How the Beer Archeologist Travis Rupp Digs into and Recreates Ancient Brews

Lily James, Ralph Fiennes, and Carey Mulligan have fanned the flames of archeological curiosity with the movie The Dig which chronicles a reimagining of the archeological excavation that uncovered the Sutton Hoo historical site. On February 14th news broke in Cairo of American and Egyptian archaeologists unearthing what could be the oldest known beer factory at one of the most prominent archaeological sites of ancient Egypt.

All the stars seem to be aligning for Travis Rupp, The Beer Archeologist, as he embarks on a project that will take him to sites around the world to uncover evidence of ancient beers, and collaborate on recreating them with breweries, using replica antique equipment and locally-sourced ingredients.

I had the opportunity to speak to Rupp about his journey to discover ancient fermented beverages, his take on the Egyptian brewery discovery, and his new global project.

A former bartender, now professor of Classics, how did you make the jump to Beer Archeologist?

I was a bartender when I first started working at Avery Brewing in 2012. I was recruited to work in production pretty quickly. I had never really thought my two careers [archeology and brewing] would cross paths. My wife was the one that encouraged me to go work in beers because she saw how much I loved it.

[I had been educating] the staff at Avery on beer history since 2012, which was kind of funny because I didn't know a whole lot about beer history, but I was a Classics professor and an Archeology professor. I knew a lot about history in general. It was a fun little side project to do some research on. I was doing presentations for the staff there once a month. And as I got deeper and deeper into it, it became clear to me that there weren't very many people that worked on beer history. In 2015, I decided to completely shift my scholarly career towards beer archeology as I call it, or ancient food and alcohol research.

In 2017 I was working as a part of the innovation team at Avery and could brew whatever I wanted. I decided to try to recreate some ancient beers. Now I'll be honest. I did it completely selfishly. I just was doing it for research to see what they would turn out like. And lo and behold, the public was very, very interested.

I read about your work with Avery on the Ales of Antiquity line. How do you go about making these recipes?

There's a perception that it's just finding a recipe and then brewing it, right? That is such a minuscule part. The hard part is trying to figure out the process that was undertaken because beer is such a volatile thing. It seems like a simple product, but it's fairly complicated in the sense that you and I could have the exact same recipe, the exact same equipment. We could try to apply all the same conditions and brew this beer. And then we get together to drink our beers—I guarantee they taste different, and it's because there are so many variables at play. It could be water chemistry or the barometric pressure or the temperature at which we boiled the water. To recreate [the beer], it's very multilayered. Most of the projects take anywhere from one to three years of research before I finally am ready to pull the trigger.

There is a lot of travel, the groundwork, visiting archeological sites, getting down in the nitty gritty to see what the equipment looked like, the conditions under which it was being produced, finding reports of a recipe. Obviously, there's plenty of reading and research that goes into all of this as well, but also there is an ethnographic piece. I found in my travels you can learn a lot about ancient or historic beers from the people that still live in that area. Even though the beer might be 500, 1000, 2000 years old, some things don’t go away.

So let’s talk about the Egyptian Brewery at Abydos they found!

One thing I think is most striking about it is the scale. We've found other breweries in Egypt before. Honestly, they're all over the place. The Egyptians drank a lot of beer. There have been breweries found that are about 20-gallon batch sizes, meaning that the breweries were cranking out about a hundred gallons a day. The fact that the brewery was putting out 5,000-gallon batches of beer, that is shocking. 

Since 2015, I have made the argument that Egyptians were the first to industrialize beer production. But there was a lot of pushback from other scholars in the field. They [asserted] 20-gallon batches are basically just beer for one community. But as archeology is getting more robust, we're finding links and attachments to other cultures where they may have been producing this beer and shipping it.

A fair amount of past scholarship has presented ancient peoples as barbaric, unrefined, and their cuisine as simply sustenance to survive. This production facility entirely refutes that by demonstrating advanced planning, organization, technology, and a desire to produce a consistent product.

My last project at Avery focused on Peter Hemings, the enslaved brewer at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. I’ve continued my research on the bleak story of beer and brewing through the lens of slavery. I was reading Ibram X. Kendi’s novel Stamped from the Beginning where he explains the propensity of 18th-century scholars to see all individuals originating from Africa as barbaric and naked or barely clothed. This sentiment could be, and sometimes was, extended to Egypt as well, but Eurocentrists tried to whitewash Egyptian history because they wanted to see later European empires as descendants from ancient Egypt. I think this brewery helps support the idea that Ancient Egyptians were more advanced way earlier than we think they were.

You left Avery last October 2020, Can you tell me about your new venture?

I'm starting a new business called Beer Archeologist LLC. The idea is to continue to do beer education, but also to do collaborations with breweries all around the world. It will offer the opportunity for more experimentations, which are a lot easier to do on a much smaller scale. There were some instances with Avery where I sourced really strange ingredients to create the Ales of Antiquity. Some of the beers required I fly in things from Sweden or from Egypt to produce the beer. Working for a major beer producer, like Avery, there are restrictions because it is a modern facility. It is built to be extremely efficient. It's designed to make perfect beer in perfect conditions with no variables at play, in very controlled environments.

With this new project, I can work on projects in the areas that I'm actually doing research in—I am not trying to ship content all the way out to Boulder. If you can create things in the environment they're intended to be in, you get a much more authentic product, something much closer to the original.

You have been to some amazing places in search of ancient ales. What is a dream archeological finding for you?

I'm a Romanist, but I have yet to recreate a Roman beer. One of my specializations in the world of Classical Archaeology is Pompeii, Herculaneum, and the cities destroyed by the 79 CE eruption of Vesuvius. I would love to discover evidence for beer production in Herculaneum or Pompeii and recreate that beer. My most popular class at CU is titled “Pompeii and the Cities of Vesuvius”. I teach it every term, and it would be really cool to bring my Beer Archaeology and Classics worlds together once again with that project.

Maybe the next beer archeologist will be in that class.