Drink This: Dogfish Head Midas Touch Ale, Oldest Beer in the World

It’s been awhile since I poured you a Drink This, but here’s a beer I’ve wanted to profile from the beginning: Dogfish Head Midas Touch Ale.  It’s about as craft as craft beer can be, as it is brewed with honey, white Muscat grapes, and saffron.  Sounds new-school, right?

But in fact, it comes from the oldest place of all: Turkey [citation needed].  You see, the Midas Touch was born of an our-powers-combined collaboration between Dogfish Head, one of the most audacious breweries in the country, and Dr. Patrick McGovern, the world’s leading chemical archaeologist of ancient beverages.  He found the oldest beer.  He found the oldest wine.  He found the oldest booze of any kind, period.  And he’s worked with Dogfish Head to Jurassic Park these millennia-old brews and let you drink yourself back to the Bronze Age.  

Yeah – most beers you drink?  Favored by dudes named Cameron and Trevor who drink it from a can while playing foosball and watching Mall Cop.  Midas Touch?  Favored by dudes named Genghis and Nebuchadnezzar who drink it from the skull of a cyclops while auditioning women for their harem and pointing at people to have executed.

As with more beers than anyone cares to admit, what it tastes like is beside the point.  It’s a little sweet, wine-ish, mead-thick, and strong with alcohol, because our ancestors out on the steppes needed to stay warm in the winter when they went out to find and punch sabertooth tigers.

The specifics of the recipe are these: a vessel found in what has somewhat imaginatively been dubbed the “King Midas Tomb” in present-day Turkey was dated to about 2700 years ago.  Until recently, it was just that – an old pot.  But about a decade ago, McGovern learned that residue had been discovered inside the vessel, and he quickly determined the chemical makeup of the residue.  The stuff was… beer.  The oldest beer yet discovered, in fact, though the technology for chemically dissecting such old residue samples is very new.

McGovern teamed up with Dogfish Head, and the resulting beer is something surprising drinkable three millennia later.  Do tastes really evolve?

Also, McGovern and the brewery have recently debuted Chateau Jiahu, based on a recipe from a 9,000-year-old vessel found in a Chinese tomb.  It’s not beer, exactly, but it’s the oldest partying agent ever found – literally from the Stone Age.

Source: Dogfish Head.