Chicago has “always been a transportation hub with access to goods from all around the world. Dovetail Brewery tries to use equipment from another era to make the brewing process as authentic as possible. ( LEARN: 75+ Craft Beer Styles) Dovetail Brewing Uses Equipment from Another EraĪnother Chicago brewery takes a different approach to recreate the grandparents of styles most Americans are more familiar with: European beers. You can find the beers off and on at the museum restaurant and brewery - whenever it fits production schedules. “We used peaches instead of apricot alfalfa instead of hemp.” “We had to think on our feet,” Ustick recalls. without going through a tedious approval process. But they’re not legal to use in beer in the U.S. The Chinese used hemp as a filter and osmanthus flower, which adds apricot-like flavor.

“Rice adds fermentable sugar to alcohol,” Ustick explains, creating beer “that drinks like saison.”īut Off Color found it couldn’t use all the traditional ingredients. Brewers combined honey, dates, peaches, jasmine, plums and rice. Unlike the Wari exhibit that focused on a single site, the China project sought to amalgamate what it found in various places. They named the Chinese beer QingMing after a traditional Chinese holiday to honor ancestors. We didn’t do that,” explains Ben Ustick, Off Color social media manager. “Traditionally, chicha fermentation happens by people chewing on corn and spitting it into a vessel. Off Color didn’t follow the production method to the letter, though. “It is like nothing else, evocative of a sour with a balsamic vinegary tart, refreshing taste, a good summer beer,” says Megan Williams, museum director of business enterprise. While the Wari themselves probably didn’t drink out of clear glass, it gets served that way today so imbibers can see the unique color. They came up with Wari, a purple beverage with a 3.8% ABV. So the museum teamed up with Off Color to recreate the chicha de molle inhabitants brewed and drank more than a thousand years ago. Archaeologists found the seeds at the site. They analyzed residues found in drinking vessels and discovered that forerunners of brewers making fruit beer today used Peruvian peppercorn (molle berries) in their beer. In Peru, Field Museum researchers discovered a brewery that seems to have been destroyed around 1100 A.D. Off Color Brewing and Chicago’s Field Museum collaborate on Wari beer. and also beer from the Shang and Zhoe dynasties that thrived in China thousands of years ago. Off Color Brewing has worked with the Field Museum of Natural History to recreate beers from the Wari Empire, which occupied much of Peru from the seventh to 11th centuries A.D. In Chicago, you may get to try what they drank in ancient civilizations in Peru and China. Small and independent craft breweries team up with historians, archaeologists, microbiologists and museums to bring styles from another era back to life. While many brewers are eager to serve their newest concoction, a handful are going backward to restore beer recipes lost to time. Credit: Small Brewers Recreate Beer Recipes Lost to Time February 12, 2018

Recipes lost to time