Beer making on Vače Situla

Here's something funny. The Vače Situla is an ornamented Early Iron Age (5th c. BC) Illyrian ritual vessel (situla) found in the 19th century at the Vače Archaeological Site in central Slovenia...Thanks @another_barbara for reminding me of it.

The vessel has three rows of relief that show what look like scenes from some complex religious ceremony...A lot of stuff depicted on this vessel is very very strange and definitely deserves further investigation. Like all the animals in the bottom row...

But for now, the funny part: "The middle one shows the main happening: at first a sacrifice of grain..." Why is the guy on the right blocking his nose if this is a sacrifice of grain? What exactly is going on here?

I want to thank @JuraPijandura for pointing me at the right direction. What we are looking at is the depiction of beer making...

In "A toast with bear for eternity" that talks about beer making techniques from Ancient Egypt, we can read that:

The most common interpretation of brewing in ancient Egypt is based on the use of bread. Beer loaves or the so-called beer bread were made from dough rich in yeast and lightly baked so that the yeast would not be killed by heat. Those loaves were then crumbled and rinsed with water through sieves into vats (additional ingredients such as dates or extra yeast might have been added at this point). Fermentation occurred inside the vats and the resulting liquid was decanted into jars which were sealed for storage or transport.

The described process is similar to the one used for making a Nubian beverage bouza even today:

First, cereal, generally wheat, but also barley, millet and sorghum is ground and lightly baked as leavened bread, with a moist, yeasty center. The bread is broken, diluted with water, and combined with malt. The resulting mash is moderately heated for several hours and more water added, and, sometimes after a filtration step, the beverage is primed with some old bouza and set aside to ferment for several days.

The above article continues with this statement: "Archaeological data has provided a different view on ancient Egyptian brewing methods" and explains that most beer was not made with bread but with malt...

But malt could have also been turned into "malt loaves" which could then have been crumbled into water...I talked about this in my post "Fulacht fiadh, primitive ale brewery" about Bronze Age Irish brewing...

The important thing here is not whether the starter was a yeast bread loaf or malt loaf...The important thing is that the starter loaf was then crumbled into vats full of water for fermentation...A smelly process...

PS:

Stone slab depicting two Illyrian warriors from the Iapodes tribe sharing a drink from the same vat (most likely beer) using drinking horns. Una National Park, Village of Ripač, Bihać, Bosnia.

Fulacht fiadh - meat and fish curing facility

A fulacht fiadh or fulacht fian  is a type of archaeological site found in Ireland. In England, Scotland, Wales and the Isle of Man they are known as burnt mounds. They commonly survive as a low horseshoe-shaped mound of charcoal-enriched soil and heat shattered stone with a slight depression at its center showing the position of a stone or wood lined pit. In legend, Fulachta Fiadh, which were also called Fulachta Fian,  were the cooking place of the Fianna. 

Fianna (singular fiann) were small, semi-independent warrior bands in Irish mythology. They are featured in the stories of the Fenian Cycle, where they are led by Fionn mac Cumhaill. The historical institution of the fiann is known from references in early medieval Irish law tracts. A fiann was made up of landless young men and women, often young aristocrats who had not yet come into their inheritance of land.

Geoffrey Keating, in his 17th-century History of Ireland, says that during the winter the fianna were quartered and fed by the nobility, during which time they would keep order on their behalf, but during the summer, from Beltaine to Samhain, they were obliged to live by hunting for food and for pelts to sell.

Now this is very interesting. If Fianna were "obliged" to live by hunting for food and for pelts to sell, they were basically full time, professional meat and fur hunters. 

Fulachtaí fiadh are usually found close to water sources, such as springs, rivers and streams, or waterlogged ground. One of the reasons for this could have been because in thick forests rivers and streams are the easiest ways in and out. So a hunting party would naturally follow the river and set camps on its banks, venturing into the forest to hunt and bringing their kill back to the camp to be processed, cooked and eaten or preserved and stored. These seasonal camps were reused year after year and this is what caused accumulation of burned stones. I spoke about this in more detail in my post "Fulacht fiadh - sweat lodge" and in my post "Banya".

