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Alcoholic drinks from Sumer

Sumerian beer with bappir (Hymn to Ninkasi)kaš (Sumerian, beer)

Sumerian beer was brewed from barley malt and bappir, a barley product often called beer-bread. The Hymn to Ninkasi describes baking bappir, malting and soaking grain, cooling the mash on reed mats and fermenting it in a vat over a collector vat. These steps are a reading of a poem and of accounting tablets, not a recipe, and what bappir was is still argued.

Fully documentedAlcoholic drinks5.5 days

Recipe

No fixed amounts recordedNo recipe amounts survive. Accounting tablets record grain issued to brewers by volume, not kitchen quantities.
Barley malt (munu)[damerow2012]
BappirRead as baked beer-bread; Damerow notes it was measured by volume like grain, not counted like loaves[damerow2012][etcsl-ninkasi]
Honey and wine (as the hymn's translation reads)[etcsl-ninkasi]
Starterunknown for Sumerian beer. Sallaberger and Stol read bappir as a sourdough that brought in the yeast (Zythophile 2024), a reading others dispute. For a 13th-century BC reconstruction from Tall Bazi, Damerow suggests spontaneous fermentation, later carried on by passing foam from one batch to the next.

Total time across the recorded steps: 5.5 days

Start
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What changes: Dough mixed with sweet aromatics is baked into bappir in a big oven

Step 1 of 7
Bake the bappir
Time
Not documented
Temperature
Not documented
Salt
None given
Acidity
Not documented
Which microbes the steps name, step by step
Yeasts

Output: bappir.

Flavour
Not documented
Texture
Not documented
Colour
Not documented

Microbes at work in this step

Not documented for this step.

Method

Measured measured in a studySet fixed by a specification or tested recipeReported one source reports itTypical a general value, not sourced for this fermentUnconfirmed not yet checked against a source

At a glance

Sumerian beer was brewed from barley malt and bappir, a barley product often called beer-bread. The Hymn to Ninkasi describes baking bappir, malting and soaking grain, cooling the mash on reed mats and fermenting it in a vat over a collector vat. These steps are a reading of a poem and of accounting tablets, not a recipe, and what bappir was is still argued. Made in 7 steps over 5.5 days. The longest step, malt the barley, takes 4 days (Damerow P. 2012) and runs at 24 °C (Damerow P. 2012). A yeast giving a mix of alcoholic and lactic fermentation, in the Tall Bazi reconstruction (yeast was also found in vessels there); no microbes are documented for Sumerian beer itself does most of the fermenting.

Key numbers
Main step4 daysReported[damerow2012]Malt the barley
Temperature24 °CReported[damerow2012]Malt the barley

What makes this one different

Sumerian beer used bappir alongside malt, and the hymn has the beer filter from a fermenting vat into a collector vat below. Every step is a reconstruction from a poem and accounting tablets.

Related ferments

Safety

In the Tall Bazi reconstruction, described by Damerow, the mash was stirred for 15 minutes at about 34 degrees Celsius and fermented 36 hours at 24 degrees, and the beer stayed stable for more than two months. The malt was dried at about 60 degrees on roofs. Damerow also notes the argument that ordinary beer was weak, usually under 1 % alcohol like kvass.

History and sources

Every number is labelled with how it is known. How this atlas is made

The Hymn to Ninkasi survives in copies written after the decline of Sumerian culture. Scholars dispute whether it is a recipe; Zythophile (2024) argues it is not a recipe. Old Sumerian tablets from Girsu list malt, bappir, imgaga, titab and GAR tam-ma as brewing ingredients.

  1. [s1] Civil M. 1964. A Hymn to the Beer Goddess and a Drinking Song. In: Studies Presented to A. Leo Oppenheim.book
  2. [s2] Zythophile 2024, No, the Hymn to Ninkasi is not a recipe for making Sumerian beerweb
  3. [etcsl-ninkasi] Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL), University of Oxford, A hymn to Ninkasi, translation, text 4.23.1archive
  4. [damerow2012] Damerow P. 2012, Sumerian beer, the origins of brewing technology in ancient Mesopotamia, Cuneiform Digital Library Journal 2012:2paper