Bettina Arnold was interviewed by German National Radio (Deutschlandfunk) about the Lakefront braggot she and Ph.D. student Josh Driscoll produced in cooperation with Lakefront Brewery.

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.

National Public Radio did an additional story on the presentation and the project in their food section The Salt: What’s on Your Plate

Bettina Arnold, Josh Driscoll and Chad Sheridan, Lakefront Brewery’s Lead Cellarman, were featured in a Lake Effect interview with WUWM’s Bonnie North. In the interview they discussed the ale-honey braggot reconstructed at Lakefront in August based on paleobotanical evidence from Arnold’s excavations in Germany in 2000.

Our braggot is cleaner than the prehistoric one but we did succeed in producing something that provides those of us with jaded modern palates with a very different flavor profile. The mint actually came through first, which was unexpected, followed by the slightly astringent meadow sweet, but the honey was barely in evidence.

Good news from Lakefront Cellarman Chad Sheridan, who just informed me that the braggot has been transferred from the fermenter to the keg to give the remaining CO₂ a chance to add some carbonation to the final beverage and to allow any solids to precipitate out and be siphoned off as it cools.

Enter Russ Klisch and Lakefront Brewery, one of Milwaukee’s earliest producers and purveyors of craft beer. When I contacted UWM’s Chief Sustainability Officer Kate Nelson in 2015 about the Fermentation Studies Program the College of Letters & Science was in… Read More