Bacchus Brewing, Capalaba, set to release beer made using 4000 year old Ancient Egyptian yeast

A Brisbane brewer has created an extremely rare, limited-edition beer using 4000-year-old yeast harvested from an Ancient Egyptian tomb. Here’s how to get your hands on a bottle.

Ross Kendrick from Bacchus Brewing. Pics Tim Marsden

A Brisbane brewer has developed an extremely limited batch of beer using 4000-year-old Egyptian yeast, after he received an unexpected gift that lay dormant in his fridge for years.

Ross Kenrick, owner of Bacchus Brewing in Capalaba, will release just 350 bottles of his world-first Sekhmet’s Rage beer at noon on Thursday.

Sekhmet’s Rage was brewed using 4000-year-old yeast that had been harvested from an ancient Egyptian tomb by a team of microbiologists from across the globe.

But how did a small family owned brewery acquire such a commodity?

In 2018, Bacchus Brewing, which specialises in creating bespoke beers that often mimic ancient beers and are occasionally brewed using several hundred-year-old yeast from England, was invited by the Queensland Museum to produce a beer to be served as part of a series of after-dark lectures on Ancient Egypt.

Mr Kenrick said he was given a list of ingredients, which he used to produce three distinct varieties.

At the end of the event, as a gift of thanks, one of the team who had been involved in the original harvest, gifted Mr Kenrick a single bottle of beer that had been made using the tomb yeast.

,Sekhmet's Rage is a new release beer from local Bacchus Brewing, which has been made with 4000 year old yeast, harvested from an ancient Egyptian Tomb. Supplied

This beer was made in an extremely small batch, with very limited details and at the time, Mr Kenrick had no idea how old the yeast used actually was.

“At the time, they didn’t know if they were going to recover actual ancient yeast, or just 80-year-old yeast from tomb dust,” Mr Kenrick said.

“Between 2018 and now it has been analysed and confirmed as being over 4000 years old.”

Unaware of its incredible origins, the beer wound up in Kenrick’s fridge, undisturbed for the better part of the past seven years, where the yeast became dormant.

That was until the Queensland Museum reached out to Mr Kenrick once more to produce a beer for their current Discover Ancient Egypt exhibition’s Temple Bar.

“To be honest, (the bottle) sat in my fridge for the last seven years and I forgot about,” Mr Kenrick said.

“There’s a new Egyptian display at the museum at the moment and we got asked again if we would be interested in brewing for it and then I remembered I had this bottle and I wondered if the yeast could be revived.

“We sent it to a specialist in Melbourne, Bluestone Yeast, and they took the bottle and were able to resurrect the yeast … they were able to revive it and build us up a commercial quantity.”

Crushingly, in an effort to preserve the integrity of the yeast in that single bottle, neither Mr Kenrick or the team at Bluestone were able to taste the original beer, and were quite sceptical as to whether a beer they made using this ancient yeast would even be drinkable.

“It was a total mystery, we didn’t know if the (microbiologist’s) beer was a sour or not … we decided to remake one of the three beers we made (for the original museum event) that was the most popular,” Mr Kenrick said.

The team followed their own recipe from 2018.

“We had enough of the yeast to do a small batch of a singular beer so we created Sekhmet’s Rage … we used sour culture to make it quite sour and tart with the fruit, so if the yeast did produce quite sour and funky flavours, that it would most likely be quite drinkable.”

In an outcome that can only be described as kismet, the beer produced is a stunning pomegranate ale, described by Mr Kenrick as having a “subtle yet delicious Belgian-style profile with a delicate clove & black pepper character”.

While the development of Sekhmet’s Rage took longer than expected, ultimately resulting in the Bacchus Brewing team missing out on participating in the Queensland Museum’s Temple Bar, 350 numbered bottles have been produced which Mr Kenrick expects will sell out extremely quickly.

,Sekhmet's Rage is a new release beer from local Bacchus Brewing, which has been made with 4000 year old yeast, harvested from an ancient Egyptian Tomb. The label features an artwork by renowned Melbourne artist and Egyptologist ‘Setken’.

Sekhmet’s Rage was named after the legend of a bloodthirsty ancient Egyptian goddess of the same name, who according to folklore, came to earth to drink the blood of mankind, but her plot was foiled when a few clever mortals stained the Nile red with pomegranate and beer which the goddess drank until she blacked out, ultimately saving humans from being wiped out.

The bottle features a painting of the goddess Sekhmet which was created by acclaimed, Melbourne-based artist and Egyptologist ‘Setken’.

Sekmets Rage will be available to purchase for $24 a bottle at Bacchus Brewing, both online and in store, with thirsty buyers limited to just four bottles each.

Mr Kenrick said they had plans to have a small amount available on tap at the brewery in the near future, with more plans to develop a second distinct beer using the ancient yeast.