Peter Smith, of the always interesting Smithsonian magazine food blog Food & Think, has dug up an ancient Sumerian drinking song. Or something like a drinking song, anyway--according to the the historian Peter Damerow, the text functions as both a religious hymn to Ninkasi, the goddess of brewing (they had a god for everything back then!) and a fairly readable recipe for how to make a jug of old-school brew:
What a lady! This same Hymn to Ninkasi inspired the brewers at San Francisco's Anchor Brewing Co. to make their Ninkasi beer, based on something like this recipe, back in the early '90s. It was not sold commercially (Fritz Maytag, the former owner of Anchor, told the Chicago Tribune that "exploiting the name of the goddess" didn't sit well with him), so why not go ahead and try to capture that 4,000-year-old flavor at home.
[via Food & Think, Chicago Tribune]