Evidence of the first beer believed to have been brewed in the UK, dating back more than 2,000 years, has been uncovered by road workers.
Signs of the iron age brew from about 400BC were identified in fragments of charred residues from the beer-making process found during the £1.5bn upgrade of the A14 in Cambridgeshire.
In parallel with the roadworks, a team of up to 250 archaeologists led by experts, from Mola Headland Infrastructure, a joint venture including Museum of London Archaeology, has been working on the project, investigating 33 sites across 360 hectares, making it one of the UK’s largest archaeological projects.
Lara González Carretero, an archaeobotanist with Mola, said the beer residues were found alongside those of bread and porridge.
“They look quite similar under a regular microscope, but I was able to do some analysis using a scanning electron microscope [SEM] and there are differences in the insides of the fragments to do with fermentation, which distinguishes them from bread and porridge.
“It’s quite unique. We didn’t have any evidence like this in the UK until now. Beer is very old but we didn’t have physical evidence of it.”
She said all the fragments contained barley, water and oats. “The thing that actually distinguishes [the fragments] is that bread is made of very fine flour. For beer and porridge they are cracked grains. They are bigger. When I looked under the SEM, you could see the starch granules from the beer grains have differences that show fermentation.”
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