At 9 a.m. in Rehoboth, Delaware, the windows of Dogfish Head Brewery, on the town's main drag, are steamed up. Mike Gerhart, a head distiller for Dogfish, has arrived early to stoke the kettles for today's historic brew. Joining him is his boss, Sam Calagione, Dogfish's founder. Down from Philadelphia for the day is Patrick McGovern, an archaeological chemist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum.
Adventures in brewing are not uncommon at Dogfish Head. In the 10 years since he started the brewery, Calagione, 36, and his crew have distinguished themselves in the brewing subculture for whimsy and imagination. They have made ales with beet sugar and raisins, with chicory and St. John's wort. Their Pangaea ale used ingredients from all seven continents. Five years ago, Calagione and McGovern collaborated on Midas Touch, a beverage informed by the 2,700-year-old remains of a funerary feast discovered in central Turkey and believed to have been that of King Mita, the historical figure behind the Midas legend.
This morning they are pushing further into the murk of alcoholic prehistory. For the past few years McGovern has been analyzing scraps of pottery excavated from a site in central China. Last year he announced that he had detected traces of the oldest alcoholic beverage yet discovered, a Stone Age brew dating back 9,000 years. When I visited McGovern's basement laboratory the day before, he handed me a plastic bag containing one of the shards. I could not get my mind around the stretch of human culture it embodied—a time period twice the span from the pyramids of Egypt to the pyramids of Las Vegas; Christianity rising four and a half times. Nonetheless, with this meager evidence, McGovern and the brewers at Dogfish have found their mission: to coax an ancient brew back to life.
Molecular archaeology is the name for the nexus of disciplines at which McGovern finds himself. He is one of a number of scientists who in the last quarter century have been using the analytic tools of modern chemistry—spectrometers and chromatographs—to scrutinize the artifacts of lost worlds, seeking evidence with which to piece together the lives of our ancestors. McGovern has made a name for himself tracking down and studying traces of prehistoric alcohol, the details of which he reveals in a recent book, Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture.
For many years, the analytic machines in McGovern's laboratory were too expensive to fit the modest budgets of most archaeology departments. Many of McGovern's are hand-me-downs, donated by DuPont when they upgraded to newer, fancier models. The growing availability of the technology has permitted artifacts long cataloged and relegated to museum storage rooms to be reanalyzed.
