Lives in Ruins by Marilyn Johnson

residue McGovern found in China; the chocolatey Theobroma, based on a Honduran drink; Ta Henket, an Egyptian beer; and even the rare and hard-to-find Chicha, * inspired by a South American maize drink and fermented with the help of Calagione’s and McGovern’s personal saliva. (No thanks.) None are cheap; occasionally I can get a four-pack of Midas Touch at a specialty market for $20. The price was partly due to the saffron, the most valuable spice in the world, that turned it golden.
    I FOUND MCGOVERN in the rotunda after his talk, sitting at a folding table, making change for a fan who had just bought a copy of hisbook Uncorking the Past : The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages . Here was the triumphant keynote speaker who had just lectured, and who was also, by virtue of his position as scientific director of the museum’s biomolecular laboratory, our host. It seemed undignified for him to be selling his own books. I offered to get him a beer and take over the handling of his money box, freeing him to sign autographs and talk to his fans. He looked nonplussed, but the beer offer was too tempting. After talking for an hour about our ancient thirst, he was thirsty.
    The bartender was delighted to pop the top on a Midas Touch for its cocreator. McGovern and I clinked bottles and savored our first sips. To describe it as a “honey beer,” or an ale/wine combo, doesn’t do the beverage justice. It is divine. I didn’t want to swallow, just hold each sip in my mouth. McGovern called it a “Phrygian grog,” and I liked that. Yes, a wonderful Phrygian grog! It took me a while to figure out the reason the stuff tasted so delicious—perhaps because it had about three times as many calories as an ordinary beer. If beer is liquid bread, Midas Touch is liquid pound cake, drenched in honey. It did not inhibit me from making correct change for McGovern’s admirers, and I made it my job to push copies of Uncorking the Past , which I had already read and found stimulating, effervescent, even intoxicating, its chemical geekery leavened with enthusiasm. After expounding on the details of some fermented banana remains in Africa, the author exulted, for example, over an “archaeological bombshell” that had rocked his world: “At one fell swoop, the date for the earliest banana in Africa was moved back three thousand years.”
    For the rest of the evening, I got to observe the beer archaeologist under assault from his fans, many of them professionals I would hear make sober presentations about ancient chariot roads or rock art, who practically launched themselves across the table to share their pleasure in McGovern’s work. Was he the star or was the star his subject, ancient beer and ale? It was hard to separate the two.Some of these people had drunk with him at a seminal beer conference in Barcelona in 2004; others were local brewers, or even old colleagues, unsteady on their feet from age, not drink. One pushed her student at him, a young man doing, she said, some impressive work with the archaeology of distilled spirits. I felt like I was sitting with Elvis, as bashful and aw-shucks as Elvis himself was reported to be. As we sipped and chatted in the interludes, McGovern confided that when he runs low on one of his brews, Dogfish Head sends more. Nice perk!
    I scrounged us another round, scavenging a plate of cheese and pastries from the ravaged appetizer table, and we nibbled while another archaeologist and fan stopped by to chat about hops. I edged a book close to the fan’s hand. “Ah, I’d love to buy one,” the archaeologist confessed, taking the hint, “but I don’t have any money on me.” “So send him a check when you get home,” I suggested, plucking one of McGovern’s cards off the stack and sticking it in the pages of the book. McGovern, or as the people at Dogfish Head Brewery call him, Dr. Pat, signed the