Saturday October 22, 2016

The day of the Wisconsin Science Festival “Power Drinking in Iron Age Europe” event! Homer and I packed up all the equipment and give-aways and headed off to campus, where we met up with Josh Driscoll and Russ Klisch in the parking lot outside the Honors College.

After briefly checking on the Brew Garden and inserting identifying labels next to the different plant varieties, we headed inside, where we moved furniture around and set up our brew station. Russ had brought the keg of the Lakefront braggot and we had various jars with barley, wheat and the aromatic plants used to flavor the beverages to pass around to the audience. We set up the PowerPoint system and loaded the presentation, arranging the brewing station so Josh and I could tag team each other brewing a version of the Keltenbräu #1 first inaugurated by Kevin Cullen at Discovery World in 2012. The two ounces of carrot seeds had already been ground that morning and the ounce of mugwort had been measured in advance. Unlike the two braggots we served the audience after the presentation, this beverage was based on finds from a settlement context (Hochdorf-Reps near Stuttgart) and contained no honey. Josh used a different strain of yeast from Northern Brewer for this batch (Roeslare Ale blend – their Web site described it as “a mix of lambic cultures including lactic bacteria). Produces beers with a complex, earthy profile and distinct pie cherry sourness from a Brettanomyces culture”). The Northern Brewer folks were nice enough to give us all the ingredients at the trade price for the event – thanks, guys!

We decided to use a double set of burners and mashed half the grains while boiling the other half of the batch in the form of already prepared malt. That way we were able to add the mugwort and carrot seeds while the audience was there to watch. In the end we combined the two batches and Josh took the fermentation bucket home and pitched the yeast the next day. It will be interesting to see how it turned out! The plan is to have a small celebration for all the folks who have contributed to the Brew Garden as well as the braggot at which (if it turns out to be drinkable) we’ll serve up the batch we brewed during the WSF event. All I can say is that given how distracted we were by tag-teaming each other during the presentation (I went first to introduce the basic topic and the archaeological context that yielded the pollen data on which we were basing the Lakefront braggot, followed by Josh with the Juellinge braggot he brewed at home, which turned out really well, with Russ rounding off the presentation with a discussion of the brewing of the Lakefront braggot and the science behind the brewing process itself), if the stuff is drinkable it proves that anyone can do this!

The cool thing was that the response to the story behind the brew was phenomenal! There’s obviously a lot of interest in this topic. Not only did we have about 45 people at the WSF event, the WUWM Lake Effect interview conducted down at Lakefront Brewery by Bonnie North was picked up by National Public Radio, which they posted on Facebook and Twitter. That set off an avalanche of media inquiries, including articles on LiveScience and FoxNews online and a radio interview with Deutschlandfunk, the German national radio station. Lots of great publicity for UWM and the Brew Garden that we hope to get going as part of the Fermentation Studies program!

Postscript: We bottled the Keltenbräu #1 in mid-November and tasted a bit of it to make sure it was drinkable. Big thumbs up! Recipes to follow.