(A pot from the iron age, believed to have been used for brewing grain)
People have been making alcohol across Europe since 400 BC, with a discovery recently unearthed during some roadworks along the A14 between Cambridge and Huntingdon of an ancient brewery. Its a well known fact that our ancestors made beer and mead on a large scale, with settlements set aside to act as the alcohol producers for the region, but it wasn’t always a way to get drunk, but more often a method of making water safe to drink.
There are two main alcohols that were produced in the iron age, which were beer and mead. Wine came along well after beer first started to be produced, and they didn’t have the knowledge or equipment to make spirits, so grain beer and mead it was.
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 wont grow in most of Europe.
This would mean that 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 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 around the 2 – 3% area as they lacked additional sugars to bring up the alcohol content.
Iron age mead
Honey is about 70% sugar and would have been much more abundant than people realise, with a huge amount of wilderness combined with a small human population who weren’t releasing any bee killing chemical fertilisers, they would have thrived in the iron age.
To obtain honey it 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 leave it some were 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.