Ancient malted barley grains have revealed that Danes were probably using this to brew beer and raising their drinking horns at least two millennia ago.
The oldest known beers in the world trace back to the beginning of agriculture in the Middle East. In Scandinavia, the oldest evidence of this drink is based on residue in a bark bucket from roughly 1370 BC which was found in the grave of a Bronze Age teenager known as the Egtved Girl. But chemical analysis shows that this beer was probably made of wheat rather than barley, and no evidence of malted grains were found there.
When barley is malted – a good indication of whether it was used for brewing beer – enzymes damage the grain, which retains microscopic hollows much like a block of Swiss cheese. Peter Steen Henriksen at the National Museum of Denmark and his colleagues used a scanning electron microscope to examine grains found in archaeological deposits.
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“Now we’ve got a tool that we can use on older grains, all the way back to the earliest agriculture in Denmark,” says Henriksen.
He and his colleagues examined grains found in a number of archaeological deposits Henriksen had collected and stored. Some were found in Østerbølle, Denmark, in pots from a house that burned down, allowing the researchers to date it to roughly the 1st century AD. In these grains the team found the hallmark hollows that are evidence of malting. The grains appeared to come from two batches, one maybe a few days older than the other based on the different length of sprouts found in each pot.
They also found evidence of malted barley dating to the Viking Age from AD 800 to 1050 from another location. The Østerbølle grains are the earliest evidence yet discovered of malted barley in Scandinavia, though Henriksen notes that they expect to find much older evidence once they apply this technique to older grains they have found.
“There are still a number of very early finds that we need to analyse, where we are suspecting beer brewing activity, which is then also likely to have been part of cultic activities,” says Kim Hebelstrup, a modern agricultural scientist at Aarhus University in Denmark who worked on this research.
Adam Cordes, also at Aarhus University and also involved in the study, says that there is a small possibility that the malted barley could have been for other uses. Some breads in the Middle East use malted grains, for example.
Henriksen notes that bog myrtle – a bittering agent still used today in parts of Scandinavia as a stand-in for hops – was found with the malted barley dating to the Viking Age.
Henriksen and his team previously worked with brewers to create a recipe based on the Egtved Girl’s beer, and they are now working to recreate the ancient barley-based beer with help from a Danish brewery.
Journal of Archaeological Science
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