At the recent Great American Beer Festival I fulfilled an objective that I had set myself some years ago, an objective I really wasn’t sure I wanted fulfilling. I had my first taste of chicha.

For the uninitiated, chicha is one of those quirky beer styles that the world of brewing has never quite forgotten. In historical terms, it’s as old as the hills, but it’s seldom found on a commercial basis these days. Read on and you’ll perhaps understand why.

Chicha is South American in origin. All over the world, for millennia, people have been making beers of some kind or other from the local grain produce. That’s why Asian beers are still big on rice, why certain parts of Belgium and Germany specialise in wheat beers, and why, in Africa, sorghum is a ready substitute for barley. In Latin America, the local grain is maize.

Like barley, maize does not give up its starches and enzymes willingly to the brewer. In order to extract these, barley undergoes the malting process, whereby the grains are partially germinated and then baked in a kiln to arrest germination.

In South America, maltings were, of course, non-existent thousands of years ago, and so the locals needed to find a way of releasing the vital brewing components from the grain. They did this by looking inward, quite literally.

Chewing It Over

They discovered that if the maize were chewed before mashing (usually by the womenfolk), enzymes in saliva would open up the grain to the brewers’ benefit.

Now you can perhaps see why I wasn’t totally convinced that a beer made in this way was quite what I wanted to drink. Images of Amazonian tribeswomen working a mouthful of corn and then spitting it into a pot didn’t exactly have me gagging for a pint.

In the far more urbane environment of the Colorado Convention Center, however, those images seemed a million miles away. It didn’t take a lot of persuasion for me to take a sample of a modern-day chicha, largely because it was brewed by the Indiana Jones of American brewing, Sam Calagione.

Sam’s Dogfish Head brewery is noted for pushing the envelope and creating, as its slogan has it, ‘off-centered ales for off-centered people’. Here at the GABF Sam (pictured above) was busy working the crowd – pouring samples, talking to enthusiasts and posing for photographs.

In front of him the line waiting for a taste of his beers snaked 30 yards across the hall; behind him the reason for the interest, a board displaying the beers he had brought to show, all of them historical beer re-creations.

Together with drinks archaeologist Dr Patrick McGovern, University of Pennsylvania author of Uncorking the Past, Sam has put together a catalogue of bizarre beers that each have an ancient seed of truth, beers discovered in China, Honduras and Finland, among other countries.

Midas Touch

Midas Touch, for example, is based on a beer – or the residue of a beer – that was discovered in an Iron Age tomb in Turkey, believed to be the tomb of the legendary King Midas. The yellow hue of the residue hinted at the use of saffron and analysis of it revealed that the drink was a mix of wine, mead and beer.

These were the clues that Sam and his team used to rebuild the drink. I took a sample and found it enticingly golden in the glass, very slick and richly sweet. Fruit, a honeyed smoothness and winey alcohol lay heavily on the palate.

Would I be so enamoured of Sam’s chicha? There was only one way to tell. The Dogfish Head take on this primitive beer style includes two kinds of Peruvian maize (yellow and purple) and also local peppercorns. The other distinguishing feature is strawberries.

The corn is physically chewed by the Delaware brewers and then flattened into cakes and allowed to dry. These are then added to the mash tun, along with more conventional grains.

Persuaded that the product was wholly sterile because the chewing takes place before the wort is boiled, I shook hands with Sam and raised the tasting cup to my lips.

The 6.2% ABV liquid was hazy and pink, with a chewy texture (no pun intended) and a fruity sweetness. It was unusual but I liked it.

No doubt I would have liked it more had I not known its origins, but there we are: pre-conceptions once again getting in the way of fair judgement.