But there is another reason why Ancient Irish hunters would set camps along rivers. Fish. And one fish in particular: salmon. We know that the Bronze Age Irish had been catching and eating salmon on large scales using massive fish traps and weirs. Indeed the oldest fish traps found in Europe were found in Ireland and were used for catching salmon 8000 years ago. 

Now salmon is a delicious fish so no wonder people have been catching it for food for so long. But as any other fish it is highly perishable. Fish can only last 12-15 hours in fresh condition after catching. So if the ancient Irish really did built fish traps to catch fish in large numbers, they must have had a way of preserving this fish for later use. 

It is exactly the same with meat. A dead animal starts rotting straight away. Especially during the warm period of the year, the meat left outside will get spoiled within hours, unless it is preserved. 

In cold and dry areas of Scandinavia, during spring months, it is possible to air dry fish in 3 to 4 days. 

Such dried fish would keep for a long time. Here is an excellent video showing how this is done. But even there, later in the year, during summer and autumn, when the weather gets warmer and more humid, fish needs to be cold smoke dried in order to preserve it. 

So if the ancient Irish used some method for preserving meat and fish it was probably smoking or smoke drying. Smoking can be done with or without salting. However if you salt the meat or fish before you smoke it, it will last much longer. 

I believe that the Bronze Age Irish were perfectly capable of doing both salting and drying meat and fish using fulachta fiadh. And this is how:

Fish first needs to be scaled, gutted and filleted. This can be done in the stream or river or lake.  

After the meat and fish was cleaned, and before it is salted, it needs to be cut into thin strips to enable deep salt penetration and proper aeration and smoke exposure. 

The meat and fish then need to be salted. Salting is an essential feature in smoking both meat and fish. The basic role of salt in curing is to dehydrate the meat and fish just enough so that bacteria cannot thrive. It also works as an antibacterial agent which kills bacteria on contact cleaning the surface of the the meat. Using the plant salts with high level of nitrates is even better, as the nitrates kill botulism bacteria, which normal salts can't. I talked about these special salts, and the possibility that the ancient Irish could have used them for food preservation in my post "Not all salts were made equal". Unsalted fish particularly will usually sour or spoil if kept at smoking temperatures for any length of time. 

There are two ways to salt-cure meat and fish.

Dry curing: Salt is rubbed over the meat.

Wet curing: Also known as brining, this involves soaking the meat in a brine, a strong solution of salt in water. 

Dry salting

Meat or fish pieces are rubbed with salt and placed into a dry fulacth fiadh trough. Once all the pieces are placed into the trough, they are covered with salt, then with stone plates or wooden planks and then stones are placed on top to press the content. You need to leave the meat in the salt for 2 weeks. Every few days the meat is repacked, the bottom pieces are put to the top...

Wet salting

To salt a lot of meat of fish, you need a lot of brine and to make a lot of brine you need a large tub. 

On the website of "the New Zealand digital library, hosted by the University of Waikato", we can find instructions how to salt and smoke fish using primitive techniques. In this instruction we can see a drawing showing a salting tank with dimensions: 

It is strikingly similar to the construction and dimensions of large fulach fiadh troughs.

So where would you make brine in a fulacht fiadh? In a trough of course. The bigger the better. You need to keep the fish or meat covered with brine throughout the brining period. A log can be floated on the brine to keep the fish or meat submersed, but what ever you are salting should not be packed so tightly that the brine cannot circulate around each piece.

The strength of the brine is a matter of preference. Brining duration depends on the type of smoking you want to do. One method of determining the ratio of water to salt is to put all the fish or meat you want to salt into the trough and then cover it with water. Then just keep adding salt to the water until no more salt will dissolve in it. You can test the concentration of the brine by dropping an egg into the water and adding salt until the object floats. 

The salting period is 3 weeks. 

The thing is for either type of salting, the trough would have to be covered with a wigwam, to protect it from rain. 

After the salting, birning is finished, the remaining salt in the brine can be reclaimed by boiling the brine in the trough using super heated stones. This is the exact same procedure used for extracting salt from brine that I described in my post about a possible use of fulachta fiadh as salt extraction facilities. 

