Dogfish Head brewery is known for making exotic beer with ingredients like crystallized ginger or water from Antarctica, so it might not sound surprising that one of its recent creations is a brew flavored simply by grapes and flowers. It's not the recipe that makes this beer so special; it's where that recipe was found: a Neolithic burial site in China.

Chateau Jiahu is a time capsule from 7,000 B.C., but to hear Dogfish Head owner Sam Calagione talk about what beer was actually like back then, it's not the kind of thing that makes you say "Hey, pass me another ice-cold ancient ale!"

"Probably, all beer thousands of years ago — to our modern palates — would have tasted spoiled," Calagione says. "In fact, in a lot of hieroglyphics, people are shown drinking beer using straws because they were trying to avoid the chunks of solids and wild yeast."

So how do you go from "chunks of wild yeast" to a beer that you can get at your local store? You don't start with a brewery. You start with Dr. Patrick McGovern.

Zombor! wrote:Dogfish Head is what got me into the whole craft brew craze. Once I tried the 90 minute I was hooked. I love that they're recreating some of the old recipes. I recently had the chance to try the "Sah'tea", a beer brewed with juniper berries and some tea flavors ( I think?), based on French "sahti" beers from the 9th century. Drinking this stuff is a history lesson in itself.