While wine is the alcoholic beverage of choice in the Hebrew Bible, beer too was known to the ancient Near East. Archaeologists have, for instance, found beer vessels from biblical times used by the Philistines—the Israelites’ enemies living on the Mediterranean coast. Melanie Lidman describes the entrepreneurs and scientists selling yeast from these containers to those who wish to recreate the ancient brews:

An interdisciplinary team of researchers, archaeologists, and brewmasters in Israel first isolated 5,000-year-old yeast in 2019. . . . But now, the fruits of that discovery are about to become available for hobby brewers and sourdough aficionados everywhere.

Using organic residue analysis, scientists were able to identify organic molecules that had survived in the matrix of the ceramics over the years, including the yeast microorganism. For a few vessels, the scientists sequenced the full microbiome inside of the vessel, discovering ancient bacteria and viruses in addition to the yeast microorganism, [the microbiologist] Ronen Hazan said. He said a PCR yeast test, similar to the PCR coronavirus test, can also quickly and cheaply determine the presence of yeast inside a vessel.

Beer was a basic commodity in the ancient world and was consumed by rich, poor, adults, and children, as well as used in religious ritual, according to [the archaeologist Yitzḥak] Paz. Ancient beer was not the clear amber substance we recognize today, but would have been filled with sediment, and produced from a variety of grains, including millet, corn, sorghum, and wheat. The vessels that provided the yeast organisms had filtered spouts, like a watering can, to keep the sediment out of the drinker’s glass.

A Times of Israel reporter who tried one of the first iterations of beer brewed with the ancient yeast in 2019 said at the time it was “slightly sweet, with a subtle tang, . . . and tasted [of] banana and other fruits.”

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].