Wow. Brewing beer, the Egyptian way

In 1873, a German Egyptologist called Georg Ebers purchased something remarkable — a 3,000-year-old papyrus. The scroll is about 20 meters long and contains about 110 pages of text. Since Egyptian hieroglyphics has been fully deciphered, we know what the papyrus says. It is said to be the oldest and most comprehensive medical compendium dealing with a wide range of diseases, diagnosis and remedies — and even surgical procedures.

Dated around 1550 BC, today, it lies in the library of the University of Leipzig, Germany. Since it was in the possession of Georg Ebers, it is called Ebers Papyrus.

For sure, if you go to the library to have a look, you’d stand stupefied not only by the papyrus’ antiquity but also by the wealth of knowledge it holds. You’d also no doubt be awestruck by the advancement in Egyptian civilization. Ebers Papyrus is no less awesome than the biggest symbol of that civilization — the pyramids.

But you’d probably come back happy and do nothing more than to speak about it to your friends or post about it on social media. That is exactly where Dylan McDonnell, who has a master’s in Middle Eastern studies and lives in Salt Lake City, US, distinguished himself.

He spotted in the Ebers Papyrus a recipe for brewing beer and lost no time in securing the ingredients — which included rare sycamore figs sourced from a 1,400-year-grove and a strain of yeast gleaned from an 850 BC pottery in Israel — and brewed ten gallons of the beer in his backyard. He got himself and his friends a 3000-year-old beer. The ‘Utah man who brewed 3000-old beer with yeast from ancient pottery’, now all over YouTube, has much to thank Georg Ebers for.

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