Now that the fish or meat is salted, it needs to be quickly rinsed in fresh water and it can then be hang and smoked. 

The reason why smoking preservers food is predominantly because a number of wood (or peat) smoke compounds act as preservatives. Phenol and other phenolic compounds in wood smoke are both antioxidants, which slow rancidification of animal fats, and antimicrobials, which slow bacterial growth. Other antimicrobials in wood smoke include formaldehyde, acetic acid, and other organic acids, which give wood smoke a low pH—about 2.5. 


In order to be smoked the fish or meat needs to be hanged off some kind of frame or placed on some kind of rack which is then placed over a smoldering fire. 

There are two general methods of smoking: hot-smoking and cold-smoking. 

Hot-smoking (also called barbecuing or kippering) requires a short brining time and smoking temperatures of  52 to 80 °C and smoking duration between 15 minutes and 8 hours. Hot-smoked fish and meat are moist, lightly salted, and fully cooked, but they will keep at the 4.5 °C for only a few days at best. If hot smoking was used, the meat or fish had to be straight away taken to the nearest settlement for sale. 

A simple wooden rack like the one below is sufficient for short hot smoking. 

Cold-smoking requires a longer brining time, lower temperature of between 26-32°C and extended smoking time of one to five days or more of steady smoking). Cold-smoked fish and meat contain more salt and less moisture than hot-smoked fish. Once the fish has been sufficiently cured by smoke, it will keep at 4.5 degrees Celsius for several months. 

There is also a method of smoking that preserves fish and meat in such a way that it will keep for longer than several months in room temperature. 

Basically you need to sufficiently dehydrate it through prolonged process of smoke drying. First you need to thoroughly salt the fish or meat and then you need to press it to squeeze out excess moisture. Then you need to smoke it for four days to a week on continuously smoldering fire. The resulting product is only about one third its original weight, is quite firm and has a glossy surface. This dehydrated fish or meat will keep for an undetermined period, (not indefinite). This is the kind of smoke drying procedure still used by peasants in Serbia. Meat preserved like this can be kept hanging in airy dry place at room temperature for as long as you want. Fish preserved like this needs to be stored tightly wrapped, in a dry place, at low temperature. 

For long cold smoking, and particularly very long smoke drying, there is a risk that it might rain, and rain will completely spoil the fish or meat being smoked. This is why cold smoking needs to be done in a covered space, similar to a sweat lodge. Remember the design for sweat lodges I proposed was used by the ancient Irish in fulachta fiadh? Exactly the same type of hut can be used as a very efficient cold smoker. 

It is amazing how every part of the fulacht fiadh can be used for so many different things...

This type of preserving fish was recorded by the Lewis and Clark Expedition, also known as the Corps of Discovery Expedition. This was the first American expedition to cross what is now the western portion of the United States. It began near St. Louis, made its way westward, and passed through the continental divide to reach the Pacific coast. 

On the website "A history of the Grand Coulee Dam 1801 - 2001" we can read that Lewis and Clark reported that they had encountered Native Americans that dressed similarly to the Nez Perce near the Celilo Falls, who were all drying and pounding fish. Here Clark wrote that he also saw "Several Indians in canoes killing fish with gigs". Clark details the drying process when he wrote:

"On those islands of rocks as well as at and about their Lodges I observe great numbers of stacks of pounded salmon neatly preserved in the following manner, i. e. after being sufficiently dried it is pounded between two stones fine, and put in a spaces of basket neatly made of grass and rushes better than two feet long and one foot diameter, which basket is lined with the skin of salmon stretched and dried for the purpose, in this it is pressed down as hard as possible, when full they secure the loops of the basket that part very securely, and then on a dry situation they set those baskets the corded part up, their common custom is to set 7 as close as they can stand and 5 on the top of them, and secure them with mats which is raped around them and made fast with cords and covered also with mats, those 12 baskets of from 90 to 100 lbs. each form a stack. thus preserved those fish may be kept sound and sweet several years, as those people inform me, great quantities as they inform us are sold to the whites people who visit the mouth of this river as well as to the natives below"

I believe that if the ancient Irish used smoking to preserve fish and meet, they must have used some method of smoke drying very similar to the one described above. And they could have used fulachta fiadh for it. 

