Cheers! Bronze Age micro-brewery, beer recipe found in Cyprus
06 Dec 2012
Archaeologists working in Western Cyprus are raising a glass to the discovery of a Bronze Age 'micro-brewery', one of the earliest ever found.
The team which excavated the two by two metre domed mud-plaster structure, led by Dr Lindy Crewe from The University of Manchester, have demonstrated it was used as a kiln to dry malt to make beer three-and-a half-thousand years ago.
According to Dr Crewe, beers of different flavours would have been brewed from malted barley and fermented with yeasts with an alcoholic content of around 5 per cent. The yeast would have either been wild or produced from fruit such as grape or fig.
Dr Crewe is based jointly in Archaeology at the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures and Manchester Museum - both at the University.
Since 2007, she has been leading the excavation at the Early–Middle Bronze Age settlement of Kissonerga-Skalia, near Paphos.
She says, ''Archaeologists believe beer drinking was an important part of society from the Neolithic onwards and may have even been the main reason that people began to cultivate grain in the first place.
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