They didn’t have electricity or cars or iPods or any of that fun stuff, but a recent discovery suggests that the Iron Age wasn’t all that bad. They had beer, at least.
Those strange rock-like things in the above photo are actually charred barley grains. They were unearthed at Eberdingen-Hochdorf, a 2,550-year-old Celtic settlement. Research conducted by archaeobotanist Hans-Peter Stika of the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart revealed that the grains were part of a large malt making operation. The barley grains were soaked in specially constructed ditches until they sprouted and then dried by lighting fires at each end of the ditches.
Unlike the beer we know and love and consume for breakfast each morning, which is generally flavored with the flowers of the hop plant, Sitka speculates that this Celtic brew contained spices like mugwort, carrot seeds or henbane. That’s not the end of the differences, though. The brew also would have been served at room temperature and contained a yeasty residue, not unlike your mom’s vag. And if a poem by Roman emperor Julian is to be believed, Celtic brew also smelled “like a billy goat.” Again, much like your mom’s vag.
Not that any of this would have stopped us from pounding it, though. Just like…okay, we’ll stop.
Read more about this wacky Celtic brew at Wired.com.