Danish beer giant Carlsberg has today revealed that its own research laboratory has figured out what kind of beer the Roman gladiators may have enjoyed some 2,000 years ago.
The not especially official-sounding Carlsberg Research Lab has claimed that it is likely the beer drunk by Romans would have been much lighter than what we are used to drinking today.
Zoran Gojkovic, director of brewing science, yeast and fermentation at Carlsberg noted: “Techniques used were probably inspired by those developed by the Egyptians, from recipes to the way the ingredients were handled.”
The science behind it all? Well it all comes down to malt. The malt used in beer-making in Roman times was neither dried nor roasted and as such, the brewing would have resulted in a beer with a paler colour and a lower alcohol percentage.
The process would have yielded a beverage closer to that of a light session beer, sitting around 2-3 per cent ABV, which the Romans called “cerevisia”.
Historians have long attributed ancient Roman beer-drinking to imported techniques from Egypt, whose brewers used dates as a starter culture.
Today Carlsberg corroborated the suggestions that the Romans would have most likely used fruit such as figs to mimic these processes and introduce wild yeast in the beer-making process, bringing as Gojkovic claims “aromas of vanilla, tobacco and even earthy notes.”
In ancient Rome, beer was seen as a lower-class drink, compared to the bacchanalian high society tipple of wine, and as such it was commonly used as payment to labourers. It’s also widely believed that the Roman army was given beer rations as part of their inventory when on duty.
Gladiators, who lived lives bound by both slavery and extreme violence, would have almost certainly drunk this session-style beer on a fairly regular basis.
Perhaps if we saw a little beer belly on Paul or Russell, the films might have been more historically accurate.
