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Alcoholic drinks from Egypt

Ancient Egyptian beer (hqt, heqet)ḥnqt

Ancient Egyptian beer was brewed from malted emmer wheat or barley. Microscopy of dried beer residues suggests brewers mixed cooked and uncooked malt with water, strained off the husk and then added yeast, rather than simply soaking bread. The oldest known brewery, at Hierakonpolis, heated mash in large clay vats; all of the method is inferred from residues and remains.

A short entry: the sources we found record only what is said here about Ancient Egyptian beer itself.

Short entryAlcoholic drinks

Recipe

No fixed amounts recordedNo recipe survives. The Hierakonpolis vats could have made about 325 litres at once.
emmer wheat malt, with some barley
water
Starteryeast (inferred from residues; the source of the yeast is not known)
Start
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shapes, not to countYeasts

What changes: Grain sprouts, and its enzymes start to eat into the starch

Step 1 of 4
Malt the grain
Time
Not documented
Temperature
Not documented
Salt
None given
Acidity
Not documented
Which microbes the steps name, step by step
Yeasts

Output: emmer or barley malt.

Flavour
Not documented
Texture
Not documented
Colour
Not documented

Microbes at work in this step

Not documented for this step.

Method

Measured measured in a studySet fixed by a specification or tested recipeReported one source reports itTypical a general value, not sourced for this fermentUnconfirmed not yet checked against a source

At a glance

Ancient Egyptian beer was brewed from malted emmer wheat or barley. Microscopy of dried beer residues suggests brewers mixed cooked and uncooked malt with water, strained off the husk and then added yeast, rather than simply soaking bread. The oldest known brewery, at Hierakonpolis, heated mash in large clay vats; all of the method is inferred from residues and remains. Yeast does most of the fermenting.

What makes this one different

Microscopy of real residues shows a malt-and-water mash, partly cooked and strained, rather than the older textbook model of crumbling lightly baked bread into water.

Oldest brewery
Hierakonpolis locality HK11C, residue dated 3764–3537 cal BCE (2 sigma), about 3600 BCE

Related ferments

Variants

  • Bread-beer model (older textbook model)Lightly baked bread crumbled into water and fermented. Samuel's microscopy does not support it as the main method.

History and sources

Every number is labelled with how it is known. How this atlas is made

Farag and colleagues in 2019 analysed residues from the Predynastic brewery at Hierakonpolis, which they describe as the oldest dated brewery in Egypt [farag2019].

  1. [samuel1996b] Samuel D. 1996, Investigation of ancient Egyptian baking and brewing methods by correlative microscopy, Science 273:488–490 (abstract)paper
  2. [farag2019] Farag M.A., Elmassry M.M., Baba M., Friedman R. 2019, Revealing the constituents of Egypt's oldest beer using infrared and mass spectrometry, Scientific Reports 9:16199paper