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Egypt unearths 'oldest' mass-production brewery (phys.org)
27 points by diodorus on Feb 17, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments



Reminds me of my favorite piece at the Metropolitan Museum. These Middle Kingdom dioramas of bread and beer making:

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/544258

It's hard to imagine but as ancient as these dioramas are, they were made at least 1000 years after Narmer.


We tend to think of medieval and ancient societies as primitive, and what's often lost on people is how much organizational effort was required to build a bridge or a temple.

They had thousands of people working onsite and thousands more on quarries and in forests, this required many levels of management, dedicated logistics and payroll teams, all with paper or clay tablets, for projects that ran for multiple generations.


This is pretty interesting, it looks like this setup could do about 22,400l at once, or about 140 bbl, in brewery terms. If the vessels here are all fermentation vessels, and they turned that over once every 2 weeks, then they'd have an output of about 1/4 of what Stone Brewing was doing as of a few years ago. That's pretty cool. I'd definitely love to know more about their process.



Interesting! There are some farmhouse brewers in Norway, Lithuania, and a few other places that use mashing processes that aren’t temp controlled two step processes. However, mixing cold and hot mashed wort is a pretty neat technique.

Looking at the photo, there is a lot of protein haze and sediment, which I would expect given the lack of boil, and consumption from the fermentation vessel.

Now I wonder how they were processing the grains prior to brewing.




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