• 1 Tasse Weizenmalz
  • 1 Tasse Pale Ale Malz

Hälfte schroten für das Brot.

Bappir (beer bread)

  • 125 ground malt
  • 1/2 Tbs of date syrup
  • 1/4 tsp aniseed
  • 1/4 tsp cumin
  • 1/4 tbs cardamon
  • A few TBS of water and all-purpose flour

Mix all ingredients except for the water and flower in a large enough container until they are mixed evenly. This will not stick together at all, which is why you will need about 1-2 Tbs of flour and some water. After adding these you should get a thick sticky substance that sort of sticks together. Spread this out on a baking sheet or pizza stone (I suggest with baking paper under it) and create a pancake of about 1 cm thick. Then bake it at 180 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes.

The resulting bread should smell very malty and be much more solid. Try to make it as dark as possible, even potentially allowing the edges to burn a bit as burnt bread is a good bittering agent to replace the lack of hops. Either way, this is where most of your taste will come from.

Now cut the bread into small chunks while it is hot and then let it cool. After that, put it into a 50 degree oven and leave it for a few hours up to overnight. You should be left with a very dry and slightly darkened ‚bread‘ that kind of looks like modern energy bars and can be eaten as such given the sugar and malt content.

Sumerian beer (2,5 liters)

  • bappir bread ( 160 g)
  • 150g ground malt
  • A dash of date syrup 4 Datteln in das erwärmende Wasser
  • 2,5L water

Place the bappir and malt into a pan with 1,5L of water (I placed it into a muslin bag for easy cleaning) and mash at 70 degrees for about 30-40 minutes while stirring occasionally. Then lower the temperature to 60 degrees for about 20 more minutes. Add 1 or 2 TBS of date syrup, depending on how strong you want the alcohol to be.

Pour the (still hot) mixture into a 1 gallon fermenting vessel and top off to get the full amount. I suggest that you pour the mixture through a cloth or some kind of filter to get rid of all the malt and bappir bits. The Sumerians of course did not do this, but unless you want to drink the beer through a straw like the Sumerians did, I can suggest giving up this bit of authenticity for convenience.

We let the wort cool down naturally, which means that you have to make sure that nothing bad comes into the fermentation vessel during this process. I just close it off with the bubbler, which will bubble in reverse for a bit as the water vapor condenses back into water. Then once you think the wort is cool enough (typically 3-4 hours later) you pitch the yeast. I used Voss Kveik yeast, because that is what I had.

The fermentation took me 3 days, but it will probably be slower with other yeasts. Either way, I suggest putting the brew into the fridge once fermentation is complete so that most of the active yeast can go dormant and fall to the bottom. This again is not a mandatory step, but some people get ‚digestive problems‘ when they ingest too much active yeast at once. Normal beer has less of an issue in this extent, because you age it in a bottle, while this is meant to drink fresh, at room temperature and mostly flat. Of course, you can bottle it, and then it will carbonate like any beer, but don’t keep it too long or it might go bad. Either way, you are ready to drink your Sumerian beer!

https://pietrow.net/sumerianbeer.html

frisch! beim Bierfestival am 3.1. in Hagenich.