Library › Greek: Didactic & Technical › On the Making of Beer
On the Making of Beer is a short technical recipe preserved among the Greek alchemical and technical treatises. It is transmitted anonymously but has been ascribed to Zosimus of Panopolis, the Egyptian alchemist active around AD 300, since C. G. Grüner's first edition in 1814; the ascription is uncertain. The recipe describes soaking clean white barley in repeated steepings, drying it in the sun, grinding it and making loaves with leaven, baking them lightly, and then dissolving the loaves in fresh water and straining the liquid.
The text is one of the few ancient Greek descriptions of brewing, a craft long associated with Egypt. It records the method of making beer from malted barley and bread, and shows that the manuscripts of Greek alchemy also preserved everyday technical knowledge.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: CAAG II 372). Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ). The beer recipe is transmitted anonymously among the technical treatises but has been ascribed to Zosimus since Grüner's first edition (Zosimi Panopolitani De zythorum confectione fragmentum, 1814), and the ascription is uncertain.