So, there you have it. Geoffrey Keating, in his 17th-century History of Ireland, says that during the winter the fianna were quartered and fed by the nobility, during which time they would keep order on their behalf, but during the summer, from Beltaine to Samhain, they were obliged to live by hunting for food and for pelts to sell. If the Fianna really lived from hunting for pelts to sell, they had to be able to preserve a huge surplus of meat they ended up with during the hunting season for the winter or at least for the duration of transport from the hunting camp to the customers in villages. To do that they had to cure the meat through smoking or salting and smoking.  And as we have seen Fulachta fiadh could have been used as efficient fish and meat curing facilities. 

Fulacht fiadh - primitive ale brewery?

In August 2007 two Galway based archaeologists, Billy Quinn and Declan Moore, suggested that fulachta fiadh were used primarily for the brewing of beer. To understand how they came to this conclusion we have to look at what we know about the history of brewing alcohol.

The earliest evidence for brewing of alcoholic beverages was found among the remains of the Neolithic village of Jiahu in Northern China. It seems that as early as 9,000 years ago people of Jiahu made alcohol from fermented rice and honey. The earliest evidence for brewing beer comes from Godin Tepe in the Zagros Mountains in modern day Iran. Here, calcium Oxalate, the principal component of an insoluble deposit related to the production of beer and known as beerstone was found on the inner surfaces of fermentation vessels dated to late fourth Millennium BC. A stamp seal from Tepe Gawra, a site near Mosul, Iraq dated to 4000 BC, shows two figures drinking beer using traditional straws and container.

At Hierakonpolis near Luxor, Jeremy Geller interpreted a site known as HK24A (3100-2890 BC), as a brewery. The brewery incorporated at least six coarse ceramic vats in two parallel rows set within a mud platform and probably originally covered with an ad hoc superstructure to contain the heat. Each vat, with a height of at least 65cm and a maximum diameter of 85cm, in brewing terms, might be considered a mash-tun, in which the infusion of ingredients (mainly emmer wheat and fruits for sugar and taste) was maintained at a warm temperature. Preliminary analysis of the black shiny residue with cereal grains still embedded found within the vats revealed compounds identified with all phases of biosynthetic fermentation. Based on ethnographic parallels, Geller suggested that the production of beer was a two day process: one day to bring the mash to temperature and cool it down and another day to ferment. There is no explicit information on how the vats were heated, but based on the vat dimensions they were probably heated by the hot coals piled around the base of the vats, in the same way the traditional cooking vats are still heated in Serbia.

Given the outlay for fuel necessary to sustain the needed heat, it is possible that the brew was transferred from the vats to ferment elsewhere, thus freeing the vats for another batch before full cooling of the installation. If this were the case, a great deal of beer could be produced on a daily basis.

If used on a full time basis, this brewery could produce 300 gallons a week allowing 2 days for fermentation in the vat. Output could be as high as 300 gallons a day if the liquid was transferred to other vessels for fermentation. This is output clearly far in excess of domestic needs.

The Epic of Gilgamesh contains references to Siduri; an archetypical brewster and barmaid who gave beer, comfort and counsel to Gilgamesh, greatest of the Sumerian kings. Archeological sites throughout the Near East have yielded thousands of cuneiform tablets containing recipes for and prayers in praise of beer. Among the many types of brew made by these ancient brewsters of Sumeria were: black beer, white beer, red beer, beer of two parts, beer from the nether-world, beering for the offering (sacrifice), mother beer, beer for the supper, beer with horns, wheat beer and beer with a head. As in the later society of ancient Egypt, Sumerian-Mesopotamian beers were made from bread loaves called “bappir.” Barley malt was rendered into a bread cake form, crumbled into water, and with the aid of ambient, airborne yeast, fermentation took place. Most ancient societies used honey as a source of fermentable sugar.

