Ancient beer? Oh yeah!
From Cracked.com:
#1. Drink Centuries-Old Booze (and Get Drunk Really Fast)
The art of beer-making changed forever one day in 1516, when Germany enacted a law stating that beer could contain only water, barley, and hops (legislating the ingredients of beer is one of the most German things you could ever possibly do). Consequently, many ancient and colorful beer recipes were forever lost to the sands of time. At least until craft brewery Dogfish Head decided to resurrect some historical hooch with its Ancient Ales line.
The first entry in their classical lineup, Midas Touch, was reproduced from ingredients recovered from millennia-old chalices discovered in the actual tomb of King Midas, who, as it turns out, was totally a real person (the story about everything he touched turning to gold was likely a case of jealous hyperbole). The beer is described as "somewhere between wine and mead" and packs an alcohol percentage of 9.0, more than twice what you'd get in, say, a Bud Light.
In order to help them re-create these archaic brews, Dogfish Head hired an archaeologist, Patrick McGovern -- or Dr. Pat, as he's more affectionately known around the brewery. Dr. Pat is quite possibly the world's first beer archaeologist, a fact that will top his resume forevermore. By studying the residue from ancient pottery and drinking vessels, he's able to discern the ingredients needed to re-create the booze that kept history comfortably shit-faced.
Not ones to rest on their laurels, Dogfish Head and Dr. Pat also released a drink based on a 9,000-year-old Chinese concoction reproduced from "preserved pottery jars found in the Neolithic village of Jiahu, in Henan province." The resulting Chateau Jiahu is a fermented medley of rice, honey, and fruits with a sobriety-demolishing ABV of 10.0.
Possibly their most insane creation (so far) is a beer pieced together from clues deciphered from Egyptian hieroglyphics. Called Ta Henket, the potion is "brewed with an ancient form of wheat and loaves of hearth-baked bread, and it's flavored with chamomile, doum-palm fruit, and Middle Eastern herbs." To make sure the beer is as authentic as they could possibly make it, the brewers even traveled to Cairo and set out Petri dishes to collect a specific yeast strain native to Egypt. Budweiser, meanwhile, is trying to delight beer drinkers with their ingenuity by mixing Clamato juice into cans of Bud Light.
Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_21716_5-mind-blowing-artifacts-that-let-you-look-back-in-time_p2.html#ixzz3IsEBsLUg
= new reply since forum marked as read
The trade in barley and hops, and thus the production of beer, was easier to regulate and tax than beer made from other grains and herbs.
Hops are used as a stabilizer and preservative. Other plants used for the same purpose were sometimes toxic or were psychoactive in ways that increased the incidence of angry and aggressive drunkenness.
The best beer I ever made was a bunch of this and that I had around, and probably included some wild yeasts from our grapes, so I'll never be able to repeat the recipe.
If cannabis is legalized here in California I might try making some cannabis beer.
Not shabby. 
The bitter truth
"...Alcohol was a doorway, or what ethnographers call an entheogen. From the Greek for ‘creating god within’, an entheogen is a drug used in a religious context, a tool or a pathway to mystical understanding of the sacred or spiritual dimension. Drunk in ritualistic communion with the recently killed, for example, in what the Norse called a totenfolge, or ‘following into death’, potent beers were acts of solidarity that put the living into a kind of transcendent, paranormal state. But alcohol wasn’t the only magic in these drinks..."
