ANCIENT BEER
Dr. Serena Love played a key scientific and collaborative role in projects that recreated ancient Egyptian beer using experimental archaeology. In 2018, she partnered with Bacchus Brewing5 to re-create three ancient Egyptian beers for the Queensland Museum’s Ancient Lives mummy exhibition6. Love provided expertise on ancient Egyptian brewing, ensuring historical accuracy in ingredient selection. These beers were featured at After Dark series7, where Serena delivered lectures on Brew like an Egyptian, detailing the ancient brewing process.
Serena’s love of brewing and ancient Egypt coalesced into the Ancient Yeast Project, where she partnered with microbiologist Richard Bowman and physicist-baker Seamus Blackley to extract dormant yeast from the pores of ancient Egyptian ceramic bread moulds and beer vessels, using innovative, non-invasive sampling techniques. This yeast was then revived for baking a sourdough loaf of bread.
The team worked with ancient grains and authentic pottery to replicate 4,000-year-old processes, aiming to answer questions about the relationship between bread and beer yeasts in ancient Egypt and their cultural significance. Love’s involvement made it possible to bring the flavours and techniques of ancient Egypt to life, bridging archaeology with
hands-on experience and public outreach, and sparking widespread interest in the sensory history of bread and beer.
