Brewing beer is, in itself, an ancient technique. Garrett Oliver writes in The Oxford Companion to Beer that “the history of beer, quite literally, is the history of human civilization. Some anthropologists believe that man moved away from a hunter-gatherer existence to a settled agriculture-based existence largely to grow enough grain to brew large amounts of beer.”
Check out four spots for sampling age-old beer styles
Off Color Brewing: Scurry
Scurry, Off Color’s Kottbusser-style beer, isn’t the brewery’s only flagship beer based on an ancient recipe—both its gose and farmhouse ale would fit that bill—but it is the most unusual. Kottbusser was brewed with honey and molasses in Cottbus, Germany, before the 16th-century enaction of the Reinheitsgebot—German and Bavarian purity laws that decreed beer could only contain barley, hops, and water—made it illegal (yeast hadn’t been discovered back then). Today the beer is so rare that it’s difficult even to find good information about it.
Most of the Prove It Gruit has already been sold, but at press time bottles were still available at Binny’s downtown, Lincoln Park, South Loop, and several suburban locations. —Julia Thiel
