Hearing The Mummy's Voice, Or Recreating A Legendary Cocktail Bitters

Not so long ago, I read a fascinating article in the New York Times about scientists who, thanks to a mummy with an exceptionally well-preserved larynx, recreated the voice of an Egyptian priest who died 3,000 years ago. They couldn’t get the late priest to chant or sing the way he did in the temple — in fact, all the 3D-printed larynx, artificial windpipe, and computer speaker could utter was a single syllable, which sounds like “Ehhhhh.” (You can hear it for yourself in the article.) Is the computer-generated “Ehhhhh” the same sound you’d hear 3,000 years ago if he said something like, “Ehhhhh, this beer is OK, but trust me, a few thousand years from now the microbreweries are going to be making some really solid session IPAs”? We don’t know. We’ll never know. We can only make an educated guess.

But the whole endeavor reminded me of one of my favorite pursuits, which is to drink the past. One way to attempt that is by tracking down unopened vintage bottles, or “old dusties,” as they’re called, and drink them, or even make cocktails with them (I’ve had a “vintage martini” made with gin, vermouth and orange bitters all dating from the ‘60s — it was pretty amazing). I have a few old dusties of my own; one of my favorite activities was to sip from a bottle of early ‘70s Canadian Club while watching vintage Johnny Carson shows on DVD, complete with period commercials. But retro though I may have felt, I was still watching Carson on a flat screen TV that didn’t exist in the ‘70s, my phone was still buzzing … the only authentic part of the whole escapade was the booze.

Or was it? (I say “was” because the bottle, tragically, has been polished off.) Booze doesn’t age in the bottle the same way wine does, but oxidation does occur, giving the spirit a softer, rounder feel over time. At least that’s what we think — we haven’t been able to corral a time machine to compare a bottle of 1971 Canadian Club straight from the bottling plant to another 1971 bottle that’s been sitting in Grandpa’s closet for 40-plus years.

The other method of drinking the past is to try to recreate vintage spirits, either by using an old recipe or by tasting and chemically analyzing a well-preserved old dusty and trying to replicate it. The results can be thrilling in their own way, and of course they have their problems as well, as you’ll see in this article I wrote for Robb Report about the rebirth of one the most legendary cocktail bitters. Whether or not they taste the way they did in Jerry Thomas’ day… well, just read the article.