Sumerian Beer

Discovery Science

About this app

Sumerian Beer is a free offline guide to Mesopotamian beer.

The brew guide follows the Hymn to Ninkasi and modern reconstructions: barley malt, bappir (a dry barley cake), water, a mash, fermentation, and filtering into a serving jar. Dates, if you use them, are marked as a common modern addition. The hymn gives no measurements, so every amount in the guide is labeled a modern reconstruction.

The Yale culinary tablets are the stew section, not the beer recipe. There are four tablets, all fragmentary. The best preserved, YBC 4644 (Old Babylonian, about 1730 BCE), lists about 25 stews. Beer and beer bread show up in some of those pots as ingredients. The app keeps those stews separate from the brew steps and does not invent a cuneiform translation.

A short history screen covers beer as a staple and as rations, drinkers who were not only elites, the goddess Ninkasi, and straw-drinking from large jars because the beer was unfiltered.

This is a historical reconstruction, not a safe modern commercial brew. Homebrew laws vary. Sanitize equipment. Do not seal an active ferment in glass that can burst. Don't drink it if it smells rotten.

No account. No network. Open the guide and read.