For the ancient Egyptians, beer was so important that the hieroglyphic symbol for food was a pitcher of beer and a cake of bread. Egyptian hieroglyphics tell of dozens of varieties of beer for both this world and the next. Pharaohs were routinely buried with tiny model breweries complete with miniature wooden brewers to ensure a regular supply of beer on the arduous journey to the afterworld.

Egyptian beer, called “Hekt,” was widely exported all over the known world: to Rome, Palestine, and as far away as India. Egyptian women brewed their beer in an area of the kitchen called “the pure,” the lady of the house always supervising. Although royal brewers were sometimes men, most Egyptian beer was made and sold by women who developed scores of beer styles. Brown beer, iron beer, sweet beer–lagered with dates, neter or strong beer, white, black, and red beer and Nubian “boosa”, were just a few of the beer styles commonly made. Special brews for religious purposes included Friend’s beer; the beer of the Protector; Hemns or old beer; the Beer of Truth; the beer of the goddess Maat; and Setcherit, a narcotic beer using as a sleeping draught. Hops were unknown to the ancient Egyptians although bitter herbs like Lupin and Skirret were often used to bitter the brew or served as an appetizer with the beer itself.

In Africa, beer is still made using the same ancient recipe and procedure. Red or white sorghum (or millet) is placed into cold water to swell and germinate.  A few days later, it is piled up in a basket, and after it has germinated a few more days, it is dried in the sun and is then pounded into flour.

A large beer making pot, like this one from Mambila - Nigeria, Cameroon, is half filled with water. 

To see the scale of these pots, here is a picture of one being made.

You can see that they are the same size as the large cooking pots from Serbia or large Beakers from Ireland. 

Coal is piled around the base of the pot and water is heated until boiled. The flour is then poured into the boiling water.  The resulting porridge is continually stirred with a wooden stick, while cold water is progressively added.

When the large pot is filled with cold water, a little sour banana beer or yeast is poured in for fermentation, and the slurry is allowed to settle to the bottom. Beer is then drunk from the fermentation pot using straws.

Or can be drunk from gourds

Pictures of the primitive beer brewery in action in Nigeria can be seen in a brilliant article entitled "Chapalo: Millet Beer, Julia Child... and Hookers" which you can find on the great blog entitiled "Cooking outside of the box". 

The author of the article describes the brewing of "chapalo", local brew which is made from red millet, but which can also be made of sorghum, or a combination of both. 

"First, the millet is washed in large buckets of distilled water kept in clean, plastic garbage cans. Then the grain is transferred to the cauldrons. These are covered and left to boil for two days, after which the contents are strained through a large, loosely woven basket into a wide, shallow pan. Once the honey-brown liquid is collected, the pan is placed in the shade of a straw mat hangar that also serves as a bar. Yeast is added, and the chapalo is allowed to cool and ferment for one day before it is served to the customers..."

Millet beer is still brewed in pots and vats in the same way in other parts of the world. 

Here is a woman from Pathak India brewing millet beer in pots heated with charcoal piled around the bottom of the pots.

In the Balkans this type of millet beer is called "boza". Boza is a thick, fermented beverage (containing up to 4 percent alcohol) with a sourish or sweetish  taste. The boza is made of various kinds of flour (barley, oats, corn, wheat), but boza of best quality and taste is made of millet flour.

To make boza slightly roast the flour (until rosy in colour). Take care not to get it burnt. Mix it with only a bit of lukewarm water. Pour the mixture into a pot filled with the rest of the water and put it on the plate. Add the sugar and leave the liquid to boil stirring it once in a while. Keep boiling for 5-6 minutes still stirring. Remove the pot from the fire and let it cool. Add 1 teacupful of boza or yeast to start fermentation. Leave the mixture in a warm place for 2-3 days to ferment. That's it. You can now drink it and enjoy it.

The world’s earliest written recipe, a Sumerian cuneiform tablet dating to 1800 BC, describes the brewing of beer.

The tablet contains the Hymn to Ninkasi, the goddess of beer who was also known as 'the Lady of the inebriating fruit'. 

