Crosby's Kitchen & CocktailWari

We have some friends over at the Field Museum because they like animals and beer and stuff and we like animals and beer and stuff. We started saying we should work on making different beers together from countries other than England and Germany. It just so happened Dr. Ryan Williams was part of a team who discovered an ancient brewery in Cerro Baúl, Peru. They found a mill, boiling and fermenting vats and remnants of molle berries all around the brewery. You can read about it here. So we thought it would be fun to try to make a beer inspired by the ancient drink known as chicha de molle. All we had to do was import some purple corn from Peru, mill it up, spice it with molle berries and pump the beer into the closest thing we had to a ceramic vat, which is our old, beat up lactobacillus tank. What came out was a beer-like drink with a dry, grainy funk and pepper spiciness, plus it was deep purple in color with pink foam lacing. Made us wonder if the Wari's wished they drank out of glassware rather than ceramics.