Documentation for “Pot of Gold” Ancient Ale as submited to IKBG competition August 2007:

In 1957 a remarkable archeological find was uncovered, what many have called “one of the most spectacular archaeological discoveries of the 20th century”, when a team from University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology breached a timber wall in the largest burial mound at Gordion, in central Turkey. What they found was the remarkably preserved tomb of an ancient Phrygian king – a king whom scholars originally believed to be King Midas.

Among the many spectacular finds there was the funerary feast of this ancient monarch, and even more important to us brewers, a well preserved set of pottery vessels. Not much was learned from these until 40 years later when infrared spectroscopy, liquid and gas chromatography, and mass spectrometry analysis could be done on them. The results from all of the vessels was the same and painted a conclusive picture of a beverage that was composed of grape wine, barley beer, and honey mead.
(http://www.museum.upenn.edu/new/research/Exp_Rese_Disc/Mediterranean/Midas/feastremains.shtml)

This, in and of itself gives us a good jumping off point from which to recreate this 2700-year-old beverage. However, I had learned that Dogfish Head Brewery was ahead of me already and had used this same research as the basis for their “Midas Touch Golden Elixir”. Better yet, “The Replicator” from byo.com had already attempted to create a ‘clone’ recipe for this beer based on information obtained from the brewers at Dogfish Head. (http://byo.com/recipe/1011.html)

I modified this recipe slightly when I first made it, first to accommodate locally available ingredients (notably the grape juice from a local winery), and then to reduce it to a half-batch (since I had no idea how this would come out, having not tried Dogfish Head’s offering). In doing so, I inadvertently doubled the amount of saffron (by forgetting to halve it), but the result did not seem to suffer from this oversight. It was received well enough that for the second run I simply doubled the quantities to make a full batch.

IKBG Score: 97 out of 100.