The hymn is also the detailed description of the beer production process, whose starting point is preparing the beer mash in a pit in the ground using ‘sweet aromatics and honey’.

You are the one who handles the dough,
[and] with a big shovel,
Mixing in a pit, the bappir with sweet aromatics,
Ninkasi, You are the one who handles
the dough, [and] with a big shovel,
Mixing in a pit, the bappir with [date]-honey.

And this is what made Billy Quinn and Declan Moore conclude that fulacht fiadh troughs could have been used as wort mixing and heating pits. As they say in their article about ale brewing in fulacht fiadh, "considering that a pit was integral to the brewing process in the Fertile Crescent at least 5500 years ago, and that there is no description of how the temperature was controlled during the wort pit brewing. Now the pits, being dug in the ground, can only be heated from the inside. In my article about pit ovens i described constriction and use of pit ovens for baking, roasting and steam cooking. They were all either heated directly by fire burning inside of the pit, like in tandoor pit ovens, or by fire heated stones placed on top of fire burning inside of the pit. Boiling pits can also only be heated from the inside but because they are filled with water, we can't heat them by lighting fire inside of them. The only way to heat boiling pits is by using stones stones heated on the fire burning outside of the pit. So if pits were used by the ancient Mesopotamians for heating and mixing wort, they could only have been heated using fire heated stones. 

Or not...

This is a view from above of a millet beer brewery in someone's home in Segou, Mali. 

You can see that pots (cauldrons) look like they are placed into pits dug into the ground. How are they heated you might ask?. If they have been sank into pits, then they surely can only be heated by hot stones placed directly into the liquid, right? 

Wrong.

On the great travelogue called "Jude's travels" you can find this picture of a woman brewing "pito" beer in Ghana. Pito? "pi to" = "drink this" in Slavic languages??? "pivo" = "pi ovo" = "drink this" bear in Slavic languages??? 

Leaving this linguistic enigma aside, the important thing to notice on this picture is that what you are seeing is the same type of brewery like the one from Mali, with cauldrons "sunk into pits". But actually an artificial hill was made from clay around cauldrons mounted on stones fixing the structure in place. Fire is burned in the space between the stones holding the cauldron.

This is a great film, showing how beer is brewed in one of these primitive breweries in Ségou.

So is it possible that what was in the above "recipe" described as a "pit" which could only be heated by inserting hot stones into the liquid contained within it, was actually a pot mounted into a pit in a clay hill brewery like the one on the above pictures, and which was heated by the fire burning below the pot??? I mean everywhere else in the world people used pots and vats heated from the bottom to make beer, right?

Wrong again. 

Guess what. The way of heating wort using fire heated stones was used in Europe until very recently.  In Germany the hot rock method for heating wort in mash tuns was used by Rauchenfels brewery, Bavaria. In Germany the bear made using this technique is called ‘stein beer’ (stone beer). Also, in Finland an unhopped ale called sahti, still served at rural feasts in Finland, is also prepared using the same method of heating wort by immersing hot stones into a wooden mash tun.

You can find more information about "stein beer" and "sahti beer" as well as recipes for making them in on "Brew your own" website. This is a great video showing how making the stein beer is done today in USA. This and this are good articles about sahti brewing using traditional equipment.

So we know that people in Europe used hot stones for heating wort as part of the ale brewing procedure until very recently. But when did Europeans start brewing beer is not clear. It is possible that first grain based meads and ales were brewed in northern Europe as far back as neolithic times. Thousands of charred cereal grains were found at the Neolithic site at Balbridie in Scotland dated to 3900-3500 BC. Pottery from Machrie Moor site at Arran in Scotland dated to the same period, were found to contain cereal pollens. Beaker people who arrived to Britain and Ireland around 2500 BC, probably didn't drink water out of all those high-status drinking vessels found in their graves. At Bronze Age site at Perthshire, Scotland dated to 1540 BC, archaeologists discovered a ‘black greasy material’ in a food vessel. Pollen analysis indicated that it most likely represented a remain of a fermented grain base alcoholic drink, a cereal-based ale.

