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Comment by ch4s3 | Hacker News Reader

I really love this kind of thing, a marriage of bioscience, craft, history, archeology, and culture. There’s something almost magical about reaching back into the past, resurrecting a brewing yeast, and making a beer that people can have today that captures something from 4 centuries ago.

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Agreed. If nondestructive time travel existed, a pub crawl would be first on my list.

Best I can do is this homebrew comp I'm organizing - https://dejabru.org

I clicked to find Roggenbier and was not disappointed. I love them but they’re really tricky to mash and sparge without getting stuck.

I made one a few months ago and served it with rye sourdough and fermented butter. Life is good.

Never received the confirmation email after signing up :(

Soon.

Address not found - I think you may have HNd yourself?

Brilliant name, by the way.

So people are going to pay you to send you beer.

Brb gotta organize a homebrew competition!

For sure. I’d love to try some stuff from the Balkans before hops arrived, or cask ales in 17th century England. Colonial American beers with weird ingredients would be fun too.

first thing I thought about was Sandman

I'm down. Anyone have enough Dall-E credits for "a functioning time machine you can build in a weekend out of household supplies, as a detailed schematic"?

Using Midjourney.com: https://imgur.com/a/vXJ59hm

Where and when would you go?

Tough choice. I’m interested in a lot of old beers. The hype around original Berliner Weiss would be cool.

Quite, but with yeasts I think there are some continuous cultures that are way older than just 400 years. Having said that, evolution will have happened along the way so there will be changes of some sort.

However there is still the living link with the long past.

It turns out that one of my 13th great grandmothers was from Cornwall (Padstow) So am I Cornish? Yes and also several other varieties of English (the tree gets a bit complicated, especially in Norfolk), Scottish (Gerdes even sounds like Girders when said by a Scot and cf Geddes), Irish (one grandfather from Dublin). I'm also German - Gerdes is our family name and that name was adopted by quite a few Germans when the law required family names (can't remember when that was - 18thC?) I can also note quite a lot of Jewish descent but I generally ignore being Christian - Confirmed by the Bishop of Jerusalem in Cyprus (we were stationed in the WSBA at the time).

I have barely touched on my roots here. They are sodding complicated and so are everyone's and so is beer's.

Sure and that’s all quite interesting but we’re not about to take a bite of your arm and romantically imagine the life and times of 16th century Cornish coal miners. Yet with a resurrected 400 y/o yeast derived from chicha used to brew the first European style beers in Quito combined with an old recipe, we can taste the drink that common laborers consumed in Quito 400 years ago at a time of great change. It’s romantic, it has a visceral appeal beyond the personal that may be evoked by genealogy. There’s the stuff of human heritage here.

I came here to say the magical bit about reaching back through time.

Yeah, something about this being in South America had a real Borges/Cortazar quality.

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