Greetings, beer lovers! ‘Tis Friday night (well, obviously), and once (or not) again, it’s chingchongchinaman here as your guest FNBB blogger tonight, with esquimaux taking a well-deserved break from FNBB duties. The “Dr. Pat” in the header for tonight’s FNBB refers to Dr. Patrick McGovern, who was a research scientist at the University of Pennsylvania with an interest in alcoholic beverages from ancient cultures around the world. Dr. McGovern died last August 24, age 80. You can read tribute articles to Dr. McGovern from:
* The University of Pennsylvania Almanac, September 9, 2025
* The New York Times, September 14, 2025, obituary by Michael S. Rosenwald
The Penn Almanac tribute concisely summarizes Dr. McGovern’s academic focus:
“A pioneer in the field of biomolecular archaeology and archaeological residue analysis, Dr. McGovern worked with experts from academic and industrial laboratories to analyze the world’s earliest alcoholic beverages.”
Going full on nerd (feel free to use Professor John Frink voice here), here are links to five of his publications from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS for science types, who knew this acronym already), going in chronological order:
* McGovern, Zhang, & Tang, “Fermented Beverages of pre- and proto-historic China”. PNAS, Vol. 101, Issue 51, pages 17593-17598 (2004).
* Henderson, Joyce, Hall, Hurst, and Henderson, “Chemical and archaeological evidence for the earliest cacao beverages”. PNAS, Vol. 104, Issue 48, pages 18937-18940 (2007).
* McGovern, Mirzoian, and Hall, “Ancient Egyptian herbal wines”. PNAS, Vol. 106, Issue 18, pages 7361-7366 (2009).
* McGovern, Luley, Rovira, Mirzoian, Callahan, Smith, Hall, Davidson, and Henkin, “Beginning of viniculture in France”. PNAS, Vol. 110, Issue 25, pages 10147-10152 (2013).
* McGovern, Jalabadze, Batiuk, Callahan, Smith, Hall, Kvavadze, Maghradze, Rusishvili, Bouby, Failla, Cola, Mariani, Boaretto, Bacillieri, This, Wales, and Lordkipanidze, “Early Neolithic wine of Georgia in the South Caucasus”. PNAS, Vol. 114, Issue 48, pages E10309-E10318 (2017).
I could actually read, or at least try to read, the full texts of each paper, as they do look to be publicly accessible, i.e. not behind a pay-firewall. While my very rusty high-school chemistry was not enough to grasp anywhere near the full dorky details of the chemistry, the historical aspects of the texts are pretty clear, if anyone is inclined to take the plunge.
In lieu of an FNBB music video (sorry), here are some YT videos with Dr. McGovern, also in chronological order:
(1) The Daily Pennsylvanian (4/23/2013), “Ancient Beer: A Talk with Patrick McGovern”
(2) TALE (The Archaeology Lecture E-library; 9/21/2016), “Ancient ales and extreme beverages: an interview with Patrick E. McGovern”:
(3) BeerSmith Podcast (with Brad Smith, 7/31/2017), “Ancient Brews with Dr Patrick McGovern”:
(4) “JCB LIVE with Dr. Patrick McGovern” (4/19/2021):
As both the Penn Almanac and NYT articles noted, Dr. McGovern’s research made its way into a commercial product outside of academia, namely Dogfish Head’s “Midas Touch”. One ingredient in the “Midas Touch” formulation, however, was a bit of a reminder that academics aren’t always the most practically-minded folks, as covered in this December 2012 feature from WHYY in Philly:
“After meeting with Sam Calagione, founder of Dogfish Head, [McGovern and Calagione] decided to see if they could recapture the beverage served at Midas’ funeral feast.
Laboratory analysis showed that it had been brewed with barley, grapes and honey, but it needed a “bittering agent” – something to counteract the sweetness of the honey and grapes. McGovern suggested using saffron, for which that part of Turkey is famous.
Calagione followed that suggestion and later told McGovern that Midas Touch was the most expensive beverage he’d ever made – not surprising since saffron retails for thousands of dollars per pound.”
In fairness, there was a short-term win from the use of (very expensive) saffron:
“It was money well spent. Midas Touch, first brewed in 2000, has gone on to win prizes at beer competitions featuring beers from all over the world.”
However, from the current listing on Dogfish Head’s page, Midas Touch looks to be out of stock. So it goes. In an NPR interview from June 2017, Dr. McGovern addressed a question from Courtney Columbus:
“Q: ‘What keeps you going after all these years?’
A: ‘Just the prospect of discovering something new, that's what really drives me. We're going to find out something exciting and we're going to re-create another liquid time capsule that's going to transport you back to some period in our ancestry. That's the basic motivation. Because every time you discover something, you get, like, a high. I think it's the best high in the world. You find something archaeologically which no one has ever seen before. It can be dull in a lot of ways, but then you have those moments of insight and discovery that make it all worthwhile.’”
Obviously doing all this research (fieldwork, lab analysis) was hard and demanding. But the nature of the subject does sound like a lot of fun, and it seems evident that “Dr. Pat” had a lot of fun doing this work. We should all be so lucky to do this kind of work that gives pleasure. So hats off to Dr. Patrick McGovern, “the Indiana Jones of ancient beverages”.
Tonight’s featured beer chez 3CM is nothing so exotic as a beer based on an ancient recipe. But at the very least, it is from Pennsylvania, a Tröegs Lager, as you see in the picture at the top of the diary. To be honest, when I made the purchase, the core craft beer pickings (i.e. more like IPAs and such) were pretty much thin on the ground, so that the options for choosing something that I’d never had before and that weren’t mass-market beers were comparably thin. I’d never had anything from Tröegs before, and my dad actually prefers lighter beers, when he has beer (which isn’t all that often), plus there was plenty of Tröegs Lager on the store shelf. So that was the choice. It turned out OK, a crisp lager with a slightly bitter tinge, and even my dad, who isn’t into craft beer at all, was OK with it. So it worked out.
With that, time to turn it over to you folks. What are you sipping tonight? Anyone brewing their own? No one here is expected to be imbibing a brew based on an ancient civilization formulation, but bonus virtual brownie points if you are :) .