So, we have:

1. Mesopotamian ale making recipe which says that the wort was heated and mixed in pits which were most likely heated by fire heated stones dated to 1800 BC (stain beer)
2. British Bronze Age ale dated to 1500 BC
3. A long standing reputation that Irish people have for alcohol consumption without any idea how did the Bronze and Iron Age people in Ireland brew
4. A lot of wood or stone lined pits (troughs) with a fire place and pile of stones which cracked because of the repeated heating and cooling (fulachta fiadh) that no one knows for sure what they were used for.

Knowing all this the question Billy Quinn and Declan Moore asked seems almost inevitable: Were fulacha fiadh ale breweries, where troughs were used as the wort mixing and fermenting pits heated by fire heated stones?

In order to answer their question the two Galway archaeologists decided to try and make beer using their own fulacht fiadh. They dug a pit and placed a wooden trough inside it. They filled it with water and crushed sprouted roasted barley. They then heated stones on a fireplace and used them to heat the mush in the trough to approximately 67° Celsius for about an hour. This produced wort, a glucose-rich syrup solution. To maximise the sugar yield from the grain the wort was sparged (washed trough with hot water) using wicker basket. After an hour the mixture in the trough was brought to a boil for a short time to pasteurise it. The end product was then transferred to storage vessels (copies of beaker culture pots), yeast was added to promote fermentation, flavourings were added to improve taste and several days later the end product was an unhopped ale. Here is the picture showing the two home brewers hard at work and the equipment they used in the brewing process.

You can read the detailed description of their brewing experiment in this article on their website. I would here just want to quote the last two paragraphs:

"We produced what is more properly termed a gruit ale (gruit is a term used to describe the herbal mix used to flavour ale). Through our experiments, we discovered that the process of brewing ale in a fulacht using hot rock technology is a simple process. To produce the ale took only a few hours, followed by a three-day wait to allow for fermentation. Three hundred litres of water was transformed into a very palatable 110 litres of ale with minimal work. The real labour for the Bronze Age brewer would have been gathering, malting and milling the barley. The spent grain provided the ingredients for a dozen malt loaves and the rest was used as cattle fodder. Other than the shattered stone and the remains of the fire, there was no wastage.

CONCLUSION

So, what is the evidence for brewing? First, the experiment worked. Fermentation caused by windblown yeast even occurred in the leftover mash in the trough within a few hours. Secondly, a number of quernstones have been found in association with fulachts – indicating that grain processing was taking place nearby. Furthermore the fact that hot rock brewing was carried out to an industrial level until the early part of the last century (and indeed is still practised at a vernacular level in Scandinavian Countries today) testifies to the efficiency of the process.

In conclusion beer at its most basic is fermented liquid bread and is a highly nutritious beverage. Our ancestors would have consumed ale on a daily basis as a healthy, uncontaminated, comfort drink. But this does not preclude the fact that in the long Bronze Age evenings and nights, family groups likely sat around a blazing fire telling tales, interacting socially and enjoying the warmth, well-being and genial companionship that ale enhances.

We suggest that the fulacht fiadh was possibly multifunctional, the kitchen sink of the Bronze Age with many conceivable uses. For us, however, a primary use seems clear – these sites were Bronze Age micro-breweries."

Now this is very interesting. I definitely agree that fulacht fiadh could have been used for brewing. The brewing temperature of 67 degrees Celsius is well below the bubbling boiling temperature and therefore well bellow the high temperature loss through surface threshold. This means that heating the mush in the fulacht fiadh trough is quite efficient. By the way, it is very interesting that the brewing temperature is the same as the hot water acorn leaching temperature. Hot water leaching was also done in pits and I suggested in my last post that fulchta fiadh could have been used as acorn leaching facilities. This raises an interesting question. Was brewing discovered by chance when people applied the same procedure used for acorn leaching on grain?

