How to get drunk in the iron age

People have been getting drunk across Europe for thousands of years, but the earliest evidence of alcohol being produced in the UK is from around 4,000 BCE. There are claims that people have been producing and drinking alcohol in the British Isles for longer than this, but people didn’t have pottery until around 4,000 BCE and would have found it very difficult to make alcohol in animal skins, and also the chances of finding traces of alcohol in preserved skins that are thousands of years old is almost impossible.

(A pot recovered from what was believed to have been an Iron Age brewery)

The Iron Age didn’t start in Britain until around the year 800 BCE, but by this time all kinds of metal works and pottery were being produced on mass, giving people all they needed to get brewing.

There were only two types of alcohol produced during the Iron Age, which were beer and mead. Wine was brought in from other countries and came along well after beer first started to be produced, and people didn’t have the knowledge or equipment to make spirits, so grain beer and mead it was. The term beer is applied loosely to what they would have produced, with beer meaning anything that is produced by fermenting grain and flavoring with hops. The quality and variations of this product would vary greatly, and it is often likely hops would not have been used for flavoring, which produces a drink called “gruit”.

Iron age beer

One of the things known about the ancient brewing process is that they heated their grain mash before fermenting it, something that’s done to this day for various reasons. The other known thing is that they had no source of pure sugar, as sugar beet wasn’t introduced to the country until after the Iron Age, and sugar cane isn’t native and won’t grow in most of Europe.

This would mean that most of their beer would have consisted of nothing but some kind of grain mixed with water, and heated to release some of the starches which would later break down into sugars. Yeast is a natural micro-organism and occurs on the vast majority of fruit and grains, and after the sugars started to appear in the mix the yeast would consume them to produce alcohol.

The types of grain they had in Iron Age Britain were Emmer and Einkorn which are both types of wheat, along with barley and rye. Beer would have been made by leaving one or a combination of these grains in a container after heating it for a while. If the temperature was warm enough the mixture would ferment, and was then presumably filtered through some cloth.

Iron age beer would have tasted quite foul, and also wouldn’t be very strong, probably no more than 2 – 3% as they lacked additional sugars to bring up the alcohol content.

(Mead has always been closely associated with the Vikings, probably because they had less decent growing land and used honey more often than one of their few preservable food types)

Iron age mead

Honey is about 70% sugar and would have been much more abundant than people realize, with a huge amount of wilderness combined with a small human population who weren’t releasing any bee-killing chemical fertilizers, bees would have thrived in the Iron Age.

To obtain honey would have meant killing the bees somehow, but after it was obtained the recipe is quite simple. Take some honey and water it down to your desired consistency, then keep it warm for about a month, and then you have some reasonably alcoholic mead.

Since the sugar content was much higher it would have produced an alcohol content presumably between 10% and 15% which made it an expensive and rarer drink, something that was normally reserved for important people. There are several Iron Age burial sites across Europe that include drinking vessels and mead jugs to show how important the person buried there was.