years to come. So if I ever come across any edible locusts I really want to try that. Now that was just the meat. He goes on to talk about 10,000 large loaves of bread, heaps of different herbs and spices, tons of vegetables and fruits like pomegranates and dates, and then grains and nuts, and 10,000 measures of beer, 10,000 skins of wine, and a hundred measures of fine mixed beer which might be something like the Alep-Anu which should be about ready to try. So after letting the beer ferment for about a week and a half it had stopped making any more bubbles and so I served it up, and here we are Alep-Anu, the pomegranate beer of the Assyrian kings. So murky yes but it reminds me a lot of like guava juice, the color too. It is kind of brown but there is a reddish tint to it. I kind of hoped that it would be more red you know, like pomegranate red but it's not, but there is definitely a reddish tint to it. So let's try it. First the smell. It's definitely, definitely yeasty like, like a beer smell. It's kind of like a hefeweizen, that yeasty smell. Surprisingly good. It's not as bitter as I thought it would be. It's also not sweet. What's interesting is you get the flavor of the honey, and you get the flavor of the pomegranate but not like the sweetness of either of those, which I guess you don't expect because hopefully the yeast has eaten up all the sugar or at least most of it. It tastes oddly modern, like the the flavors. What it is not at all is effervescent. There are no bubbles. There were bubbles during the fermentation but they have all gone. So it is a completely flat beer. It's a light beer but it is, it is flat so that is really where it greatly differs from any modern kind of beer. Another big thing that's different is that because it doesn't have any hops in it, this does not stay good for very long. You can keep it for about a week. Now if, if you were to bottle it and if you had made everything perfectly sterile and everything you could probably keep it for longer in that case, but as it is beer would only last for maybe a week at most. Sometimes beer would last even less than that, but it's actually quite good. As far as alcohol, I don't know exactly how alcohol it is, alcoholic it is. It doesn't taste alcoholic. There surely is alcohol in there. The Mesopotamians loved their alcohol, so much so that they had a saying that said you should not pass judgment when you drink beer, which is still a wise thing to think today. You shouldn't drink and pass judgment on anyone or anything, but yeah they did get drunk. Just probably took a lot more, but their wine was also really strong. Anyway, yeah it's not that hard. It takes two weeks to make, but if you buy your malted barley then it's actually really, really easy, and you can play with the amounts of dates, and honey, and pomegranates, and everything, but I gotta say the way that I did it I think it turned out pretty good. I could, I could drink a decent amount of this. Cheers. So yeah make some pomegranate beer, and I will see you next time on Tasting History.