However, there is a problem with the theory that fulacht fiadh were used for brewing ale. The same problem that the theory that they were used for acorn leaching and food cooking. This is an excerpt from the original article about the fulacht fiadh brewing experiment:

"Seeking authenticity in replicating our Bronze Age ale we decided that our equipment should be as basic as possible. The wooden trough, posthumously donated by Billy’s granduncle, was 60 years old, leaky, wedge-shaped and measured 1.7 m in length, 0.7 m in width with a depth of 0.65 m (roughly consistent with the average trough dimensions from excavated examples). When filled with water to a depth of 0.55 m, it held 350 litres. In an attempt at caulking the more obvious gaps moss and alluvial clay was applied. Where this process was carried out with care no leaks occurred. After digging a pit, the trough was lowered into the ground and water added. Despite some initial leakage we eventually reached an equilibrium in the water level by simply flooding the immediate area."

Basically fulacht fiadh troughs, which were lined with wooden planks or stone plates were not watertight. This means that they would leak water out into the ground leading to the significant loss of the precious wort. That is if you are lucky, and your fulacht fiadh was built on a dry well drained soil. However, as I have said already in my previous posts about fulachta fiadh, most of them were built on marshy boggy grounds. A leaky trough lining a pit dug in such ground would quickly fill with marshy boggy acidic bad tasting dirty water. Not something you want to eat or drink... So unless the troughs of these bog fulachta fiadh were made in some way completely watertight, which is quite difficult, there is no way they were used for food preparation of any way...What is very interesting is that there is a very easy way to make completely watertight large wooden troughs. All you need to do is to fall a large enough tree, cut a two meter piece of the trunk, and split is vertically into half and then hollow one half to make a trough. A completely watertight trough. The makers of sahti beer use exactly such troughs called kuuran for flavouring and spariging:

And we know that people of bronze age Ireland were perfectly able to make such dugout troughs, because we have found huge dugout canoes made at the same time when fulacht fiadh were made. Like the Lurgan canoe which is over 4000 years old and which was discovered in 1901 in a Co. Galway bog:

These type of troughs were widely used throughout the world. Here is one used for watering cows:

So if one of the main challenges for our bronze age brewers, as our Galway archaeologists turned brewers claim, really was how to heat large volumes of water to make a wort in the absence of suitable large metal containers, a dugout trough one tenth of the size of the above dugout canoe would have sufficed. No leakage problems found in fulacht fiadh plank lined pits...However I don't think that bronze age brewers had the problem "how to heat large volumes of water to make a wort" at all. If you look at the copies of the beaker pots they used in their brewing experiment, you can see that they are approximately the same size as the largest of the vessels used for brewing beer in primitive societies. They are free standing, and could have easily been heated by hot coals piled around the base, and you could boil hundreds of litres of worth in them no problem...So I don't think that bronze age Irish would have needed fulacht fiadh troughs to heat up the worth. 

Another reason why I don't think fulachta fiadh were used as breweries is that if you wanted to make beer, wouldn't you make it close to the place where you would drink it, like the village where you lived. And close to the granary where you kept your grain. And not in the middle of nowhere, far from any villages, which is where we find fulachta fiadh? This is the way things were done in every early and primitive society that made beer...There were roads in Bronze Age Ireland and I wrote a post about them called "Togher, Tocher - Wooden trackways". But the road network was tiny and I don't think most fulachta were on that network. I would have been very impractical to drag the grain from villages to far away fulachta and then drag beer back to the village. 

So I believe that if bronze age Irish did brew beer, they did it in large beakers heated with hot coals piled at the bottom, probably in their villages. But if their eyes were really bigger than their bellies, and they thought that couple of hundred litres of beer was not enough for a party, they could have used , kuuran like dugout vessels, heated using hot stones, again in their villages...

So I really don't believe that fulachta fiadh were used as breweries, even though they could have been. There are easier and more practical ways to brew beer that were available to the bronze age Irish. Remember, people are lazy and will use the easiest way to do things...As one of my university professors said "Laziness is the mother of all invention"...

But if so, what were fulacht fiadh troughs used for? Well as I explained in my post "Fulacht fiadh - acorn leaching pit?" they could have been used for leaching acorns during acorn food production. But that was not the only thing fulachta fiadh could have been efficiently used for. More in my next posts. Until then drink responsibly :)